Seven Days and Seven Nights

by anni

Nathan has one week to convince Haley that they can be something real.

1. Chapter One, Part One

Title: Seven Days and Seven Nights
Author: Annie
Email: asleeperemail.arizona.edu
Rating: PG-13 because that Haley and Nathan, boy do they have potty mouths.
Summary: Nathan has one week to convince Haley that they can be something real.
Note This takes place early in the season, say around ENIAS. Peyton and Nathan have broken up, but no one else has hooked up at all. They're just a bunch of sad and lonely, horny teenagers.
Another Note: I don't generally like splitting up chapters, but this first one got obscenely long, so it will be posted in two parts. I do want to give a warning right here at the beginning that I am the slowest writer ever. I'm going to try to keep up with at least one update a week, but we'll have to see how that goes.
Another, Another Note: Big gigantic thanks go out to the lovely and talented Janet for her mad betaing skills. She's teh awesome. And also to Bekah who lets me bother her will all of my paranoid and annoying rambling. She's the awesome as well.
Last Note, I promise: I absolutely lurve it when people tell me I'm pretty, so drop me a line and tell me what you thought of the story, and I will think you're pretty for the rest of my days.

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Chapter One, Part One:

"Hey."

Haley glanced up from her geometry homework to the door of the otherwise empty tutoring center and smiled widely as Nathan entered. "Hi! I was beginning to wonder if you were even going to show up this morning. I know how hard it can be for a slacker such as yourself to roll out of bed in time for a seven-thirty tutoring session."

Nathan smirked, pulled out a chair, and dropped down beside her, his backpack thumping when it hit the table. "What, and miss seeing your beautiful face first thing? You do know that breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right?"

Haley laughed, averting her eyes as a blush crawled across her cheeks and spread up and around until the tips of her ears were colored a soft red. "I can't believe you ever get dates with lines like that."

His gaze danced along the flushed lines of her face, and that smirk widened into a grin. That was what she did to him, what she did for his mornings. She made him smile, setting his day off on the right foot. He hadn't even known there was a foot that didn't suck before he'd started spending so much time with her. "Well, you do have to give some of the credit to the pretty face. That really helps a lot."

He watched her roll her eyes, but she still refused to glance up at him, instead twirling her pen nervously between her fingers and keeping her focus on the math homework in front of her.

There was a tension between them now, and it was a new sort of feeling, or maybe not new so much, as newly noticed. It seemed to float back and forth between them each session, growing until it reached almost palpable levels.

It had started with a few soft moments. Haley was there for him, with the break-up with Peyton and with his dad. Things between them hadn't started with the most clear of intentions or the most unbiased of opinions, but there was a connection established almost at their first early morning meeting. Agendas were pushed to the side at the sound of quiet, feminine laughter and a broad, open smile that crinkled the corners of wide brown eyes. All of the preconceived judgments faded at the realizations that people exist outside of their position in the hierarchy of a high school.

And the most unexpected of friendships was formed.

Those feelings of friendship, however, started to evolve at the first notice of just how long and graceful her neck appeared when she lifted her hair up into a ponytail and his growing irrational obsession with the tiny mole at the corner of her left jaw just underneath her ear. He'd wanted to lick it.

Then, there had been that one morning where the temperature in the tutoring center was set a little lower than normal, and she'd arched back to slip her arms into her jean jacket. The sudden movement drew his stare, and it was then that Nathan, considering himself a bit of an expert in the field, determined that this girl had one hell of a fine rack.

That discovery was soon followed by the picture of her bending over to pull a practice exam out of one of the lower filing cabinets. The hem of her t- shirt rode up to give the most tantalizing view of a strip of soft tan skin. His eyes had traced the two lines formed from the curve of her hips as they rolled back and down to meet in a v somewhere below the waistband of her jeans. His fingertips itched to trace that line, and he knew, just knew, that the two round cheeks of her ass would fit perfectly in the palms of his hands.

It was official. Haley James was #%$ hot.

