[1/2]
The professor is busy giving a detailed explanation of Algorithms and Data Structures' grading rubric, but Alyssa isn't listening; she looked it up weeks ago, the information now carefully printed on the inside cover of her notebook. Frankly, she's surprised more people didn't do the same.
While she waits for the rest of the class to catch up, Alyssa studies her fellow students, seizing the opportunity to do so before actual lessons begin and her full attention is required. It feels strange that Eva's is the only face she recognizes. It's been so long since she's been in a room full of strangers.
The professor starts in on the syllabus, but Alyssa's mind stays adrift; she's memorised their assignments through the Easter holidays. Done examining those students whose faces she can see from her seat, Alyssa stares unseeing at the back of Eva's head. She watches the light bounce blue and black off Eva's midnight-dark hair and wonders how Louis and Ben's day is going. And that's when it happens.
Eva moves.
She reaches up and wraps her fingers around the long, thick plait that hangs halfway down her back, pulling it over her shoulder to drape in her lap. Eva slips her fingers into the strands at the back of her neck, into that place right before they tuck and twist into the plait, and Alyssa is sitting close enough to see the wetness at Eva's nape. For a moment, she thinks she can smell the sweat on Eva's skin, dark and earthy and secret, and she leans forward in her seat and breathes deeply through her nose.
Eva's fingers fall away from her neck and Alyssa fixates on the smooth skin there. She wonders what it looks like elsewhere on Eva's body. Not just on the curve of her neck, but on the slope of her breasts, wrapped around her hips and buttocks. Framed around the pink between Eva's legs.
Alyssa sits bolt upright, her body jittery, and she can't breathe all of a sudden. Her clothes are too tight and she's hot – far too hot to be sitting in this classroom, listening to the professor drone on about the format of the final exam. She grips the edges of her desk and wraps her calves around the legs of her chair; she'd look like a fool if she ran out on the first day.
Closing her eyes, Alyssa takes a deep breath, but behind her eyelids are pink nipples and a warm, open smile, and she thinks she may actually pass out before all around her feet start to shuffle and chairs scrape against the floor in the rush for the door.
Alyssa opens her eyes and exhales hard, rising from her desk on shaky legs. She exits the classroom quickly, trying not to catch anyone's eye on her way out.
**
Alyssa's learned to expect it: the heat, the sudden feeling of too-tight clothing and too little skin. The sharp pain in her chest that pushes the breath from her lungs and makes her eyes widen, mouth gasping around air it doesn't seem to be able to pull inside. Every time, it's because of Eva, Alyssa knows that now. She just doesn't know what to do with it, this knowledge. It's the first time she's ever felt that way.
At the moment, she and Eva are sharing a desk in the library. The room smells musty, like old tomes and stale ink, but Alyssa's barely noticed.
Instead, her eyes trace a path from the top left corner of her textbook – edged out in the middle of the table, across the imaginary line she's drawn down the center – to the top right corner of Eva's identical tome. Alyssa silently measures the distance, weighs it. She lets the number sit on her tongue for a moment because, again, she's not quite sure what to do with this information. She just feels the need to collect it, to quantify her feelings, somehow.
Alyssa studies Eva's dark head bent low over her notes, the long thick plait piled on the tabletop beside her, and feels hot again. She prays the feeling passes quickly, because she really doesn't want to have to leave the library. She's dashed to the loo between classes three times this week – back pressed against the stall door and it's only a matter of time before she's caught.
Hoping for a distraction, Alyssa turns her attention to Eva's notes. Eva's writing is familiar now – half in cursive, half in script – and Alyssa wants to ask how Eva decides which letters get which treatment. Instead, she learns each one by heart: the wide, loopy Ps crowding the letters that follow it. The Es, little more than dashes, as if Eva's too focused on the word up ahead to finish the previous one up properly.
The written words aren't enough though; Alyssa wants to see Eva's mouth moving over them. She wants to know if they're as lovely on Eva's lips as they are on paper. If her mouth puckers around the Ps, keeping the rest of the word on hold. If she rushes past the Es, leaving her words open-ended in her eagerness to finish a thought.
Alyssa shakes her head. When did she become so romantic? She scolds herself, until Eva looks up from her notes and smiles, and then all the words in Alyssa's head suddenly seem to rhyme.