Chapter Four – Library Bargain

Chapter 4 – Library Bargain

(Dante POV)

The library wasn’t my place. Never had been. Too quiet, too still, like the walls themselves were holding their breath and expected everyone else to do the same. The air smelled of old paper and dust and faintly of coffee someone had spilled three years ago and never quite cleaned up. Every sound felt amplified: the scratch of a pen, the soft creak of a chair, the occasional cough that earned dirty looks from three tables away. Give me the roar of the stadium when the crowd surges on third and long, the metallic clang of weights dropping in the weight room, the sharp squeak of sneakers cutting across hardwood anything loud, anything alive. Anything but this suffocating hush where even turning a page felt like breaking a commandment.

And yet here I was. Third floor, corner table by the tall windows that overlooked the quad, because of him.

Eli sat across from me, surrounded by an explosion of books and loose-leaf notes that looked like they’d been attacked by a highlighter-wielding tornado. His hoodie sleeves were pushed up to his elbows, revealing thin wrists and ink smudges on his knuckles. His pen tapped an erratic rhythm against the open page of his battered copy of *The Waste Land*, and every few seconds a dark curl slipped forward to curtain his eyes. He kept pushing it back with an impatient swipe, mumbling half-sentences under his breath something about “Eliot’s fragmentation mirroring the post-war psyche” that dissolved into a frustrated little huff when the thought didn’t land right.

When he finally looked up, his grin was instant, wide, and far too knowing for someone who spent most of his time hiding behind books.

“So,” he drawled, stretching the word like he was unwrapping something dangerous, “you need help. And luckily for you, I’m great with words.”

I leaned back in the uncomfortable wooden chair, arms crossed tight over my chest, trying to look like I had zero investment in this conversation. “I don’t need help.”

“Mm-hm.” He flipped through the lit anthology I’d reluctantly brought the one the professor kept threatening would be on the midterm and stabbed his finger at a passage I’d highlighted in aggressive yellow. Right next to it, in my blocky handwriting, I’d scrawled: *?? football??* “You underlined ‘the futility of man’s struggle against fate’ and then immediately asked if it applied to fourth-quarter comebacks. That doesn’t scream mastery to me.”

Heat crept up the back of my neck, slow and humiliating. “I was… making connections.”

“You were making nonsense.” He slid the book back across the table toward me, smile too smug, eyes too bright. “But that’s okay. I like nonsense.”

I should’ve stood up right then. Grabbed my backpack, muttered something about practice, and left him to his chaotic pile of books. Pride screamed at me to do exactly that. But the truth the part I didn’t want to look at too closely was that watching him light up like this, watching him poke and prod at me like I was just another text he could annotate and unravel, pulled something loose inside my chest. Something I usually kept locked down tight.

I drummed my fingers against the scarred tabletop, the sound too loud in the hush. “Fine. Say you do help me. What do you get out of it?”

He tilted his head, curls falling forward again, and this time he let them stay. His eyes sparkled with mischief, but there was something else underneath something almost shy. “I’m glad you asked. See, you’re popular ”

“I’m not ”

“You *are*,” he cut in, voice firm but soft around the edges. “People look when you walk into a room. You don’t even notice it because you’re used to it, but I notice.” The last three words came out quieter, like they’d slipped past his guard before he could catch them. His gaze flicked down to the table for half a second, then back up. “I notice.”

That did something dangerous in my chest something hot and tight and unwelcome. I swallowed it down, forced my expression to stay neutral. “So?”

“So…” His grin returned, sharper this time, weaponized. “You’re gonna help *me*. Socially. Parties, people, not being the weird lit kid who stands in the corner clutching my notebook like it’s a life raft.”

I raised a brow, letting skepticism color my voice. “You want me to make you cool?”

“Basically, yeah.” He leaned forward, resting his chin on the heel of his hand like he had all the time in the world and nowhere else he’d rather be. “Think of it as… tutoring in opposite directions. You teach me how to exist in a room without quoting Foucault. I teach you how to write about Greek tragedy without comparing it to a missed field goal.”

The corner of my mouth twitched. I fought it hard. “You really think I have time to babysit you at parties?”

“You really think you’ll pass Lit Theory without me?” His voice dropped low, teasing, but there was steel threaded through it. He knew he had me cornered. Worse, he knew I knew it.

I exhaled through my nose, long and slow, shaking my head like I could shake off the inevitable. “You’re ridiculous.”

“And yet,” he sang, stretching the word into three ridiculous syllables until I wanted to reach across the table and strangle him or maybe just cover his mouth so he’d stop looking so damn pleased with himself “you’re not walking away.”

He wasn’t wrong.

I stayed right there, elbows braced on the table now, watching the way his pen spun lazily between his fingers, the way his sneakers kept up that restless little tap-tap-tap against the carpet like he couldn’t sit still even when he was winning. Every piece of him was in motion always had been, I realized and I hated how much space that motion was starting to take up in my head. How much I wanted to keep watching it.

“Fine,” I muttered, the word scraping out like it physically hurt. “Deal.”

The smile that spread across his face was slow, bright, unguarded. It hit like sunlight through the library windows warm, blinding, and completely unfair. For one stupid, suspended second, I didn’t care that the victory wasn’t mine. I just wanted to keep looking at him while he looked like that.

Then reality slammed back in: the ticking clock on the wall, the weight of midterms, the fact that I had film to watch and sprints to run and a thousand other things that weren’t this soft, dangerous thing blooming between us.

I cleared my throat, reached for the anthology, flipped it open like nothing had happened. “So. Where do we start?”

Eli’s laugh was quiet, almost fond. “We start with you admitting you’re terrible at this class.”

I shot him a look. “Keep talking and the deal’s off.”

“Too late,” he said cheerfully, already pulling out a fresh sheet of notes. “You’re stuck with me now, Cruz.”

Yeah.

I was starting to suspect he was righ.