He was a good boyfriend. You could tell by the way he smiled when he was around her--cherry blossoms and good music and the pink glow of a June sunset. His skin was brighter, his face softer, and if you peeked under the desk you’d find their bare ankles intertwined.

A mop of curly red hair--the kind of hair that confuses you at first. The kind that calls for tousling. Darker eyebrows, straight and strong on his forehead.

She had the tip of her thumb in her mouth, resting between her teeth. Aqua nail polish bright against her tanned skin. Her glasses were small and rectangular, not the thick black frames that you were accustomed to seeing on kids nowadays. Her smile was crooked, her face rounded and cheeks scrunched in a laugh, that glorious squeeze of muscles working. Synapses firing. A bony shoulder curved under a thin t-shirt.

He stared at her as she leaned over her paper, small fingers gripping a pink pen, all right angles. She wrote ferociously and his eyes beamed soft and he marveled at the size of her slender pinky. His fingers interlaced behind his head, his elbows triangles pointing toward the ceiling tiles.

In his mind he reached over and grasped her hand, the smallness of it, his palm against its smooth back. He watched as she let the pen slip to the table. The small clatter. The rustle of skin and clothes. The silence of the gaze behind a curtain of escaped hair.

There was a quick kiss, and nothing more. A curly mop bent towards a dark-haired temple, eyes closed. Lips pressed against skin, and time in the room seemed to slow, bending backwards through the sunlight floating in through open windows.

A sigh like velvet, and a grin. The tap of a keyboard across the room.