But eventually four o’clock came, and with it, time to meet him. I strode from Aurora’s room where she’d been bitching about Phineas Yates—a Hellfire boy and total manwhore—and steeled myself as I walked into the lab.
Okay. Game plan.
Lady bits, listen up.
I wasn’t going to let Clara’s words scare me, but I also wasn’t going to kiss him or even think about kissing him. I was going to hold my ground, and I wasn’t going to let him railroad me into something stupid for this project, because I wouldn’t hear back from my safety schools until December at the earliest, and I needed my high school CV to be immaculate until then, just in case the Sorbonne fell through.
Which meant this project needed to be stunning and original enough to impress an admissions team. And that was not going to happen with a ball-playing bully like Keaton mucking it up.
You can do this.
Don’t piss off Clara.
Don’t take his shit.
Don’t get distracted by his eyes.
Pembroke’s photo lab was made of two parts: the digital lab where we worked on Photoshop today and the wet lab, or darkroom. I walked into the digital lab with its long rows of tables studded with giant, gleaming Macs and found Keaton sprawled in a chair, lazily clicking through something on one of the computers.
With some horror, I realized it was my computer. And he was clicking through my images, my photographs. The ones I’d scanned in earlier today to play with in Photoshop.
“You really should remember to log out of a school computer when you’re done,” Keaton said in a bored voice. Click click went his finger on the mouse. Each click felt like a gunshot in the air—echoing and final.
I’d known he would have to see my work eventually, but—but not like this. Not without my permission. Not without my preparation.
As I came closer, I could make out the individual images he was scrolling through. A picture of a leaf fading from green to gold. A shot of Isabelle in the middle of Hyde Park, looking down at her phone with a frown while the wind whipped her copper-colored hair around her face. Another one of Isabelle standing by the window in her empty London flat, her hand clenched tight around her new house key.
“Who is she?” Keaton asked.
God, of course he wanted to know about her. Everyone did. She was brilliant and beautiful and always did everything right—except picking the right boys to date. She’d always been very bad at that, for how smart and pretty she was.
I wouldn’t answer. I shouldn’t answer.
“My sister, Isabelle,” I answered, dropping my bag on the table. Some bitterness crept into my voice. “She’s single if you’re interested, but she is older than us. And she’s in London right now for school, so you’ll have to borrow your mommy’s jet to go see her.”
Keaton looked at me appraisingly. “You’re jealous of her.”
“I’m not,” I said huffily, crossing my arms.
“You are,” he said. “Trust me, I know when someone is jealous of a sibling they feel like they can never live up to.”
“Oh, really.”
He shrugged, not bothered by my sarcasm and also not elaborating either. “And I wasn’t asking because I thought she was hot. I was asking because she clearly means something to you. You show how lonely she is, how tense she is, and you make sure the viewer feels her loneliness too. The framing of both, the empty space around her . . . it’s really well done.”
My lips parted as shock poured through me. The fact that he could perceive that—perceive that I did really love Isabelle despite our differences—and he actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about left me stunned. Never in a hundred years would I have thought that Keaton Constantine could assess emotion in art.
And also . . .
“Are you complimenting me, Keaton?”
“I give compliments when they’re warranted, Big Red. And these images warrant them.”
It was almost patronizing. Almost. And I wanted to be mad about it. But when our eyes met, there was nothing but honesty and reluctant admiration in his face.
He’d meant what he said.
“Here, I want to show you something,” he said, getting to his feet. He’d left his bag up by the teacher’s table at the front, and he paced over to it, pulling off his blazer when he did. Which was unfortunate for me, because it meant there was now nothing disguising the firm swells of muscle under his white button-down. There was nothing hiding how his broad, hewn chest led into a flat stomach or how his waist tapered into lean and narrow hips.
Nothing hiding how tight his muscle-curved ass looked in his school trousers.
He idly loosened his tie as his other hand dug in his bag and pulled some glossy pictures free. “Tell me what you think,” he said, pushing them across the table. The loosened tie made it so that I could see his throat—strong and male and oh-so-lickable.
I thought about how it would feel to have my lips against his neck. To suck the skin there until he moaned, until he growled.
Then I flushed.
“Iris?” he said. “Did you hear me?”
I gratefully took the excuse to think about something that wasn’t kissing him and snagged the pictures. “Yeah. Sorry, I was just thinking about the project.”
Keaton braced his palm against the back of his neck. “Yeah, so. Uh. About that.” He nodded at the pictures, and I suddenly understood that he was nervous. The fidgeting. The hesitancy in his voice.
Keaton Constantine, god of the school, was worried about showing these to me.
And with renewed interest, I looked down.
The pictures were digital illustrations, all of them. Some incorporating photography, some freehand. And all of them were bright and vibrant and interesting. Even the ones that weren’t perfect showed an understanding of color, of movement, that I never would have expected from a sportsball boy.
I stared down at one in particular; a drawing of a man standing with his back to the observer, his bare feet sinking into the earth, the wind tugging at his suit pants and the matching jacket draped over one arm. Even though he seemed to be standing in some kind of garden, he was looking out to where the sea glimmered in the distance, like a chilly blue invitation.
I raised my eyes to Keaton, who still stood there with his hand hanging from the nape of his neck. He was tense, unreadable. Waiting for me to say something dismissive or hurtful maybe.
I didn’t. I couldn’t. “This is really good, Keaton.”
He relaxed the tiniest amount.
“I’m sorry I assumed you wouldn’t be any good at this stuff, on account of the jockitude.”
“Jockitude,” he repeated, the corner of his mouth curling up ever so slightly. “What a way with words you have, headmaster’s daughter.”
“He’s someone important to you,” I decided.
His smile fell off, replaced by a careful neutrality. He started unbuttoning and rolling up his shirtsleeves—a study in forced casualness. “What makes you think he’s real and not just a figment of my imagination?”
I moved some of the pictures on the table so that they were side by side. “You see this one here? Another person, but the hair is more of an idea of hair and the environment around them is static. Same here. But him? This garden? There’s movement in it—the wind and the churn of the sea—and you can see how it makes him feel. And the hair isn’t just blond; it’s all different shades of gold, like he’s just spent the summer outside. Like you drew him from memory.”