That hadn't really been an unwelcome insight. It certainly made getting up at the butt crack of dawn a little more bearable, though his propensity to get caught up in staring at her full, pink lips and wondering what they tasted like, he thought she was maybe just a simple cherry flavored lip gloss kind of girl, did tend to make paying a reasonable amount of attention a bit of a challenge.

It had all been harmless at first, just a simple perk of getting a dig into his ass half-brother and raising his grades. It wasn't a big deal.

That was, of course, until the first night he'd dreamt this gay dream about the two of them on a picnic on a sunny day in a field of flowers. They'd held hands and gone berry picking, of all things. That weirdness was followed by that first shower when she had replaced both Peyton and the entire Slutty Sororities website in his head as he'd given himself a morning hand. It was then that he'd come to the conclusion that he was in big trouble.

Just over a month ago, Nathan had set out to make this girl fall for him, just another trick to teach Lucas his place, but now, it was him that couldn't get her out of his mind.

And it wasn't just that perfect set of tits or the plump curves of her backside that had him so strung out. No, it was all of her: her laughter, her smile, her intelligence, that sharp wit that kept him on his toes, the caring heart that had him opening up like he never had before, and the stupid way his stomach flip-flopped when she walked in the room... for crap's sake, he was this close to getting down on one knee and spouting off a bunch of pansy assed poetry for her.

It was freaking ridiculous. He was Nathan Scott, star athlete, big man on campus, and Haley James of all people had brought him to his knees in the throws of the most pathetic schoolboy crush he had ever had.

And he didn't know what to do about it.

He knew that he was not alone in these shifting feelings between them. He had more than once caught her staring through her lashes as she pretended to be reading a book, waiting for him to finish whatever assignment he was working on. There was the innocent way that she would blush at his more flirty advances, as opposed to how she'd merely brushed him off at the beginning and the proud way she would beam at him every time he got something right, a reaction that always seemed a tad more personal than a tutor would normally give.

More recently, he noticed that she'd begun applying a light brush of makeup each morning. At first, the artificial coloring had stood out, too much blush and an unsteady hand at eyeliner. Instead of laughing at her clumsy attempts, however, he'd wanted to smile, sweep a hand across her cheek, and kiss her, let her know how beautiful she was.

He hadn't done that though, and she'd started getting better, probably an effect of the blossoming friendship he'd noted between her and Peyton.

And that was where the problems entered.

Peyton. Lucas. His friends, her friends, his father, the rest of the school. Everyone would have an opinion, a say. The things between them were more complicated than what was just between them. And that held him back, and he knew it held her back as well.

A part of him wanted to say screw them, and just go ahead and make his move. People could deal with it however they wanted as long as his fingers got to brush across that silky skin she had covered up so well and his tongue finally got to taste that smile that lit up his mornings.

He wanted her as his girlfriend. He wanted to be able to kiss her whenever he felt like and run his hands up under her shirt to touch all that she kept hidden. And he wanted the right to talk to her whenever he needed to, wanted to, whether it was just in passing in the hallways or before class or late night phone calls that faded on into the early morning. The desire to just hear her voice was getter stronger and more regular with each passing day.

He just wanted Haley.

But another part of him, the more shallow and insecure part, was afraid of the rejection, hers and theirs. As the jockstar he was, there were expectations he had to live up to, a reputation he had to keep, and she was far from a cheerleader.

That part was wavering, however, and sometimes, he wasn't sure how much longer he could go without just giving into the urge to nibble on that beauty mark at the corner of her jaw. More frequently, it was all he could do to not reach out and run his fingers through her mane of auburn hair. Just yesterday, when leaning in to watch her tiny fingers work out the math on one of the problems he'd missed, he'd actually had to stop himself from pushing further into her space to bury his nose in the crook of her neck and breath in that scent that he still hadn't been able to place, that scent that was just her.

Crap. He had it bad.

"Nathan?"

"Hmm?" Her voice snapped him from his thoughts, and he realized that she wasn't the one caught staring that time.

