She straightened, stepping back when his words registered, realizing that humiliation stung a little bit sharper the second time around. What was her problem? Why was she always mooning over this guy?
“So…” she tried, gripping the door handle just to have something to do as he went on watching her. “What are you doing here?” Gia shook her head, a sudden realization forming in her head as she shook herself out of the dumb fog Luka seemed to bring with him with that damn smirk. “How’d you find me?”
“I’m…resourceful,” he admitted, looking over her head. Luka shifted his attention around her, as though there was something that caught his interests just beyond the threshold of her door. “You got anything in there to drink?”
She followed his gaze, looking over her shoulder before she turned back to him, heart hammering at the mere idea of Luka in her room. Gia tried pushing down the intensity of her feelings, and calm the twist of emotion that rumbled in her stomach before she nodded, motioning inside her dorm room to welcome Luka.
“Nothing fancy, I’m afraid.” She turned toward the bookshelf next to the window, fishing inside the cabinet below it to grab a half-empty bottle of whiskey. “Jack and no ice. No Coke either.”
“I can handle it straight,” Luka said, smiling as he shut the door behind him.
The room seemed so much smaller with him in it. Luka dwarfed Claire’s bed when he sat on in to tug off his jacket and the frilly purple duvet cover little like a baby’s blanket compared to his mammoth size. But his expression was open, and his smile was friendly when Gia offered him a small shot of the brown liquid from the shot glass with “Polyjuice Potion” written on the side in Harry Potter font she always kept next to the whiskey bottle.
“So can I.”
They stared at each other—Luka relaxed, his expression easy as he looked up at Gia with her straight back and the shot glass empty before Luka could get his to his lips. There was something hanging like a fog in the room. It was a strange current of unspoken knowledge that neither one of them seemed willing to discuss. Luka watched Gia as she refilled her glass and offered him another. He continued to watch her down the second shot and refused another offer of a third from her before he set his on Claire’s bedside table.
“Gia,” Luka started, grabbing the bottle from her when she held it over the glass for another shot. She didn’t have to respond or make an argument over his stopping her. “Should we talk about this…thing?”
She moved then, not sitting next to him, but putting one knee near the foot of Claire’s bed. “Thing?”
Luka considered her, doing that with a swagger that impressed her. He was cool and utterly composed, leaning back on one elbow, folding his free arm over his waist as he tilted his head. He seemed to want a good look at Gia, like he’d never seen anyone or anything like her before. For a long time, Luka only seemed able to stare, that dark gaze raking over her face, down her body like he couldn’t get enough of the look of her.
Finally, when he seemed satisfied, Luka’s mouth lifted at one side and he motioned with two fingers. “Come here.” There was a small plead in his voice that worked a small kind of magic over Gia. It was in the flirting tone of his voice, and the sweet timbre that was half joke, half beg, both leaving her a little helpless.
Gia took one step, resting for half a second before she relaxed against the mattress and went to her side to face Luka, their hands a half breath apart. “I’m…here.”
“I see that.”
He wanted to kiss her. That same look he’d given her in the showers was starting to inch in his eyes. It started as a hazy cloud that darkened his irises, then became a twist of his mouth that pressed his lips together when Gia brushed her hair off her shoulder. Like he’d done it a hundred times before, Luka reached for her long, dark hair, playing with the ends like it was a comfortable habit, like the curl in each strand was the most fascinating thing he’d ever seen.
“You stood there,” he started, his attention on her hair as he looped it around his fingers, “half a foot from me in that shower, looking