And a smack it earned him, her eyes comically beady and trained on his head like meteors ready to burst. "If ya were gonna agree, should'a did it from the start!" She walked ahead of him, believing he'd follow and enjoy a relaxing session of irritating book work with her.

"Even if y'think that, I want ya to help. So you're gonna help." She wouldn't take such a shallow dismissal lying down. For all the time they'd spent together, he surely would have seen her witless rebuttal coming. Her eyes, intensely honest as they'd always been, were fixed square on his.

"Don't give me that." She squinted, making it evident that she didn't give the first hoot about his unspoken struggles. Ignorance, certainly, but such she acted on without a second thought. "How am I supposed to study if you're not gonna pitch in?"

"That's it?" She clasped at the book's end, but didn't yet pull it away from him. A narrowed gaze cast unto his oddly distant countenance, she openly pressed buttons only she knew he hid. "You're just gonna dump this and walk away? I thought we'd study. Together." Annoying as it was.