Episode 10
1041 Words
ANNALISE
The moment we arrived home, I had hardly even stepped out of the car when Knox spoke behind me in a loud voice, teasing even.
“Meet me at the study in ten, or both of us get detention tomorrow.”
My head whipped towards him.
“f**k you,” I hissed.
He grinned.
“I love you too, step sis.”
“You’re impossible,” I mumbled, rolling my eyes in frustration.
I turned away from him, went into the house and up the stairs with rage boiling over inside of my belly.
He always found a way to infuriate me no matter how much I noticed and tried to avoid his rude ass.
My shoulders twitched in a tic that made me to stop for a moment. And after it was over, I resuned walking straight to my bedroom door.
The moment the door closed behind my tired ass, I collapsed onto the soft mattress with a deep sigh.
“I've missed you,” I whispered to the mattress, kissing the polkadot sheets that were cold to the touch.
My phone buzzed.
I knew it was Knox even before I took it out of my bag and checked out the ID of the sender.
Knox, indeed.
“What now?” I groused under my breath, fingers opening the text.
[Knox: Six minutes left.]
I typed back.
[Annalise: Maybe you should go f**k yourself if you aren't going to have a little patience. Thank you.]
His reply came in before I could set the phone down on the bed.
[Knox: Really?]
The ellipses mark appeared in a white bubble at the bottom of the chat interface to let me know he was already typing another response.
Curiousity ate at me, and I stared down at the phone, waiting, even though I wanted to keep it aside and ignore anything he would send.
The ellipses disappeared. I waited for a moment and it didn't come back.
“Maybe he let go?” I whispered to myself, almost dropping the phone.
The message dropped in then with a soft ting sound. I read it fast.
[Knox: I’d rather f**k you instead.]
A frustrated groan slipped out of my mouth when I realized that I had just been waiting around for that.
His nonsense gibberish.
[Annalise: Bastard.]
[Knox: I have a father, Miss Goody Two Shoes. Oh, he's yours too.]
I facepalmed.
He was so shameless.
[Knox: Three minutes more.]
My eyes widened.
He was as still counting?
Fuck him!
I dropped my phone in the bed and abruptly stood to my feet. My fingers began rummaging through my bags for all of the supplies I would need, and I gathered them quickly.
My phone tinged with a message, the screen lightening up though.
I read the message from the floating notification on the lock screen.
[Knox: You are late teacher.]
My eyes rolled.
I left the phone on the bed and just rushed out with my supplies, running down the stairs to the study room.
The door was closed.
I paused there to catch my breath before I would go into the Lion’s den and meet the shameless carnivore.
My hands wrapped around the knob and turned it, pushing it open. And I stepped inside, more composed.
The study looked different in the afternoon light pouring into the space—less like a study room and more like a place that something was always bound to happen.
Knox sat there with a grin.
“Took you long enough.”
“Shut up,” I snapped. I set my books down on the table and uncapped my pen while telling myself to focus.
"Where did we stop?" I asked.
Knox pulled out the worksheet from yesterday. The gesture surprised me greatly because I had not even been expecting him to keep it in all of the chaos that unfolded too. He set it on the table between us and pointed right at the third problem.
"Here," he said.
I looked at the paper and it seemed like he had even attempted two more of the problems after our session had abruptly ended last night.
Both were so wrong, but they had been attempted, nevertheless.
I said nothing about that and moved on, sitting down close to him.
“Now, you have to focus,” I told him in a warning voice. “You dig?”
He grinned.
“Yes, teacher, Tic-tac.”
I rolled my eyes at his words.
“Focus, Knox.”
We worked through the next set of equations and for a while it was almost manageable.
He asked questions that were less stupid than usual, and I answered each of them in a flat voice after I corrected his working without letting my eyes stay on his face too long.
But the room kept getting smaller.
Every time I leaned over to point at something on the page, I was aware of how close we were sitting.
Every time he reached for the pencil, I would move my hand quickly before our fingers could meet.
Then, I would pretend that I had done it for another reason.
My heart was going too fast and I needed it to stop.
I told myself I was a good girl, the sensible scholarship student.
I told myself this was work and he was absolutely insufferable.
I reminded myself that no less than twenty-four hours ago he had been mocking my major tics at the lunch table without even flinching.
And I had to reiterate to my brain that I was the good step sister who should not dare to sleep with her arrogant stepbrother no matter how much he teased me and tried to lure me into commiting such thing.
I could not fall.
"You're doing it again," his voice drew me back to reality, distracting me from my sequence of thoughts.
I looked up.
"Doing what?" I asked.
He leaned back and watched me with those dark intense eyes.
"You know? That thing where you go somewhere else in your head?"
I shook my head.
“I don't know.”
He tapped the page.
"You simply just stopped talking mid-sentence," he stared. “What were you lost in? My eyes?”
- Writer
