Pointe Shoes and Spider Webs

33. Kitchen Towels and Cucumbers

Daphne and Peter settled at the breakfast bar. They agreed that she would read through the subjects first to figure out where she gets lost and then he can help her with that. While she reads, he's doing his own homework. However, she can't focus on the books in front of her. Her brain keeps telling her she won't get the eighty percent on the tests anyways, so why should she even bother. It's like whatever's on the pages is in a different language. The long, difficult words that cover the paper almost make her dizzy.

Daphne glances at Peter, who's bent over his own homework. The end of his mechanical pencil rests in the corner of his mouth. He's completely focused on the exercise in front of him. A slight frown twitches in his brows and he scrunches his nose while reading the question. Cute. She raises her eyebrows at her own thought and quickly looks back at her own books. What's going on with her? Everything used to be so normal with Peter. It was just a regular friendship, right? But whenever she looks at him now, or even thinks of him, she feels... something. Isn't it way too soon to feel anything like this? It hasn't even been two months yet. But he's so kind... And funny... And he's... Cute.

Peter protected her from day one, when she was in the store with just him. He came to find her when Loki took her. He brought her home. He's going to help her with her pas de deux classes... She takes another peek at him. He's still frowning at his book. Sometimes he writes down part of an equation. A brown curl falls down his forehead. She wants to put it back in place. His hair looks so soft. She wants to touch it. Touch him. Hold him.

"You alright?" He asks, not looking up from his work. She snaps out of her trance and sits up straight.
"Wha- yea?"
"You've been staring at me for a while." How did he even notice? She barely had her head turned towards him. Does he have a sixth sense or something? He pushes the hair that's in front of his face back onto his head and looks at her. "It's a little distracting." No, Daphne thinks. You're distracting. "If you need help with anything you can ask me, you know?"
"I don't want to bo-" She stops herself when the kind look on his face twists into a glare.

Daphne knows he doesn't like it when she says that, but she just can't help it.
"You're not bothering me, Daph, I came here to help you study." He closes his own books and pushes them to the side. He stands up to move his stool closer to hers and sits down again next to her. His shoulder brushes past hers and she quietly holds her breath. He reads the paragraph she's stuck at. He clears his throat. "Alright, oscillation." He nods and scans the page one more time and then looks at her. When she turns her head to face him, she realizes how close she is, but she decides to push everything away that is not important to her studies right now. She absolutely has to get into this school.

If you get 80 percent on all tests you get to see Peter every day. The thought makes her perk up. Another reason to work extra hard this weekend.
"Yeah, I don't really get the concept cause it's so broad?" She mutters. "The book says it can apply to anything, from biology to economics?"
"Yep," Peter pops the p at the end. "So, all you really gotta know about it, is this;" He looks around the room and spots the kitchen towel. He gets up to grab it and stands in front of her, letting the towel hang from one corner in his fingertips. "Oscillation is when something moves back and forth at a steady rate, with a central value." He starts swinging the towel side to side. "Don't really have a pendulum or anything, but this works too." She stares at the towel and nods slowly. He stops the towel again and lets it hang still. "So, this would be the central value. Nothing happens."
"Uh-huh."
"But when an outside force uses energy on it," he says as he swings it again. "It starts moving around the central value. Oscillation."

Daphne thinks for a second.
"Like a heartbeat?" Peter looks up at her. Daphne's heartbeat is suddenly a loud thumping in his ears. He takes a breath and pushes the sound out of his thoughts. Stupid Spider-Powers.
"Exactly like a heartbeat." He grabs the towel with two hands and puts it on the breakfast bar. Daphne recalls being hooked up to one of those machines that reads your heart rate when she woke up after what happened with Loki. The screen showed a line and her heartbeat was moving back and forth with that line always at the middle. The central value.
"I think I get it."
"Think or know?" He cocks his head at her and she smiles.
"I know."