He's Just a Skater Boy (boyxboyxboy)

Chapter 99: Oblivious

[A/N] By my rules if I haven't slept yet the next day hasn't started! So it's still Monday. Adjust your calendars accordingly people.

Maybe I expected them to do something, say something, make fun of me somehow or gloat or anything really. Instead when I sat down Atlas glanced at me but said nothing as his friends messed about around him, drawing his attention back to them as they cackled over something. 

Jacob just sat down next to me and pursed his lips as he laid out all of his stationary in the uniform way he always did and saw me glancing at him, too nervous to go to sleep or anything, not that I usually bothered in homeroom.

He must have misunderstood though, because he coughed, shifted and stared straight ahead as he talked to me in a low voice. "I'm not normally late. Something happened on the way here..."

I looked at him with wide eyes, freaked out that he was even talking to me, before the words sank into my brain.

He thought I was judging him for being late. Fucking hell I didn't even realise he was late, my head was preoccupied with relearning exactly how to talk to him, to both of them, and now I had to explain why I would be visiting the gym teacher in the morning for uniform inspection and I wasn't sure I could take another punishment so soon after the last. I felt like I knew less and less how to act around him.

I folded my hands in front of me and swallowed, forgetting to reply lost in my own head.

It took me a while to realise I didn't actually have to tell him. Jacob was in charge of me but he wasn't my fucking mom, it wasn't a big deal. I'd come a couple minutes early, show up and let the sadistic prune-face give me a one over before I went to homeroom.

And actually as the day went on, most of which were shared with Jacob and Atlas, I felt the nervous buzz in my chest, the terror of trying to look at either of them without remembering the feeling of being on my knees in front of them a certain appendage expanding against my lips, began to dwindle as the day went on.

Maybe it was in part because neither of them spoke about it, maybe it was because the entire day the sun relentlessly roasted the poor studious scholars of Central Leighstone Secondary.

In the heat that grew into a smouldering greenhouse, particularly in our double science class which had the most windows and all of them closed, about a thin rectangle each able to be opened but which the teachers generally didn't since one student chucked a bottle down from it hitting another kid in the face, the entire room was feeling nice and toasty.

Even the teacher looked like she was melting, slanting sideways a bit more every half minute. 

The rules grew lax as the most restrained of students began to wilt in the heat, suggesting that the blinds should be drawn only to realise that ever since the repainting of the classroom there were no blinds to speak of.

But I told a lie just now, because the only one not actively complaining or getting distracted was Jacob, and that wasn't to say he wasn't hot, because the sweat patches were proof he was probably just as much human as the rest of us, but instead of moving an inch he watched ahead, eyes on the whiteboard as the teacher clicked through a slideshow slowly, not bothering to narrate.

I watched him from the table where I lay, my face sticking to my arm, watching his hand glide across his notepad, that perfect writing appearing under his hand like magic, a perfect cold gaze on his face as he stared straight ahead.