While the Sun Shines

39.

"Are you ready?" Blake's eyes twinkled as he teasingly hovered the cursor above the Excel file that contained the latest batch of grades for Nick's economical models course. 

Nick groaned. "No. No, I'm not ready."  

"That's too bad, because your grade is already here and I, for one, am dying of curiosity." 

"This is not fair—it came online way faster than the last time!" Nick complained. "The professors aren't supposed to already be done with grading the next day." 

"I'm going to open it," Blake threatened. 

Nick swore and turned away from the laptop, despite having much more confidence in the outcome this time. He and Blake had done another study session in the school library after the first one, and Nick had definitely recognised the questions and knew the answers while he was writing the quiz. Immediately after he'd felt like he did well, but the doubt in the back of his mind that he hadn't was still there. A lot was riding on this, and with each fail it would get harder to raise his grade. If he didn't do significantly better than last time, Nick knew he'd have an even tougher job—an almost impossible one. Even worse: it meant he'd failed while Blake had put so much time and effort into helping him study. It would feel like an even worse failure.

"I opened the file," Blake told Nick sing-song. "I'm going to look up your name in the list now."

"Blake, stop it!" 

Blake only laughed and continued what he was doing with Nick's computer. "And I found you in the list. Do you want me to tell you, or do you want to look at it yourself?" 

Nick pulled a face at Blake while still carefully avoiding looking at his laptop screen. Blake was usually quite expressive, but it sucked that he was also very good at not showing what he thought or felt when he wanted to. Blake kept his expression completely blank, giving nothing away about Nick's grade. 

They held a staring competition until Nick was finally the first one to cave. "Fine, you tell me," he said.

Instantly, Blake's lips broadened into a wide, beaming smile that looked like it couldn't have been contained much longer anyway. "Nine out of ten," he said. "And fun fact: congrats, babe, you got the highest grade in the entire class." 

Nick's mouth almost fell open. "What? Really? I haven't been top of the class in anything since kindergarten." 

"Well, you are now. Thanks to me and my help, of course." 

"Pretty much, yes," Nick admitted. 

Blake scoffed, leaned in, and pecked Nick on the cheek. "Hey, you're supposed to protest and tell me you did all the work, not feed my ego further. That's dangerous business." 

Nick chuckled. "Okay, it was a team effort." 

"Good enough. I'll take it." 

Blake grinned, and both of them started leaning in to make out, but before their mouths could find each other, the laptop in front of them loudly notified them of a new message in a group chat. Blake seemed to glance at the screen automatically. When his eyes stayed trained on the laptop, Nick also turned to look. 

He instantly wished he hadn't. He also wished he'd never ever hooked up his chats to his computer. Although he'd mostly done it to not miss Alex' replies about their gaming night while in class, all the other chats automatically gave notifications too. Including the football chat.

Nick watched on in horror as the guys showed themselves from their worst side. 

"@Nick how's your bitch?"