It Won't Be That Bad

Ch 17

His fingers twisted and fiddled with the Rubik's cube in his hand to match the last color block of the six sides of the toy. After all the colors had matched, he shuffled the colors again and started from the beginning. He had been doing this since class had finished, sitting on the same bench yesterday as he waited for his husband to arrive. A pair of eyes focused on the Rubik, he seemed calm and careful playing with it, but his hearing was focused on the faint chatter from a distance. Some of the voices he recognized as his classmates, two girls and one boy.

"Alexander is acting all pretentious again today, Professor Ferdinand's entire attention is on him; rarely does he pay attention to other students! Peeve. Why doesn't Alexander just shut the fuck up and let the others try too?"

Juliet Barrow was one of the people he avoided in class. Apart from her hair color being quite eccentric recently after being dyed from dark beige to bright blonde, her voice was too loud for his liking. According to him, it would be better for the girl's hair to remain wavy before cutting it to her shoulder blades and straightening it, which would suit her dark brown eyes better. But of course, he had no right in controlling an individual's desires, not that he cared either. Noah rotated the Rubik's cube until the orange block was now complete, his hand moved to complete the white color.

"He knows he's smart, so he brags about it, rubbing it on our face." Harley was a kid who was in the middle line for him, between being avoided or being neutral, so far he hasn't had any problems with the green-eyed young man. "No matter how many times you complain, it won't make Alexander stop doing it. The only thing you can do is keep studying to compete with Alexander, and you often skip class."

"Whose side are you on? Me or him?" His red eyes glanced back, they sat together in the small park of their faculty building's courtyard, seemingly unaware of his existence. He focused on completing the yellow color block. "You know it, you admit it, Alexander is so annoying."

Thank you, he knows that.

Someone suddenly spoke up. "July is basically right, after all," Bloom added in quite a sharp tone. "He doesn't need to show his intelligence all the time, it's so exhausting to see his cockiness. Many people are smarter than him."

"He's too damn arrogant, fuck it." Barrow never knew how to control the volume of her voice, the corners of his lips twitching upwards as he finished the cube and mixed up the colors once more. "In fact, every time Jayden answered, he always broke his argument, always gave the correct answer and the lecturers would praise him. Do you think they gave him a cheat sheet first?" Giggles of laughter could be heard from the three people, he lowered his shoulders and relaxed on the bench.

"You have to 'give' something to 'get' something as a teacher's pet, of course." The addition of Harley even made Barrow and Bloom's laughter harden. Suddenly his hand felt itchy to throw the Rubik's cube right at their heads one by one.

"Are you fucking blind, prats? Don't you see Alexander sitting there?"

This reprimand succeeded in making Noah turn his attention away from the Rubik, whose color almost matched the cube's blocks, to the back, to find Merry Marquez standing in front of the three people who were now showing shock because it had happened so suddenly. Then they turned to him, his gaze met theirs and he just pulled his eyebrows up, the corners of his lips curved downwards slightly while the color in their faces slowly faded, covered in red, perhaps embarrassed.

Ah, it turned out they were really embarrassed over how they caught red-handed, they didn't even say a single word to Marquez, instead they walked away from there together, slightly nudging each other and apparently blaming each other. Marquez might be right if they were blind. The girl with straight, light brown hair tied high as a ponytail began to walk towards him, he put the Rubik to the side and leaned his back against the back of the bench as soon as Marquez reached where he was sitting.