The pen in her hand had been hovering over the same line of text for the past three minutes. I watched the way her brows pinched together, the way her lips pressed into a tight line—somewhere between focus and frustration.

She was trying to ignore me. Which was fair. I wasn’t making it easy.

I stretched out on the couch, the leather cool beneath my palm as I drummed my fingers against the armrest. “You know,” I mused, keeping my voice just low enough to disrupt her without seeming intentional, “you’ve turned exactly one page in the last half hour. Impressive productivity.”

She exhaled sharply through her nose but didn’t rise to the bait.

Yet.

I smirked, rolling my whiskey glass between my fingers, watching the light catch the amber liquid. Her brother was supposed to pick her up from campus, but apparently, something more important had come up. And since I was the only other person within a reasonable radius, the responsibility had been dumped on me.

I didn’t mind.

She went back to her book, flipping a page she hadn’t actually read. I watched, amused, as she tried—really tried—to ignore me.

She lasted about two minutes.

“Do you not have work to do?” she asked, snapping her book shut with a little more force than necessary.

I shrugged. “Delegation is a powerful thing.”

“That’s code for ‘I’m annoying and have nothing better to do.”

Tomato, tomato.

She let out a frustrated noise and dragged her laptop toward her, muttering something about how she could have been at the library, but no, she was stuck here because her brother was an unreliable idiot and I was an inconvenience to society.

She glared. I grinned.

Somewhere across the city, her brother was living his life blissfully unaware that he had just made my night significantly more entertaining.