Haley gave him a funny look. but continued on. "Were you able to get most of those math problems done last night?"

"Oh, right." She watched as Nathan reached toward his bag and pulled out his math notebook. "There were a couple I had questions on."

Haley tried to keep focused in on what he was saying. She knew that any moment she was going to have to start answering those questions he had, and to do that, she would need to know what they were, but she kind of had this problem where every time she let herself look at his hands, her insides would turn to goo.

Nathan had really nice hands.

His fingers were long and not too skinny, not too thick. As crazy as it sounded, there was something graceful about his hands, a masculine kind of graceful. She could tell that they were strong from the firm way he held his pencil, and she knew the skin was slightly calloused from the time that he'd brushed against her arm as he pointed out a specific problem on the worksheet she was checking. His nails were trimmed and always clean, and there was a tiny mole on his left hand, just in between the knuckle of his pointer and middle fingers.

After the first time he'd gotten a B on a history pop quiz, he had wrapped her into a hug, and she'd felt those big hands as they flattened against her back and pulled her closer to him. She'd felt so tiny and feminine with his arms draped around her and his long fingers splayed out so far that they covered almost the entire width of her back. It was one hug, and it still gave her shivers just thinking about it.

That was the thing about being around Nathan. He made her feel different that anyone else, a good kind of different. It was almost like he made her more aware of herself, physically speaking. She had always been one of the guys. He made her feel like a woman... or a girl, at least.

Ugh, that sounded so cheesy, but it was true.

It was like, last week, she'd worn a nice button up and down blouse to school rather than her normal t-shirt because she was going to give a presentation in French class and wanted to look a little nicer. They were in the middle of structuring out an essay he had for English when she caught him leaning over slightly and looking down at her. She'd figured that she must have spilt a little syrup from her pancakes that morning and that was what drew him away from the weird fixation he seemed to have with her ear, but after a quick check of herself, she realized that that was not the case.

He was checking her out. Nathan Scott was trying to catch a peak of her boobs.

That little realization was almost too surreal for her because other than the creepy old man that stood as a greeter in the local Wal-Mart, she didn't think she'd ever had a guy check her out. And she tried rationalizing it out that sixteen year old boys were horny and would ogle anything with breasts... but she couldn't stop the giddy feeling that twisted in her belly at the chance that maybe he found her sort of attractive.

And she would never admit to it out loud, but that chance may have prompted her to buy a blouse that weekend at Banana Republic that was slightly out of her price range and a tiny bit lower cut than her normal style.

She hadn't gotten up the nerve to wear it yet, though.

Not that she would dress up specifically for him, of course. They were just friends. And that was it.

It was a surprising friendship that had developed between them. She'd gone into this whole set up with the idea that she was just going to have to suck it up and deal with this cocky #%$'s crap for the sake of making things even a tad easier on her best friend. He was the typical jock, and she was ready to steel herself against whatever charm, and she used the term loosely, he would throw at her.

The real shock had come when Nathan dropped his so-called charm, and she found him to be one of the most charming people she'd ever met.

Once he finally grasped the fact that she would not do his work for him and he set out to actually learn and pay attention to the assignments in front of him, she'd seen a sort of will and determination to succeed that rivaled only Lucas's. It wasn't that he cared about his homework, per say. It was more like he couldn't stand to not do well at something he actually put effort into. It was kind of backwards, but on more than one occasion, Haley found herself admiring him for that fortitude.

When her defenses continued to thaw, and his short attention span led them off of tutoring and onto more personal topics, she discovered that not only was he an interesting conversationalist, but he also had a sort of dry and kind of dark sense of humor. He made her laugh.

As their more personal type bunny trails became more common, Haley learned that not everything in Nathanland was as peachy as people would think. Sometimes, when he trailed in a little later than he normally did, and his shoulders sagged tiredly beneath the pressure of his home life and the expectations that everyone and his father seemed to heap on him, she just wanted to wrap him up in hug, tell him it would be alright, and make everything better for him.

