Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,141

to get me a new room by Monday,” Taylor said, hoping that would be okay.

“Were you able to get in and get your stuff?” Nelson asked.

“Oh. Uh, they said maybe tomorrow or Wednesday. I think there’s something about the dorm insurance or something like that? I’m not sure.”

“Well, they should pay for it,” Wes said. “Or she should. Somebody should.”

Taylor nodded as she felt the three of them under the rock ledge trying to figure out how to help get her down. “She’s probably not that bad. Just a little misguided.” Taylor shrugged. “It’s tough when you don’t have your feet on the ground.”

“Huh. You’re a whole lot nicer about it than I would be,” Wes said.

“How’d your parents take it?” Nelson asked, taking another bite.

“Oh. Uh.” Taylor scratched the back of her head. “Dad wasn’t too thrilled, you know? But what can we do now? What’s done is done.”

“Well, don’t go back alone,” Nelson said. “That probably goes without saying, but I think one of us should be there to help.”

Instantly Taylor felt bad about that. “Oh, you don’t…”

“Nels is right,” Wes said. “It’s not going to be easy to pack up even if everything’s in one piece.”

“I…”

“I’ve got Wednesday night open,” Nelson said.

“Wednesday’s a no-go for me, but I’ve got Tuesday and Thursday.”

“’Less we go dancing,” Nelson said as if she wasn’t sitting right there.

“We could go after dancing. Wouldn’t take long if there were several of us…”

Somehow, in three minutes flat and without her input, they had decided on Thursday after dancing. The plan was to bring her stuff to the house “at least until they get you another room.” How could she argue with that? They were in plan-and-execute mode not let’s-think-this-through-and-talk-about-it mode.

When they finally decided it was time to call it a night, Taylor knew she couldn’t just sit there, so she squiggled her way up off the couch. Greg only moved once, and although he didn’t look comfortable squished up like that, she wasn’t about to wake him up. Instead, she took his dishes to the kitchen and cleaned everything up before going back out to check on things. He still hadn’t moved. Carefully she retrieved his blanket from the night before and laid it over him. She couldn’t stop the smile as she gazed down at him.

“Thank you,” she whispered in the stillness.

With that, she collected his laptop and headed back for his room, clicking off the living room light as she went. It was only a little after eleven. Plenty of time to finish up her paper and rewatch the last hour of the movie without all the distractions. She wouldn’t have admitted it, but she was interested to see everything she had missed the first time around. Even more, she would never admit that Greg was right, that was a great movie.

Everything was quiet. Really, really quiet. That was the first thing Greg thought when he woke up, wondering where he was and why everything looked so very strange. He jerked hard because the window was above him rather than to one side or the other, and he sat up, fighting to get his bearings. The living room? What was he doing in the living room?

Then he remembered. Taylor was sleeping in his room. Her room had been trashed… As he came more awake, he remembered they were watching a movie. Had he really fallen asleep? So asleep she’d watched the movie alone and gone to bed without him even realizing it? Wow. That was brilliant.

He put his hand on the back of his head and rubbed there before giving up the fight, grabbing the pillow and stretching out. Nothing he could do about it now. It was solidified. He was and would always be the biggest loser on the planet.

“Two psychologists, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Martin Seligman, are basically responsible for the modern movement called Positive Psychology,” Professor Peters said on Tuesday. “Csikszentmihalyi was a pioneer in a study he called the flow state.”

Taylor jerked forward and had to force herself to take a breath from the excitement that surged in her. On her notebook, she wrote flow state and put a big star next to it. Yoli was going to freak out when she heard they were studying flow state too.

“The flow state that Csikszentmihalyi wrote about is defined as a break from the conscious state or out of what researchers call beta brain wave state and into alpha and theta brain wave state.” Professor Peters clicked so that on