Page 37 of The Make-Up Test
Mandy arched an eyebrow. “Which answer are you going with?”
“Pound sign,” Colin insisted.
Allison jerked in her chair to face him. “Like hell we are. I know, one hundred and fifty percent, that I’m right.”
“That’s not an actual percentage.”
She glowered. “Do you subsist off technicalities?”
His fingers tensed over her hand as he laughed. Only then did Allison realize that neither of them had let go of the horn (or each other).
Still, she maintained her grip. How else was she going to ensure she won?
“It’s definitely the pound sign,” Colin said. “That’s what it was called on landlines.”
“But that’s not the technical name.” Allison had to bite her tongue to keep from reminding him that she googled punctuation facts for fun. He used to mock her mercilessly for it. Instead, she pinned him with her gaze. “Trust me on this.” Her voice had a (wholly unintentional) sultry tone.
Colin’s mouth swept up. “What do I get when you’re wrong?”
“Whatever you want, because I won’t be.”
His grin widened, igniting that clever glint in his eyes. It did something to her insides that Allison refused to acknowledge.
With a wink (a fuckingwink), he turned back to their host and said, “We’ll go with octothorp.”
“Correct.” Mandy slashed another line in their column.
Allison tipped her chin in triumph, then yanked her hand from beneath his before Colin misread it as anything more than competitive thoughtlessness.
For the next half hour, Mandy fired questions at them. The other two teams managed to squeeze in a few responses, but Colin and Allison were almost always quickest to the draw with their horn and very rarely wrong. They fumbled a few sportsball questions and didn’t even try to answer the ones about cooking (Allison had long ago made a pact with Sophie that she would do dishes if Sophie dealt with the meals), and somehow, neither Allison nor Colin knew anything about Restoration comedy. But otherwise, they dominated.
Colin continued their rivalry, diving for the horn, smirking every time he answered first, but the tension in it was gone. And he kept filling their silences in ways he’d never bothered to before. Quietly mocking Ethan, congratulating Allison, commenting on the various mundanities of Mandy’s house (Allison had no idea what chair rails were but he mentioned them twice). Multiple times, his foot tapped hers under the table, and his fingers accidentally found the soft skin of her wrist. And he was staring at her, his eyes warm and wide, as depthless as a murky lake. At some point, that same energy that had crackled in the air between them yesterday before Allison fled had returned. It was as if they couldn’t help but gravitate back toward each other, their connection natural and magnetic and impossible to control.
Allison didn’t know how to break it. But she needed to.
The prizes from the trivia game turned out to be cross-stitches. Allison chose an intricate floral design withI am a delicate fucking flowerstitched in loopy cursive beneath it. Colin took one with an image of an adorable smiling whale, water shooting from its blow hole. Above it simple lettering readblow me.
Dropping onto a loveseat beneath the window, Allison pulled her phone from her pocket. A photo of Monty, upside down and dead asleep with a bone hanging out of his mouth, filled her screen.
With no one else around to show it to, she flashed the phone at Colin. “Look at this goofball.”
He joined her for a better look. The couch had more than enough space for both of them, and yet his hip pressed into hers. She scooted toward the arm, but her jeans kept sliding across the leather until she was jammed against Colin again. Whoever dreamed up leather sofasshould be drawn and quartered, she decided. Her muscles ached as she held her frame awkwardly to force some space between them.
“Is this the famous Corgi?”
“Yup. That’s Monty. Sophie’s hanging out with him tonight.”
“You still live with Sophie?”
Allison nodded.
Without her phone tethering them, they both readjusted, Colin perching himself on the arm, his spindly knees propped under his elbows. Allison let out a slow breath. Though barely any part of them had touched, it felt as if he’d been lying on top of her.
“I wish I’d kept in touch with more people from Brown.” He smoothed a finger over the cream-colored stitching of the fabric. “We all sort of drifted off after graduation.”
“Well, you were doing all that traveling.”
“Sure.” Something stony hardened his smile. Perhaps those European adventures he’d bragged about hadn’t been as grand as he’d let on. “It would have been nice to have people to catch up with, though.”