And if she was able to catch a stronger whiff of that fancy cologne that delightfully tickled her nose and probably cost more than what she made in one entire shift at Karen's, than so be it.

No. She was not interested in him as anything more than a friend... just a casual friend... a casual friend with the most amazing set of clear blue eyes ever.

There was a connection between them; there was no denying that. And when she looked into those clear blue eyes, she wasn't just Haley James, frumpy tutor and all around good girl. It was almost like, when she looked deep into that ocean color, he could see into her soul.

Holy crap.

She wished someone would just shoot her in the head already.

Haley was not, and never would be, one of those girls, those ones that fell madly in love with a guy one week only to find their soulmate in another boy the next. She loved a good romantic comedy as much as the next girl, and she had that obligatory stack of embarrassing romance novels hidden in the back of her closet, but she wasn't a swooner or a flirter or the type of woman to get swept off her feet.

Especially not for a guy, who while she may be kind of friends with, was not above using someone for a quick lay.

It didn't matter if he could see into her soul or whatever other crap, she would not be one of those hussies that threw themselves at him just because he had a letterman jacket and an ass that looked like it had been sculpted from granite.

And while yes, she may have started wearing make up and using a curling iron on her hair and cutting back on the amount of times she wore a sports bra, that had nothing to do with him. Just because a girl spent a little extra time on her appearance did not mean it was all for some stupid guy. She could make herself beautiful for nothing more than herself.

...

Oh, who was she trying to kid?

Just last week, she caught herself zoning out during a history lecture and upon looking down at her notes, she found N H scribbled inside a slightly lopsided heart. Her eyes had widened, and being as that was the one class they shared, she turned around to look at him to see if he caught her embarrassment, only to find him staring at her ear again.

Holy cheese and rice. She had it bad.

As much as she tried to convince herself otherwise, Haley couldn't deny the fact that she was thinking about him all of the time, doing the sorts of things that she hated other girls doing like puffing her chest out, fluffing her hair, and giggling at even his lame jokes.

And while it seemed to kind of be working on him, it wasn't a good thing.

Just yesterday, as he was leaning over to watch her work out a problem, she'd thought for a moment that he was going to kiss her neck. It had flustered her so much that she'd ended up getting the math wrong twice and having to redo the problem. Then, as she lay awake, restless half the night, she wished that he had kissed her. She wondered what those beautifully curved and perfectly soft, or she imagined perfectly soft, lips would feel like on her skin.

There was nothing good that could come from this pathetic schoolgirl crush she'd developed. Absolutely nothing. Even if it turned out that he did like her as something more than the nerdy girl he was using to crank up his grades and get back at Lucas, there were too many other things to consider.

Peyton, his ex-girlfriend, who he'd treated like complete crap by the way, was quickly becoming one of her best girlfriends. Lucas would very likely blow a gasket. He hated the idea of her spending even one hour of the day with his little brother. She was sure he wouldn't be too keen on the idea of them kissing and holding hands. Then, there were his friends, and she pretty much did all she could to avoid them, so she didn't see his side being a whole lot better.

As much as the fantasy of having Nathan as her boyfriend, being his girlfriend, made her warm all over, Haley needed to realize that it wasn't going to happen and in the end, she could only get hurt.

"So, basically, I think Mr. Peters has some serious sadistic qualities that need to be dealt with, getting back in touch with his childhood and all that, because I don't know how much longer I can take all this homework crap."

Haley focused back in on Nathan, realizing that he had been talking to her for the past few minutes and was now looking at her expectantly. "Right. Um, well..." She cleared her throat and concentrated on the notebook he pushed at her. "Maybe you should put it in a suggestion box for him."

Nathan chuckled, taking in the quiet flush that colored Haley's cheeks as she scanned over his homework. "That's a good idea. I'll definitely have to try that."

