Building the Tension | ✔ | 18+

Chapter 6a - Planning, Anticipation, and Action

On our walk back to the dorm, I tried to distance myself from Dimitri a little, just so my feelings for him wouldn't be too conspicuous, although, I could hardly stand the wait for his walk-by at midnight to come that night. As I passed him at the doorway to the building, I let my hand graze his for just a moment. It made my heart hurt to know that was as close as we could get during the day.

I glanced over at Dimitri a few times in the cafeteria throughout the day, but he was always along the wall wearing his aloof guardian mask. I sat at lunch and dinner with Lissa, but Adrian was a regular fixture at mealtime that day. In a vain attempt at distraction, Adrian chattered about idle nonsense the entire time, like whether coconuts were a fruit or a nut. Dimitri didn't escort the high school novices for the rest of the day, so I never even got close to him.

I checked in on Lissa through the bond a few times throughout the afternoon and it appeared that she and Adrian were making some good progress on their charms, but it didn't seem like they would be ready for another day or so. Lissa's first attempt at a no-smoking compulsion charm made Adrian immediately run to the doors and grab a cigarette. Adrian seemed to think he was doing a little bit better at creating the healing charm that he was working on, but he didn't really have a test subject and there was no way I was going to volunteer to be his guinea pig.

About a half-hour after dinner, Eddie stopped by my room and asked me to join a couple of the other senior novices in the lobby to play poker. After I beat them all for five hands straight and collected almost thirty dollars of my classmates' money, Eddie suggested I should probably head back to my room for the night before the others decided that I would need to give it all back.

Once I had returned to my room from the card game, I immediately found a sheet of paper and slid it under my door, as Dimitri and I had discussed. Seeing that I had to be in my room for the night a few hours before he would show up, I debated whether I should try to sleep before he arrived. Inevitably, I decided against it because I didn't want to miss his knock.

When I had gone to Dimitri's apartment the other night, I may have had a few minutes to think about how I looked before I left, but I didn't take long then. I wanted to do it right this time. I made my way to the showers and really took my time washing, exfoliating, shaving, and conditioning - I wanted everything to be as perfect as I could make it. I returned to my room just before lights out. I turned out the room light and turned on a small desk lamp so that I could continue moisturizing, styling out my hair perfectly, and a thousand other little girly things.

The next question was what I should wear (or not wear) for when Dimitri would show up. I decided it was probably better to go ahead and use some lip gloss, still thankful that he had bought me that tube of it in the fall, but cosmetics was the easy part. As far as I knew, he'd never had the opportunity to see my over-sized t-shirt that I usually slept in, but it really wasn't anything that I was sure I'd want him to see me wearing, either. Even if I had some sexy lingerie (I didn't - I'd never had a need for it), I wasn't sure that would exactly be something I should be wearing if anyone else should happen to be the one to knock on my door. Knowing my mother had been by earlier that day, I wasn't confident that he would be the only one to knock. For the same reason, it'd be pretty odd for me to still be in my daytime clothes in the middle of the night. After looking around through my drawers a bit more, I decided I would wear a simple bath robe - and nothing else.

While I was waiting for Dimitri to show up, I thumbed through the papers in my room. I found a picture Lissa had taken of the two of us together the night of the shopping trip to Missoula. Dimitri was just in the background in the picture, but his gorgeous face was looking at me. The expression on his face was mostly his typical guardian face, but if you looked right in his eyes and knew it was there, you could see that he had cared about me, even then. When I had looked at this photo before, I hadn't known it was any more than just my imagination, but now I knew. Just looking at him in the picture with all of his hotness was nice, but to see that look, knowing it was there ... it was so amazing and exciting. As I touched my fingers to the picture, I had the urge to kiss it, but I already had my lip gloss on and didn't want to mess up the photo.

I looked up at the clock and saw that it said 11:45. Fifteen more minutes seemed like an eternity! I fidgeted with the belt of my robe, debating if I would even bother to have it tied when I answered the door or just hold it closed, ready to release it when he came into the room. After a few minutes, I untied it and just sat there waiting. The waiting was getting boring awfully fast and I was starting to run out of ideas to pass the time. On top of that, I knew I'd had more sleep than Dimitri had, but I was sitting in low light and had still only had about five hours of sleep the previous night, so I was starting to get pretty drowsy. I had a huge pile of clutter sitting out in the middle of the floor, so I walked over to go through it and began to organize it into little piles; dirty clothes, school papers, books, and more.

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Author's Notes:

I broke the chapter up based on where the mature content is, so 6b will be a quite a bit longer and then 6c is mostly clean and will be shorter again.

What do you think of Rose as a card shark?  Or a complete slob?  It just seemed right for her personality to me.  Not sure if she comes off that way to everyone else or not, though.

If you liked it, leave me a comment or a vote (that little star in the corner).