#Chapter Sixteen
She walked into the room and he sent her a glance before a small smile spread on his lips and he returned his attention to the papers in his hand. She sat down on the couch and put her bag on top of her lap, unzipping it to remove a book from within to read. The clock ticked on and she put some soft classical music on using her phone and flipped her book open.
It was some romance book that she tried to focus on, but found that she was peeking above it from time to time to stare at Gunner. He was more enthralling than all the words on the page, and it was her favourite novel. He looked up and stared at her book, and laughed with a slight shake of his head before he set his papers down to use the computer towards a corner on his desk.
Why had he laughed? She tried to immerse herself in her book but her mind was firmly on him. She looked up again and watched as he sent looks between his papers and the screen. He typed a little, and the veins on his hand tightened and shifted accordingly. Frustrating images of his hand popped into her mind and she forced them out, desperate to maintain control of herself.
"I love that book too," he said. "Which part are you at?"
She jumped at his voice and nearly lost hold of her book. She flipped the pages back and forth to try and make some sense of them when she realised that every word seemed to be in another language. She blinked her eyes repeatedly and read the same phrase over and over again, flipping some pages back and forth. It was then that it dawned on her.
She had been holding her book upside down the entire time!
She closed the book and set it down on her lap, trying to pretend that she hadn't made a mistake and she told herself that definitely, surely he hadn't noticed. There was a woman on the cover though, and it would have been hard not to recognise that a head was not on top of a human.
He laughed again.
She tried, with movements that were as small as possible, to turn the book the right way up. When she lifted the book again, she resumed where she left off and after some time, the late afternoon turned to evening.
Days passed and they turned into weeks. She familiarised herself with his schedule and visited him during the times where he would be alone at his office. They would spend the day together in silence, or he would pull a chair from the side to face her on the wide couch and talk to her for hours, until her belly hurt from all the laughing. Or they would settle on the floor around the coffee table and play a board game and inevitably, she would lose every single time until she grew tired of his skill and flipped the board game each time she neared another loss. Then he would pull a chair behind his desk and put it beside his and they would watch Netflix together. When that happened, she spent more time looking at him than she did watching the show and many times, he would talk about the intimate details of the show to her and ask her complex questions about it, as if he knew that she was unable to pay attention to the show because of him.
Gradually, it got to a point where she was having recurring wet dreams about him and being around him became incredibly difficult for her to behave normally. As they grew closer, the soreness between her legs intensified and now, she anticipated every day of school like she was a valedictorian.