Page 65 of Love & Notes

God this is so fucking awkward. Though, I’m not quite sure what I expected after a frantic dry hump on a piano bench.

Bloody hell.

“Good,” I reply. “You?”

“Good.”

Another silence, longer and heavier this time.

I run a hand across the back of my neck. “Friday night…”

“Was not what I expected,” she says at the same time.

We both stop instantly. Ellise looks at the marble floor for exactly a single second, readjusting her skirt with nervous movements, before forcing her gaze to look back at me.

“I was going to say,” I start again, slower this time. “That Friday night was… a lot. For me. I wanted you to know that.”

I was an emotional mess, and tasting you completely finished me.

Something shifts in her expression. It isn’t a smile exactly. It’s something more careful than that.

“For me too,” she says softly.

“I’ve been trying to find you all day,” I admit. There’s no real reason to tell her, but I don’t want to be anything but honest with her.

What the hell has gotten into me?

Her mouth curves, just slightly. Enough to kill me.

“I know,” she says. “I saw you walking past the library… the second time.”

I blink, a low chuckle catching in my throat. “And you didn’t—”

“I needed a minute,” she says it simply, offering no form of apology whatsoever for making me sweat. “I needed to figure out what I wanted to say to you, before I actually said it.”

“And did you? Figure it out?”

She pauses, studying me. “Mostly.”

“What’s the part you haven’t figured out yet?

She looks at me for a long moment. “What happens now?”

What happens now.

I exhale slowly. “I don’t think either of us really knows the answer to that yet.”

“No,” she agrees, shrugging her shoulders.

“But I don’t think Friday night was nothing,” I mutter. “And I don’t think you do either?”

She doesn’t answer me immediately. Around us, the conservatory is filled with bustling movement—students crossing the grand entrance below, someone practicing scales behind a closed door somewhere nearby. The ordinary life of Belrose Academy continues around us, completely unaware that everything feels slightly different than it did last week.

“No,” she finally states, looking dead into my eyes. “I don’t think it was nothing.”

The words settle between us like the last note of something that doesn’t quite resolve.

I move slightly closer to her, stepping up one riser as I look at her perched above me. I am close enough now that she has to tilt her head slightly to hold my gaze. I notice her grip tighten on the leather strap of her violin case.