Page 69 of Embrace

When I pull back, he stares at me, then simply turns back to his laptop. “I tried to do most of it, but if you could explain—”

“Are you not going to ask why I hugged you?”

His mouth opens, then closes with a soft, almost sympathetic smile. “You don’t need a reason, Scarlett. I like you hugging me.”

Blush creeps onto my neck so deep, you’d think he’d just kissed me. But that’s what those words feel like, tiny presses of affection all over my skin. I pull his laptop to face me, hoping the blue light will hide the redness on my cheeks and neck.

The assignment is brutal. Multiple regression problems, factorial ANOVAs, chi-square tests, and effect size calculations. Not your average homework.

I slide him a paper. “Let’s start with this multiple regression. Predicting anxiety from sleep, caffeine, and exercise.”

He scans the table quickly, brows furrowed in concentration.

Sometimes I wish he could see himself the way I do, giving his all to everything and everyone. It’s like he thinks he needs to be this genie, the shooting star in everyone’s lives, and somehow he manages it.

“Sleep and exercise are significant predictors because p is less than 0.05,” he says. “Caffeine isn’t. Negative betas for sleep and exercise mean more sleep or more exercise predicts lower anxiety. I’d check multicollinearity, too, just in case the predictors are correlated?”

“Yeah. That’s exactly it.” When I tell him we were moving on to logistic regression, he leans forward, his eyes bright.

“Easy. I can make more sense of it than the textbook.”

“You think you can relay it better than the textbook?”

He shrugs. “I read it three times, then again after an hour. That stuff’s locked in here.” He taps his head. “But they make it so confusing. I have a pretty good handle of it on my own.”

I can’t stopstaringat him. He’s so naturally good at this, and he’s got no damn clue. No one catches on this fast, and for a second I think he’s so focused on hockey that he doesn’t realize how academically smart he is.

We spend an hour going through the formulas and testing out of order to see if he just memorized or actually knows his stuff. He gets each one correct, and I think he might even understand it better than I did when I took the course.

“You’re really good at this, Kian,” I say.

He shrugs. “If something interests me, I’ll learn everything I can about it.” He points to his assignment. “I did go over this like three times before I went to sleep though.”

I recall his random bout of insomnia, and how he’s always awake when I’m up late enough to text. I remember he said his dreams feltlike memories of the past sometimes, and he’d always jolt awake as if he could catch them. “Have you been able to sleep?”

He’s silent, his Adam’s apple moving with each swallow. “Uh, yeah. I’ve been getting better.”

“Yeah? No weird dreams?”

He chokes. “What?” He laughs loud and awkwardly. “Are dreams even real? I mean, no one can prove them. There’s no record, right?”

I blink at him.

He swallows. “I slept great! Excellent! I mean—the normal amount of good. Just super normal sleeping stuff, you know?” He’s nearly breathless by the end of his sentence.

“Are you okay? Did you have a nightmare or something?”

He mutters something under his breath before he says, “Let’s take a break. That’s enough t-tests for today.”

“But—”

He shakes his head, standing from his seat. “You have your methods. I have mine. It’s break time, Scar.”

Reluctantly, I shut my laptop. Downstairs, the guys are still loud. I think the game’s in overtime, but when we get to the living room, they’re watching a nature documentary.

Aiden Crawford sits on one side of the couch with his girlfriend, Summer, on the floor between his legs as he finishes braiding her hair. Cole and Sebastian are setting up a whiteboard and a box of markers next to a Pictionary set.

“Who’s playing?” Sebastian asks, tossing markers at us. Kian snatches one midair and glances back at me.