Page 50 of Burning Embers
“Hot stuff?”
“Mimi, do you want to leave this classroom friendless?” Desiree pops her hip out to the side and flutters her lashes innocently.
Mimi laughs out loud—the noise drawing attention from more than one guy in the classroom—before turning towards me with a wink.
“You see what I have to deal with?” She playfully grabs my arm and pulls me away from Desiree. “Now, go ask Mr. Holter if you can be lab partners with me and Des.” She gives the middleof my back a firm push that has me staggering forward a few steps. “Go!”
I chuckle wanly and go to do as she instructed. Yet my gaze can’t help but flit to an empty table near the back of the room. For some inexplicable reason, I know this table is used by Ethan and Emery.
The throbbing in my heart intensifies, echoing between my ears and drowning out all other sounds, but I force my gaze away and step to the front of the classroom.
Mr. Holter glances up from the textbook he’s currently skimming, one of his gray brows arched beneath his wire-framed glasses. He stares at me blankly, as if he doesn’t realize I’m the new student in his class but also has no idea who I am.
“May I help you?”
“Hi.” I fiddle with the strap of my backpack. “I’m the new student. Isabella. Izzy. Um…I wanted to ask you?—”
“Oh right.” He waves a hand in the air dismissively, cutting off my words.
I immediately clamp my lips together as he turns towards his computer and begins to type something in. A second later, the printer behind him rumbles to life, and he slides his chair backwards to grab the freshly printed sheet.
“Here are the chapters you missed so far,” he says without preamble, handing both the paper and the textbook to me.
I actually stagger under the weight of the damn thing.
Do we have an additional textbook to the one I picked up earlier? Fuck.
“Okay…?”
“I expect you to do the reading on your own time and catch up enough to be able to take a test over the chapters you missed by next Friday.”
“Next Friday?” My voice comes out a little higher pitched than I would’ve liked.
Mr. Holter doesn’t even blink at my obvious distress. “You’ll have to make up the labs you missed after school. Again, on your own time. I’ll be here for an hour every day after the bell rings, but you’ll need to schedule your makeup labs ahead of time.”
He absently scratches at the whiskers on his chin, as if he’s wondering if he forgot to mention anything. After a moment, he snaps his fingers together and jerks his chin towards a lab table near the front of the classroom. “You’ll be partnered with Ansel for the remainder of the semester, as he is the only student here who doesn’t have a lab partner.”
“Um…”
Mr. Holter reclines in his seat and steeples his fingers together on his chest. “Now, if you don’t mind, Ms. Isabella, I have a class to teach.”
“Yeah. Of course. Yup.” I wince inwardly when I realize that the entire class has bore witness to our awkward exchange.
Desiree and Mimi flash me sympathetic smiles. Well, Mimi’s smile is sympathetic. Desiree is simply hurling daggers with her eyes at the back of a stranger’s head.
Correction.
My new lab partner’s head.
What’s his name again? Ansel? Why does that name sound so damn familiar?
As I move through the aisle to claim my seat, I can’t help but study him out of the corner of my eye. My breath actually catches in my throat, trapped there as if it’s been vacuumed up.
My god.
Is it a rule that all of the men at this school have to be insanely good-looking? No, that can’t be a requirement. The kid directly behind Ansel isn’t going to beAmerica’s Next Top Model, if you know what I mean.
But Ansel…