“You want my help?” Olive asked incredulously. “Is that what you’re saying in this roundabout, won’t-come-out-and-just-admit-it way of yours?”
“You know your students.” Levon leaned against the doorframe as he studied her.
Olive pushed her glasses up the crinkling bridge of her nose. “I should hope so. Though I’m starting to wonder if I know them as well as I think.”
“Well, I think you do,” Levon confirmed. “Current students and past ones. Our intel suggests they’re recruiting young guys just out of high school or still in it. Guys who don’t know enough about the criminal world to realize they’re getting in over their heads. I think you can help me figure out who they might be.”
“You think some of my students are involved with the gang?” Olive followed after him into the living room, and Levon was pleased to see she had left her packing incomplete in the bedroom; in fact, she appeared to have forgotten her scheme to escape him entirely. Instead, she retrieved her messenger bag from the hall and joined him in the kitchen, opening her laptop at the table.
“If your instincts are telling you something’s off with any of these guys, then I believe you,” Levon said. “Think you can get me those kids’ names?”
“Already on it.” Olive’s fingers tapped industriously as she typed. “Some graduated in the past year or two. A few of them are supposed to be current students, but they have dropped out already. The rest seem on their way to dropping out if I don’t do something.”
“One thing at a time,” Levon consoled her as he opened his own laptop, then dialed a number on his cell.
Olive paused to watch his procedure with interest. “Who are you calling?”
“Ordering pizza.”
He grinned as Olive snorted and rolled her eyes. “What is this, a study session?
“In a way. Something tells me we’re in for a long night.”
* * *
Their long night seemed to fly by in no time. Five hours in, and Olive was so focused on their collaboration that she hadn’t even noticed how late it was getting.
“Another slice?” he offered as he got up to raid the pizza delivery box for the third time. Olive nodded thankfully, and leaned in to look at a spot of interest on Google Maps. Perfect. He didn’t want her going hungry, but he didn’t want to give her the opportunity to glance at the time emblazoned on the microwave oven, either. He plated their pizza and quickly punched in the heating time, then watched the slices rotate and irradiate until they were sizzling once more. “Know what this reminds me of?”
“Our old lab days?” Olive supplied. Levon turned back to face her, surprised, and found that she had surfaced long enough to grin at him from behind her laptop.
“How did you know?” He was genuinely thrown for a loop in that moment. He looked back on their partnership in high school fondly, but had always assumed the memories meant more to him than they did to her.
“I’d been thinking the same thing.” Olive accepted the reheated slice of pizza when he brought it over to her.
“Well, this might be the first time our brains have operated on the same wavelength,” Levon said as he sat back down. “It only took, what? Ten years?”
“Ten years on and you talk a lot more now,” Olive pointed out. “Could be our thoughts aligned more than once before then and you just never said anything.” She grinned. “I always assumed my Big Brain Energy intimidated you.”
The comment was playful, and completely in line with the teasing atmosphere he had been trying to set up between them in his attempts to flirt with her... but there was something else. Levon paused, and set his pizza down. “Olive, your brain is a gift,” he said gravely. “You know that, right? Because something tells me you never thought of it that way before. Not back in high school.”
Olive shifted uncomfortably, and her lowered eyes broadcast more to him than any direct gaze ever could. “It never felt like a gift,” she admitted quietly. “Not when the person I wanted to talk to most would barely talk to me. I wanted to use my intellect to connect with people, but it just seemed to intimidate them, instead.”
Levon’s hand beneath the table clenched into a fist. He had to physically bar himself from admitting the truth: that Olive’s mighty intellect had intimidated the hell out of him. That it still did. It wasn’t what she needed to hear, and it was his own hang-up to deal with in private.
It wasn’t Olive’s fault he had a soft spot for smart girls.
“This may be the dumbest thing I ever say, and I’m about to say it out loud...” Olive trailed off, laughed awkwardly, then revealed what was weighing on her in a rush: “I don’t feel amazing. Not then, and not now. I feel lonely. I feel like... like any man I may want to attract, or impress, will look the other way as soon as I open my mouth.” Her eyes seemed to be begging him for something, anything, but Levon couldn’t assess what it was she needed in that moment.
Maybe he needed to stop thinking for the both of them.
“Maybe...” He drew her chair around the table to bring the two of them closer, and Olive leaned in attentively. “... when you open that mouth of yours, and a man goes quiet, what he’s really thinking is...”
Levon caught her chin between his fingers and pulled her in. He stifled Olive’s gasp of surprise with the firm press of his lips: a firmness that soon gathered strength and became a demand. He gripped her waist and pulled her in against him, forcing her to occupy the space between
