Richelle Mead owns the VA and Bloodlines series.

This chapter is for Karina who suggested the topic. It caught my interest and before I knew it I had the whole thing written out. Hope you like it, Karina and everybody else :) Review and let me know what you think!

Adrian trailed his fingers up and down my arm as he flipped through the channels on his flat screen TV. "You wanna come over tomorrow?" he asked. "We could hang out, get dinner, play Scrabble." He smirked. "You know, or something."

I grinned. Or something usually ended with him on top of me on his couch and my shirt half off.

"Can't tomorrow," I said apologetically. "Brayden and I were planning to go see the Park Theatre Group's production of The Taming of the Shrew. Brayden says it's one of Shakespeare's least intellectual plays, verging on slapstick, but I think it's amusing. You have to be smart to write comedy well, otherwise it'll just come off as..." I trailed off as I realized Adrian was rolling his eyes.

"What?" I demanded.

"It's nothing," he said in a cold voice that made my stomach drop.

"No, what is it? Adrian? Tell me."

My voice sounded calm, comforting, but I was panicking on the inside. Adrian and I had been semi-dating, I guess you could call it, for a while now and he'd been in a really good mood lately. I hadn't noticed as many mood swings recently, certainly none that compared to this, and I was hoping it would stay that way. But his cloudy green eyes and brooding stare, which he had purposefully fixed on the carpet, were leading me to believe spirit might be hitting him right now. Hard.

"I don't like you hanging out with him," he muttered so softly I barely heard him.

"Who?" I asked stupidly. "Brayden? Why?"

"Because," was all he said. He still refused to look at me.

Was he jealous? It seemed like it, but Adrian wasn't really the jealous type. About a month ago, when Brayden had asked me at Spencer's if I'd ever want to hang out, strictly as friends, Adrian had actually encouraged me to accept the offer. He'd jokingly said hanging out with another nerd might be good for me from time to time. I mean, yeah, Brayden and I had been hanging out more than I thought we would, but not enough for Adrian to react like this. This was ridiculous. "We're going to see a play. Why in the world would that bother you?"

"It's not just the play," he hissed. "You've been out with him, like, four times in the last two weeks! It just bothers me."

"He's my friend, and you said it was okay!" I told him, still feeling more than a little confused by his attitude. "And we've only gone to the textile museum, the air museum, and the botanical gardens tour."

"Whatever," he said with a shake of his head.

"Don't whatever me, Adrian," I warned. "Just talk to me, because I really don't understand why this is bothering you so much."

"Because you can ask me to do those things with you, Sydney!" he shouted. I flinched back a little, caught off guard by the intensity of his voice. From the way he grimaced afterward, I guessed he hadn't meant to be quite that loud.

"I'm sorry," he said in a softer tone. "I didn't mean to yell, but it drives me crazy every time you go out with him."

I shook my head, feeling even more confused. I knew how Adrian felt about me, but he knew how I felt about Brayden. "We're just friends, Adrian. I swear."

"No, I know that," he said quickly. "And I'm not, like, jealous in that way. It's..." He shook his head and then put his head in his hands.

"It's what?" I prompted. He looked up at me, but didn't say anything. Because maybe this was one of those social things that I just didn't understand and maybe he's wasn't saying exactly what he meant, I repeated myself. "I don't feel anything for him. It's not like what we have."

Adrian closed his eyes for a minute and then smiled at me. "I know," he said softly, taking my hand in his. "But when you go hang out with him and do all your little learning dates—"

"They aren't dates," I said, exasperated. He ignored me.

"—it makes me feel left out. Like you don't think..." He sighed and looked away. "Like you don't think I'm smart enough or something."

"Oh, Adrian, no!" I reached out and turned his face back to mine. "I would never think that. How can you think that? You're smart." I sat up a little straighter and pulled both of his hands into my lap, trying to show him I was serious. "Brayden and I may know random trivia but you're smart in the way that counts. You're good with people. When Brayden and I were at that textile factory tour last week, the tour guide told him he had really pretty eyes when she thought no one was listening. He went into a fifteen minute lecture about how the color of one's irises depends the frequency of the scattering of light in the stroma—"

"Yeah, Hayden's an ass," Adrian interrupted, "I understand that. But what does that have to do with me?"

I rolled my eyes. "He doesn't understand things the way you do. What good is being so smart if you can't connect to people?"

Adrian seemed to ponder this.

"So," he said thoughtfully after a moment, "you're saying that even though he's smarter than me, you still enjoy being around me more because I connect to you better?"

