Chapter Text
“The kids are watching us again.”
The deep murmur of Percy’s voice is unexpectedly close to her ear, causing a flush crawl its way up Annabeth’s neck. She casually adjusts her scarf before she glances at him, a little surprised by how close he’s moved to her since the start of the period. They’re nearly bumping shoulders at this point.
“They are not,” she says evenly, looking back down. She uncaps her red pen and marks down a wrong answer she’d noticed before he distracted her. “They have better things to do in study hall than stare at their teachers. Like homework, for instance.”
“Your faith in their productivity is so refreshing,” Percy replies, his voice heavy with sarcasm. “It’s like you’ve never taught teenagers before.”
“Maybe if you taught them more than how to run laps and dodge rubber balls, you’d have a little faith yourself. And,” she adds, checking off another wrong answer, “maybe you’d have something to do during first period besides bug me or come up with conspiracy theories about our students for a change?”
“Hey, I waited until you got halfway through the Algebra II stack to start bugging you today. That’s better than usual. And it’s not a conspiracy,” Percy’s voice, already low so he can’t be overheard by the students at nearby tables, drops to a, well, conspiratorial hiss, “They are watching us.”
Annabeth skims the rest of the assignment for any more missed problems. Finding none, she writes the score up in the corner and places the paper on top of the neat stack of corrected assignments at her side.
“Uh-huh,” she says, picking up the next assignment. “I’m sure our students are just dying to watch you harass me while I grade papers every morning. It’s probably the highlight of their day. I know it’s mine.”
Annabeth’s no slouch in the sarcasm department herself. She’s had the time to hone it since she and Percy started working together at Goode High School last year. Initially, she hadn’t been impressed by the new gym teacher, so their back-and-forth exchanges had much sharper edges to them at first. But coaching the JV volleyball team meant that Annabeth spent a lot of time in Percy’s domain, allowing her to get to know him better and for those jabs to soften into playful, friendly banter instead.
“Ah, so you haven’t heard the rumors then.”
He might’ve sounded blase to anyone else, but Annabeth easily picks out the superior, knowing undertone to his voice. She should just ignore him — who cares what the students are gossiping about now? — but she can’t, not when he knows something she doesn’t. And he knows that, the asshole. It’s why he said it like that in the first place.
Annabeth gives the uncorrected assignment an apologetic glance before heaving a sigh and recapping her pen. If the alleged rumor has anything to do with her, she’d rather hear it from Percy than from one of the kids or, god forbid, an administrator.
“What rumors?” she asks, turning toward him so she can give him her undivided attention.
She regrets it almost immediately. Percy always looks his best in the mornings, when hasn’t spent seven hours teaching gym and he’s wearing something besides his workout gear. Not that she minds the athletic clothes, but she likes the loose fitting flannel shirts he favors more. Especially when he pushes the material up around his forearms, like he did today.
Ugh. She’s the worst, mooning after the cute gym teacher like one of her lovesick students. She should be better than this.
Then again, who can blame her when Percy’s legs and butt look as good as they do in compression pants? He shouldn’t be allowed to wear them as often as he does, really. It’s unfair. The idiot needs to get himself a pair of baggy windbreakers ASAP.
“Your volleyball girls haven’t kept you in the loop? For shame, Chase,” Percy admonished, smirking. “Maybe I should make you ask them instead.”
Annabeth shoves him in the shoulder. “Like I’m going to encourage that. They’re already terrible gossips the way it is. No, you brought it up, so you have to tell me.”
The low, warm sound of Percy’s laugh stirs up that incriminating flush of hers again and Annabeth can’t help the small smile that pulls on her lips either. She props her chin on her hand, waiting attentively for his response.
“All right, all right. But you have to promise not to punch me, being the poor messenger and all.”
“That bad, huh?”
He hesitates, trying to drag out the suspense for just a bit longer, but Annabeth knows he wouldn’t have joked about the rumor if it was something truly awful.
“Depends on how you feel about it,” he says, leaning even closer to her. His arm is fully pressed against hers now and she can smell the fresh, spicy scent of his cologne. “Our students have decided that we’re dating.”
“Us,” she repeats slowly. “Dating?”
Okay, it’s not the most absurd rumor she’s heard about herself in the three years she’s been teaching. It’s not even the most original, though it does explain why her volleyball kids have taken an annoying interest in asking her about her love life this season. And why they’ve been giggling like crazy every time Percy drops by to chat to her during warm-ups.
She’d thought that had been because of the compression pants, honestly. Teenage hormones, good looking butts and giggling tended to go hand-in-hand.
And, yes, she can sort of understand how some of the students could come to the conclusion that they’re in a relationship. She and Percy spend a lot of time together outside of work; they’ve run into enough of the kids when they go out to brunch or shopping or football games on the weekends. But that’s because they’re friends, not because they’re dating.
“Yup,” Percy confirms, his green eyes gleaming with amusement. “They’ve started a betting pool and everything. That’s why they’ve been watching us so much. They need the proof to cash in.”
Annabeth snorts derisively. “What, do they think we’d make out in front of them if we were? Get real, kids.”
Reminded that she never actually confirmed that they were, in fact, being stared at, Annabeth turns to let her gaze rove over the student tables. The number of eyes that snap back to their books and heads that dive together in giggling, guilty clusters actually surprises her. She’d thought Percy meant one or two kids, but at least half of the fifty some kids in the study hall had been looking at the teacher’s table.
Teenagers.
“Right? They’re dumb.”
“Percy.”
“What? They are,” he insists. “It’s not my fault they don’t know what flirting looks like. And you know they’re going to dissect every little interaction we had this morning for signs of true love or whatever.” Percy’s deep voice changes pitch by a few octaves as he mimics the cadence of some of their students, “Like, O-M-G, Miss Chase touched his hand when she gave him the sign-out clipboard today! They’re totally engaged, I know it.”
Annabeth lets out a loud guffaw, but muffles it with her hands quickly, self-conscious now that she knows her interactions with Percy are being monitored so closely.
“Whoops, now we’re secretly getting married next week,” he continues. “Way to go, Chase.”
She’s used to being watched, of course; as a teacher, she has to be careful with her public persona. This, however, is something different… and something she and Percy can use to their amusement, she realizes.
“God, how embarrassing,” Annabeth says as the last of her laughter dies down. “It’s a pity accidental hand touching is the only thing they have to speculate on. No one’s going to win any bets with that kind of material.”
Percy arches an eyebrow. “What, are we going to make out in front of them now?”
Is it her imagination or does Percy’s gaze dart to her lips for a split second? She wills her blush not to spread up to her cheeks.
Of course she imagined it. She and Percy are just friends, she reminds herself, and not the kind of friends who make out with each other. Just because they work in a high school doesn’t mean they have to act like high schoolers.
“No, nothing like that. But I think we should give them something else to talk about. You know, mess with their heads a bit,” she says. “If they’re going to bet on us, it’s only fair.”
“Annabeth,” Percy says with mock sternness. “Are you suggesting we troll our students? What kind of teacher are you?”
“The best kind, obviously,” she replies, her grin turning wicked. “You in?”
“Like you even had to ask. What did you have in mind?”