He could tell from the nervous way she was tapping her pen and the slight pout that curved her lips that she had not been listening to his bitching about the previous night's assignments and now wasn't quite sure where to start. She'd zoned out on him. She'd zoned out about him.

And he found that delightful.

"So." He leaned close to drape an arm across the back of her chair, all for the purpose of getting a better view of the notebook, of course, but couldn't stop a small smirk at the way she stiffened at his new position. "I guess we can just start with the third one, right?"

Haley nodded slowly and tried to catch her bearings at their new more intimate seating arrangement. Nathan's crowding into her space was becoming something he did more and more often, and the butterflies in her stomach loved that. She could breathe in his cologne and his aftershave and she could feel his body heat through her layers of clothing until all of those stupid little butterflies were jacked up on pure raging teenage hormones.

The tutor part of her, however, couldn't help but find his closer proximity a bit of hassle because it was hard to get anything right when the object of her late night pirate type fantasies was practically sitting on her lap.

"Right." She mentally shook herself and crossed her fingers that a good dosage of geometry would be all that she needed to cool down that tempting desire to ask him what he thought of said pirate type fantasies. "Let's get started."

Nathan tried to pay attention to the words that were coming out her mouth, he really did. Her tutoring had helped him in pretty much every other subject, but geometry was still kicking his ass a good portion of the time, and with midterms on the horizon, he needed to learn this stuff.

More and more, though, he was finding it really hard to stay focused when they got into working. All of the uneasiness and tension would just drain out of her when she got going on a topic that she was truly comfortable with. Kind of weird to think, but there was a passion in the way that she taught him about all those circles and squares and other stuff.

And if she was that enthusiastic about math, he couldn't help but wonder about the passion she would have in the backseat of his dad's Expedition.

She pulled out a scratch piece of paper, and Nathan nodded in all of what he thought were the appropriate moments as she worked step by step through problem three, showing him the parts the he had done well on and the few stages he missed.

She shifted in her seat, turning a bit toward him so that he would have a better angle with which to watch her work, and he could now feel her warm thigh pressed against his through two layers of denim. The shift also allowed his hand, still resting across the edge of her chair, to brush against her shirt at that sensitive area of her back just underneath her arm.

Because the distraction of merely being near her wasn't enough, he now got to touch her as well... not that he would really complain all that loudly about being able to cop a guilt free feel to assure him no chance of being able to sleep that night or to pass a probable pop quiz when math class rolled around later that day.

He let his fingers graze as inconspicuously as he could manage across the soft cotton of her t-shirt, feeling the warmth of her skin beneath it and the lines of her bra. He didn't want to spook her, but he also didn't think that he had the will power to stop touching her just then. It was like each time he got a new taste, he couldn't help but press for more.

There really was just something about her. He tried to tell himself, at the beginning, when these feelings first began to surface, that she was a phase, something new, but nothing more. And once he finally got his fill of her, she would be as easy to drop as all the rest.

Nathan may have been slow on occasion, but it hadn't taken all that long for even him to figure out that that wasn't the case when it came to Haley James. And when he got the chance to stare at her openly, like he did just then, it was so easy to see why.

There was such life in the way that she moved, the way that she spoke. Her eyes were always bright, warm, accepting, and her smile, with those perfect white teeth, was always wide and friendly. She was open and innocent in a way, having been raised the way he had, that he couldn't identify with. She was new and uncharted, but not in the just looking for a hot piece of ass sort of way. Haley was so much more than that.

She was breathtaking.

And as he stared at those full perfect lips as they stretched into a smile over some lame math joke she'd just made, he couldn't even blame himself for turning into such pansy over her.

Haley tried to keep her fingers steady as she willed herself to stay completely tuned into the problem she was working. He was staring again... and if she had learned anything from those romance novels she denied reading, it was a lusty kind of stare he had going on.

She knew how to handle his lack of understanding when it came to the quadratic equation, but when he busted out that smoldering look, she could only draw a blank.

And that was why it was so important to stay focused on math. She was math, or at least, that's what she told him once. And math didn't care about his bluster, his B.S., or his massive biceps.