"He's not smarter than you," I snapped, getting annoyed with his attitude. "It's not a crime not to be able to name all of the Renaissance humanists. It's a trick of memory. Real knowledge, the knowledge you have, is much more important." I gave him a small, flirty smile, hoping to distract him from whatever had spurred this negativity—I still believed it was spirit—and maybe even make him laugh. "And it's much more attractive."

While he didn't laugh, he did smirk at me. "Well, I don't know anything about Renaissance humanists or whatever that is, but if you think that makes me more attractive than I guess I'll just have to live with that."

I rolled my eyes.

"Do you really not think you're one of the smartest people I know?" I asked him seriously. "Do you really think I'd be with you if you were stupid?"

"I didn't know we were together," he said with a challenging raise of his eyebrow.

I shrugged. "We're kind of together. Maybe not officially, that might never be able to happen, but you know what I mean. Adrian, everyone thinks I'm so smart, that I know everything, but sometimes the things you come up with blow me out of the water."

I pointed to the painting he had hanging on his living room wall. The golden lily he'd painted that day he'd first kissed me. It seemed like so long ago now, but it had only been a few months. "Do you really not see how smart something like that is? Any idiot can pick up a paint brush, but it takes intelligence and talent to come up with the paintings you do. Sure, Brayden can recite facts all day long, but he can't look at me and see straight to my soul the way you can. He can't observe a situation for five minutes and put together all these clues that would take me a week to figure out." I took his face in between my palms and leaned forward so we were only inches apart. "You are intelligent in all the ways that really count for anything."

We stayed that way for a few minutes, staring into each others eyes and breathing the same air, until he pulled away. I was a little disappointed at the loss of eye contact. There was almost nothing better than getting lost in Adrian's beautiful green eyes.

"Alright," he said finally. "You don't think I'm a big dumb dummy. But my question still remains. Why do you have to do all of these smart people activities with Brayden? Why not me? We never do any of the things you do with him."

I was caught off guard because he'd actually said Brayden's name correctly. "I... I don't know. I guess, I didn't think you'd be interested."

Adrian reached over, cupping my face in his palm, and I leaned into him. "If you're interested in it, I'm interested in it. I've told you, you make learning fun. I could listen to you talk about random facts all day long. And I mean actually listen. Not just listen to the sound of your voice, but the actual meaning of your words." He gave me a proud looking smile and went on. "Do you remember, on the plane to Pennsylvania when I was doing a crossword, I asked you what a word for cotton gin pioneer was? You said Whitney. And those Greek women? The progressive, prostitute ones? They're called hetaerae. I remember everything you say."

I was a little stunned that her remembered any of that. And he'd remembered specifically because I was the one who'd said it? I didn't know why, but that thought made my heart swell in my chest.

"Do you want to go with me and Brayden tomorrow?" I asked cautiously. "I know you don't like him, but I can't really just bail on him."

"Do you want me to go?" He seemed just as cautious as I was, and I realized something. Adrian was afraid I didn't want him in that part of my life. Whatever my friendship with Brayden meant to me, it meant something entirely different to Adrian.

"Of course!" I told him, laughing a little.

Adrian perked back up at that. He gave me a killer smile that had my heart rate increasing by the second. "Good. I was afraid you only kept me around for the kissing."

I sent him a smirk of my own and leaned forward to brush my lips lightly across his. "The kissing is good," I told him. "But I keep you around for your head and your heart."

I ran my fingers through his perfectly styled hair and then down his chest, placing my palm over his heart. I was pleasantly surprised to find it was beating just as fast as mine was. "You have a good heart, Adrian. The best."

He didn't say anything back, probably because he was too busy kissing me to form words. I know I was too into the kiss to even form thoughts, much less words. When we finally had to pull away for air we were both breathless and panting.

"You know," I said, trying to catch my breath. "If you come with us tomorrow, we're going to have to enact a no kissing rule. Or, a no flirting rule, actually."

Adrian gave me a disappointed pout.

"Brayden thinks you're my brother," I said unwavering. "There's no way around that."

"Fine," he agreed with a sigh. "I guess word getting around that we're an... unusually close family... wouldn't do anyone any good."

"No," I agreed with a laugh. "But, you know. After the play maybe we could come back here. Get some dinner, play some Scrabble." I mimicked his smirk from earlier. "Or, you know, something."

Adrian gave me a wicked smile before pinning me to the couch, eliciting a squeal of delight from me, one I didn't even feel the least bit embarrassed about as his lips descended on mine.