So since I (and everyone else, it seems) have taken such a liking to Oliver and Kayne’s dysfunctional little relationship, I’ve decided to write more about them. I can’t help it; they’re adorable.

Hurray.

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Across the classroom, Kayne spins his pencil between his fingers and pretends to listen to what our math teacher is saying. I’m distracted by how his eyes are distracted, staring into a space that seems to be just above my shoulder. He hasn’t blinked for a minute.

“Kayne, can you tell us the answer to this problem?” Miss Reynolds asks out of the blue. Kayne starts, blinks back into focus, and looks over at her.

“No,” he replies, in a ‘why would I need to know’ manner. Miss Reynolds sighs and kind of smiles and shakes her head at him, and goes back to drawing on the overhead. I have to smile at Kayne, and he catches it and smiles right back.

Katie, who sits next to me, yell-whispers something to Gina, who sits next to Kayne on the other side of the circle our desks had been placed in. It was supposed to stop us from talking, but nothing really stopped us from talking. Miss Reynolds seemed to have given up after a while and I think now she was just making amusing shaped with our seating arrangements.

Kayne glances at Gina, says something to which she quickly replies, and then leans out of his desk to grab his blue spiral-bound notebook, the one that’s been decorated with phrases like ‘Oliver owns your ass’ or ‘am I making myself queer?’ (Not the green one he uses for his first four classes, the one with smiley faces on it. That one says ‘Oliver owns your ass’ too, on the front cover. Actually, come to think of it, all of his stuff says ‘Oliver owns your ass’ somewhere. Even his backpack.)

He flips to a clean sheet of paper and tears it out, not even bothering to scribble anything on it before he crumples it into a compact little ball and flings it at me.

“What?” I hiss at him, and Miss Reynolds turns to look at me and I sing out, “Sorry!” before she can even open her mouth. She smiles again, fondly, and turns back to her equations.

Kayne is pretending to be innocent, talking to Gina–who’s giggling quietly, and I don’t know why–so I peg him in the head with it. He flails, albeit silently, and it lands on his desk. Gina nudges Kayne and says something, and Kayne gets this devious look on his face that I’m not quite sure I like (the sound of it, I mean, because his damn face is adorable).

Miss Reynolds looks up momentarily and we all pull an angel, looking back at her blankly with smiling faces. She knows something is up–she’s not stupid–but she won’t do anything because she’s cool like that. Either that or she thinks we’re all retarded (and I think it’s the latter).

As soon as her head turns Kayne flings the ball back at me and I hack in surprise when it slaps against my cheek. Miss Reynolds looks up again; I know she heard that one. I glare at Kayne until she looks away and throw it back again, hard.

Kayne yelps this time, out loud and Miss Reynolds looks up sharply and he pretends to be examining his fingernails, shaking with laughter. When she raises her eyebrow at him he says, “I...stabbed myself. With a pencil,” he adds, when she doesn’t look convinced.

“You guys are something else,” Miss Reynolds says, turning back to her lesson.

He throws the paper back at me, hitting me in the other cheek. I wonder if paper balls are supposed to hurt this much.

I throw it back as revenge, and mime taking notes when Miss Reynolds looks up. Katie is snickering beside me; in fact, the rest of the class is laughing at how oblivious our teacher is–or pretends to be.

But when I look back over at Kayne he glances quickly at Miss Reynolds, then stands up tentatively to see if she notices. She doesn’t, surprisingly, and he dashes, hunched over, and lands on his knees beside my desk. Gina’s giggles are increasing, and when I look at her she gives me what’s either an ‘I know something you don’t know’ look or an ‘I hope you’re ready’ look. It’s kind of a mixture of both, really.

I lean over him to see what he’s doing, and he puts his hands on either side of my face and pulls me down and kisses me, briefly but sweetly, and then pulls a stupid and rolls back across the floor to his desk. I blush, and as if on cue the classroom is filled with wolf whistles and a resounding ‘Whoa, that’s hot’ from Gina.

Miss Reynolds looks up, raising her eyebrow at us all in general.

Gina doesn’t falter. “Ah, I mean..it’s hot in here,” she says, nodding emphatically and fanning herself with her hands. “Really hot.”

I have a sneaking suspicion she would’ve added ‘guy-on-guy hot’ if Miss Reynolds hadn’t looked so doubtful anyway. And then she glances at my red face and her eyes widen.

“Look at you, Oliver. Is it really that hot? You’re all red in the face,” Miss Reynolds observes. I blush even harder and Katie’s body quivers beside me. Kayne is laughing silently at my plight from across the circle and God, I hate that kid right now. I really hate that I love him.

“Yeah, Liv. You’re looking kind of...flushed,” Kayne manages to choke out, his voice wavering as he tries not to openly laugh. I glare at him, flicking him off when Miss Reynolds turns to look at him for a second.

“Well, if it’s that hot,” she says dubiously, shrugging. “I mean, I don’t think it is, but I guess if you can’t concentrate with the thermostat so high, I’ll turn it down a bit.”

She crossed the room to the thermostat, turning her back on us, and on my other side Daisy Judge was face down on her desk, cheeks pink from restraining herself from laughing. I frowned, running an embarrassed hand through my hair, and nearly followed suit and put my head on my desk.

For the rest of the period my classmates would wiggle their eyebrows at me and pretend to make out with invisible people when Miss Reynolds wasn’t looking. Kayne kept making inappropriate hand gestures at me that would have kind of turned me on a tiny bit–sort of! Not even that much!–if it hadn’t been during the middle of math class. All I could do was flip them all off and blush.

And burrow deeper into my jacket and look smug as the temperature in the room slowly dropped.

And they said I was the stupid one for wearing my jacket into the classroom...

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I like this one. The phrase ‘am I making myself queer’ cracks me up every time I think about it.

And Oliver is so cute...and Kayne is a devious (but adorable) bastard. I love them both.

If you read and liked ‘Hate, Because I Really Don’t Like You’, you might like this. It’s a different tone, but I think it’s good.

Review?