Right.

His fingers were tracing the outline of her bra through her shirt, and it was all she could do not to shiver at his contact. She knew that she should move, shift away from his touch. She tried repeating in her head that mantra that nothing could happen and she would only get hurt, but she couldn't hear that voice of common sense over the squealing her voice of 'OhmyGod,NathanScottistouchingmybra' was making.

And there was nothing wrong with a little harmless touching, right? It was just a little harmless touching...

Said the voice of single teenage mothers everywhere.

Taking a deep breath, Haley tapped her pencil on the scrap piece of paper, chortling a little at some lame math joke she choked out as she finished the problem. She needed to draw Nathan's attention back onto the more common ground of homework because if he didn't quit it with the sexy eyebrows, she was going to hop on his lap any second.

And that would be embarrassing no matter what kind of spin she put on it.

An awkward moment passed, and Haley began to fidget when he still wouldn't snap out of his daze. "Nathan, are you still with me?"

"What?"

Nathan snapped back to attention when he heard her call his name. Jeez, she was probably starting to think he was like ADD with all the times she caught him gawking at her, completely lost in some daydream.

He watched as she pushed a stray lock of hair back behind her ear and was rewarded with a perfectly unobstructed view of that beauty mark. "Have I completely lost you? Equilateral triangles not stimulating enough to hold your interest?"

His eyes slid along the curve of her jaw, from just below her ear all the way along until he reached her chin. She nibbled uneasily at her bottom lip and he was suddenly irrationally jealous of her for that fact that she got to taste her own lips and he didn't. He very much wanted to taste those lips.

"Oh, I'm stimulated alright."

His voice sounded husky in his ears, and he wanted to cringe at the total cheese of what had just popped out of his mouth. That sounded almost like something Tim would say.

But, as Haley's eyes widened at his words and her chest expanded with a sharp intake of breath, Nathan was struck by one of those moments, those moments that didn't come along very often and once they're gone, they're gone forever. There was opportunity in front of him; his destiny was in his own hands and all that other crap.

And he wasn't going to let it pass him by.

He was stimulated alright. Haley sat frozen in front of him, but her mind raced at his words. What the hell did he mean? And why did something so lame make her heart beat so fast?

His eyes were concentrated on her lips, like practically glued to them, and Haley was suddenly struck by the memory of a sleepover her sister once had, back when she was just in junior high, and how Emily had forced her to be a life sized Barbie doll for her and her friends. She'd cried the whole night, but they'd paid no attention to her wailing as they pulled at her hair with curling irons and slathered her face in enough make-up that she was sure, years later, that her pores were still clogged.

Her sister was honestly one of the last things she wanted in her head as she was sitting so close, having what she was sure would qualify as a 'moment' with the boy of her dreams, but there was something about that sleepover that spun in her mind.

Emily was reading from a copy of Sixteen magazine as her friends put Haley through all of that torture of a makeover. It was some dumb article about how to make a boy interested in you and how to know if it was working. She'd hardly heard any of it over her begging for her mother to come rescue her, but there was this one line that stuck, one line that she remembered.

If a boy is staring at your lips, he wants to kiss you.

Nathan was staring at her lips.

Nathan wanted to kiss her.

The little girl in her, the one that had never been kissed and would much rather be hanging out with Lucas and the guys rather than go shopping and doing other girlie things, wanted to slap her hand over her mouth and insist that all boys had cooties. She wasn't ready to be kissed, especially not by someone who could probably write a handbook on the art.

The young woman in her, though, the one that wondered what it felt like, had practiced on her hand and imagined it was him, she wanted to let her eyes flutter shut, all romantic like they did in the movies, and pucker out her lips and wait for the earth to spin off its axis like it was supposed to when you kissed someone you really liked.

The two sides pulled at her, each debating their case until she couldn't distinguish one voice from the other. So, she sat, unmoving, blinking at him like a moron as he leaned forward.

And then his lips were touching hers.