This morning marked the end of this peripheral hovering being coincidental. And I wanted to tell him I knew where he could find a friend as creepy as him, but that it would require him to come over to my house and, apparently, stay the night in Charlie’s closet.

Standing, I shoved my book and notepad into my messenger bag. If I confronted him now, that would leave him the weekend to think about what an unsubtle weirdo he was. It would also guarantee that, except for today, I wouldn’t have to awkwardly run into him again.

Hipster Glasses stiffened as I approached, his suspender-clad shoulders going rigid.

I guess he was hoping I would stroll on by. When I stopped to stand to one side of his table, his eyes flicked to mine, visible for the first time through those lenses.

Wow, they were blue.

“Hey,” I said.

“Uh . . .” He blinked at me, his dark, floppy-in-the-front, vintage, college-contour haircut trying (not unsuccessfully) to be retro-cool. “Hhhhey.”

The way he drew out the “h” annoyed me, because it suggested that I was the one behaving oddly here.

“I don’t date,” I said. “I don’t do homework for hire. I don’t do or sell drugs, either. And I don’t like being monitored.”

His face went crimson, which was exactly the reaction I’d been going for. It forced him out of hiding and dismantled any potential excuses or explanations he might have gone for.

“I’m not monitoring you.” He snapped his book shut, eyes darting, perhaps searching for the librarian or anyone else who might overhear our conversation.

“Really,” I said, my tone as deadpan as my stare. “You haven’t been following me?”

“Following you, yes,” he said, smart enough, apparently, to recognize the corner he’d been backed into. “ ‘Monitoring’ suggests I’ve conducted surveillance on you. Recorded and reviewed data. There’s a difference.”

He was schooling me on vocab?

“You do know how stratospherically creepy you’re being, don’t you?”

“Yes!” he shouted at the book. I could tell he was genuinely angry at himself and not me. Not only had a deeper and more scarlet crawl begun to work its way up from the collar of his white button-down shirt but, from this close, I could actually feel the heat of mortification radiating off his inflamed skin.

Well done, Stephanie. You have appropriately cowed Clark Kent’s lurker second cousin.

“You know—” I began, but he cut me off.

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to talk to you without weirding you out,” he said, shooting straight out of his seat to stand up. Up, up, and away.

I swallowed hard, tilting my head back to take in his height, half expecting his nose to start bleeding.

“Mission unaccomplished,” I said, resisting the fierce urge to step back from him. Which would be giving him a win. And since when did standing up make someone kind of maybe hot?

Broad shouldered with limbs almost too long for his body and this chic geek thing happening with his clothes, he looked as if, after tripping out of a 1940s newsroom, he’d tumbled into a taffy puller.