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I lower the laptop screen and finish chewing, careful not to choke on congealed cheese, but if it doesn’t kill me, the embarrassment might. “What I do or don’t do really doesn’t concern you.”
He plops onto a stool next to mine. “Why do you hate me?”
It’s a trick question because if I give him a reason, I sound unreasonable, and if I say I don’t hate him, he might interpret that to mean I could possibly, one day, like him.
“Who said I hated you?”
He spins on his stool until he’s facing the wall, his back propped against the table, and he shoves his hands in the pocket of his black hoodie. “You’ve acted disgusted with me since we met.”
“I’m not acting.”
“You’re insufferable, you know that?”
I do know that, because I’ve been told. I’m too high-maintenance, too needy. But Sawyer doesn’t deserve to know that bit about me. “Now who’s the dictionary?”
He shifts in his seat, and I see his smile from my periphery. “Touché.” After a few half-swivels from him while I clean up my pizza trash, he asks, “So, what do you do, anyway?”
“Data analytics for a tech firm.” I risk just enough of a glance back to see his eyes widen, and he stops twisting in his seat.
“Seriously?” But he reads me right away when our gazes meet, and he picks up on the smile I can’t fully stop from forming. “Oh. Funny.”
“You don’t think women can work in STEM?”
He shrugs. “I know they can. I just didn’t think you were one of them.”
My jaw drops, but I recover quickly. I narrow my eyes at him, choosing to ignore his implication that I’m not smart enough to work in that field. “What about you?” I ask instead.
He twists on his stool again. “I’m a teacher.”
It all makes sense: ‘Thank you for saying what you said earlier. About the teachers,’ and ‘I think you’d love my grandson.’ Nancy’s a tricky one, for sure, and wildly off-base with her assumption.
“What do you teach?”
He shrugs. “High school math.”
“I bet your students are missing you, with you playing hooky.”
He crumples at that, shoulders sagging and curling in on himself. Even if I didn’t like him taking up space earlier, there’s something about him making himself smaller that feels wrong. “I bet,” he says, and it’s so pitiful I have to change the subject.
“Did your grandmother really not tell you anything about me?”
“She really didn’t,” he answers. “She wanted us to get to know each other.”
“When did you find out about their little plan?”
He shrugs. “Right before dinner, I guess. She told me to be on my best behavior because the future Mrs. Sawyer Dawson might be there across from me.”
I cringe, and he laughs.
“If it makes you feel better, I told her no way, no how, was I going to entertain this idea of letting her hook me up with a random stranger on this ship.”
“Good.”
“Because I’d already met a feisty stranger in the adults-only part of the ship, and I wanted to spend a little more time with her. Assuming I could find her again, of course.”
I freeze, nervously glance his way, and say, “Liar.”
And shit, the way his skin pulls and folds itself around his lips and eyes when he smiles.
