Rachel has this way of shivering every time she gets excited about anything.
It starts with a tiny tremble in her knees – it's like the excitement is a fire that starts there. She will eagerly start tapping her feet, waving the leg that's crossed over her other knee, and wiggling her toes. It's not noticeable until you can see the tips of her shoes moving excitedly back and forth. This is normally accompanied by her trying to tell someone an idea, her mind going a mile a second and her mouth trying to catch up.
The words stumbling one over another are hard to understand. Rachel's normally crisp, deliberate diction ends up turning into a slightly lispy, stuttering mess.
Next, her hands start to move. She will either use them to talk or flutter them by her sides, her excitement unable to be contained. Finally, you'll see her playing with her hair in an attempt to quell the tics that are threatening to send her body into orbit.
It's annoying, but it's cute, and Will can't help but love that part of her.
She also shivers in the cold, like most people do – but Rachel gets cold easily. When they are sitting beside the outdoor ice rink in the snow, watching the skaters in their brightly coloured scarves twirling and whirling on the mirrored ice, she ends up cuddling close to him, and he can feel the tremble all over her body.
He loves this. Sometimes he'll even lift her onto his lap. She's so tiny. She doesn't like this, though, and will often emphatically insist on being put down. They can't let anyone know about this.
She's only 18. It's her last year of high school. He's 35 and her teacher. This is sickening, to all standards of society.
Except it isn't. When they sit by the Christmas tree in his apartment, she likes to lie underneath, the shiver of excitement in her body causing the glass ornaments to tinkle, her big dark eyes reflecting the coloured lights between the evergreen branches.
It makes him ache. How can this be wrong? She's so innocent and yet she's an adult. He never makes her do anything she doesn't want to. She chooses everything they do. She chooses how far they go.
Sometimes the shiver hits him, too. But it's not a shiver of excitement.
It's a shiver of apprehension.
What has he done here?
.#cutid1
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