Kiss King - Mickey Miller Page 0,1

to play it cool. “I’m—”

“Maya.” He smirks, then narrows his eyes. “Are you messing with me right now? You are. You’re messing with me.”

“Oh, yeah. I’m messing with you.” I giggle.

I’m not, I’m just really that awkward.

We stand in front of the counter together as I wait for my coffee to arrive, and I curse my luck.

Why is this frat bro up at seven a.m.? It’s Thursday, and isn’t Wednesday national ‘get hammered in the frat basement’ night? The whole reason I snuck in here at this godawful early hour was to have some peace and quiet, not to have my heart run a race.

Grant takes a loud sip of coffee, and I thank heaven at least the man has one flaw—he’s a loud sipper. Maybe if I focus on that, my body heat will go down.

“I missed seeing you out on the quad painting like you were doing fall term,” he says.

“Painting?” I reply. “Wow, I barely remember that. It was nothing. Just a passing interest.”

“Really? I thought you were so talented. I mean, not like you’d be out painting in the freezing weather. But where have you been? April and Alex said you moved out of the dorms.”

With focused resolve, I manage to bring my eyes to his.

Don’t picture him when he was naked in sculpture class yesterday. Do not.

Seriously, aren’t schools supposed to bring in models from out of town so that we don’t have a chance at having a personal relationship with them?

Of course, trying not to picture him that way has the opposite effect.

When my eyes fall on his deep grays, there’s no other way to describe what happens to me, other than I go dumb.

Wait, what was the last thing he just said?

I clear my throat and grasp at straws for any comment I can make that’s neutral and doesn’t make it seem like I already lost track of this conversation.

I glance over at the table where Grant put down his backpack, and notice a red Moleskine notebook opened with a black pen strewn across it. Perfect. Something random I can comment on. I point to it. “Nice notebook. What do you write in there? Something for class?”

He takes another sip of coffee.

Dammit. This one is quiet.

“One mocha latte,” the girl behind the counter calls.

Thank the fucking Lord. I exhale a breath of relief as I take the coffee and smile at the counter girl.

I take a grateful sip of my coffee drink.

He looks right and looks left. The entire café is empty except for us.

“Oh, I’m so rude. I should have asked you already. Would you like to have a seat? Forgive me.”

Grant leads me to the table where his things are and pulls out my chair like he’s a southern gentleman and it’s courting season.

I stand there like an imbecile, frozen, praying the caffeine will hit my veins soon and breathe some life into me.

Why is this man being so nice to me? I curse him in my head for messing with all the douchebag frat stereotypes I’ve built up over the years. He’s so good-looking, he could treat girls like crap and they’d still be lining up at his door, no doubt. Hell, having seen him naked, it wouldn’t surprise me if girls signed up just to…

“Uh, Maya? Would you like to have a seat? If you have to study or something and you don’t want to talk, that’s okay, too. You won’t offend me. I just saw you yesterday in sculpture class and I was thinking about how we used to have those great drunken conversations fall term. I miss those.”

I blink a few times. First of all, he saw me in that class? There’s a reason I was hiding out in the back.

Second of all...he was thinking about me?

“Uh, yeah, I have a few minutes,” I say, sitting down in the chair. He pushes my chair in. “I’m curious, what are you writing about in that red notebook?” I repeat.

“I write whatever I want. Which, right now, is notes on exploring the nature of love versus sex. Can you have one without the other? Or do they always interact?”

“Wow,” I reply, and something tingles deep down about what he’s saying. Grant and I used to always have conversations like this fall term, and I miss them. “What do you think?”

He pauses for a moment, his eyes flitting out the window before he brings them back to me. “I wonder what happened to love.”

“What do you think happened to it?”

“Our