Chapter 14 – Lena #2
Under the table, Trace’s fingers tightened on my thigh, a quick squeeze that wasn’t part of any script. The booster wife sighed happily and turned back to her husband, and I reached for my water glass because my mouth had gone bone-dry.
The real thing. A stranger had looked at us for five minutes and believed every second. The worst part? I’d believed it with her.
His chair was close, too close, our thighs pressed together under the tablecloth, and neither of us moved apart.
The warmth of his leg against mine sent a low hum through my body that made it impossible to focus on the AD’s wife and her daughter’s volleyball scholarship, no matter how hard I nodded.
He talked to the AD on his other side, one hand gesturing while the other rested on his thigh, then migrated to my thigh at some point during the salad course, just above my knee, his fingers curving around the inside through the fabric of my dress.
Move his hand. You should move his hand.
I didn’t move his hand.
His fingers moved in a lazy back-and-forth just above where the hem ended, and I lost the thread of every conversation at the table. A woman across from me asked about a fundraiser and I nodded and smiled while my entire world shrank to the strip of skin his hand was covering.
“You okay?” he murmured, leaning close enough that his lips brushed my ear and his breath was warm against my neck. “You’ve got a death grip on your fork.”
I looked down and my knuckles were white around the handle.
I loosened my grip and set the fork down with a deliberate clink. “Fine. Your hand is on my leg.”
“Part of the show.” His voice was low and amused, and his fingers squeezed once, just barely, and my thighs clamped together on instinct, trapping his hand between them.
His breath caught. I felt it, the slight hitch of his chest against my shoulder.
Good. At least I’m not the only one losing my mind.
“Keep it PG, Coulter,” I whispered.
“I’m being a perfect gentleman.” But his fingers didn’t move, and neither did I.
A gentleman. With his hand up my dress at a school function. Sure.
When they called Trace up to accept the athletic achievement award, the whole table erupted. I watched him walk to the podium, confident, unhurried, that crooked smile making half the room lean forward in their chairs, and clapped until my palms stung.
He thanked his coaches, his teammates, his family. The Coulter charm was on full display and it came easily to him. Up there with the spotlight on him, he looked like exactly what he was. A future first-round pick.
That’s your fake boyfriend up there, Hartwell. The operative word being fake.
So why are your palms sweating?
But when he got back to the table, he didn’t sit down right away. He leaned in and pressed his lips to my temple, quick, soft, barely there. Not a performance kiss but a real one, the kind you give someone you’re proud to be sitting next to.
“Thanks for being here,” he said against my hair, low enough that only I could hear.
My lungs forgot how to work. Because the room was watching and this should have been performance, and there was no reason, none, for my eyes to sting. I blinked hard and stared at the centerpiece until the feeling passed.
It’s not real. None of this is real.
Then why did it feel like the realest thing anyone had done for me in years?
After the dinner, he drove me home. The Range Rover was quiet except for the heater humming and a low acoustic track I didn’t recognize playing through the speakers.
Dashboard lights turned his jaw blue-white, and I was hyperaware of the distance between us.
The center console between us, his hand easy on the wheel, the quiet sitting heavily between us.
The campus slid past outside the window, the dark quads, the library still lit up on the third floor, a couple stumbling arm in arm toward the dorms. I watched it all without seeing any of it because my brain was still stuck on the temple kiss, on the booster woman’s that’s the real thing, on the way his voice had gone rough when he thanked me.
I caught myself rubbing the spot on my temple where his lips had been and dropped my hand to my lap.
Pathetic. You are pathetic.
When we pulled up to my dorm, he put it in park and turned to look at me. The engine idled and neither of us moved.
“So.” His voice was low. “Was that okay? Not too much?”
“It was fine.” My voice came out smaller than I wanted. “You were good. Convincing.”
“Yeah.” He held my gaze a beat too long, his jaw working like he was chewing on words he wasn’t going to say. “Convincing.”
The air between us went thick. I could hear him breathing and I could hear myself breathing, and I was suddenly very aware that we were parked in the dark with the heater running, no one watching, no performance required, and absolutely no excuse for the way my pulse was hammering against my throat.
My eyes dropped to his mouth and I yanked them back up.
“I should go.”
“Yeah.”
I opened the door and the October cold rushed in, sharp enough to snap me back to my senses, and I didn’t look back because if I looked back, I was going to do something stupid.
Like climbing back in. Like asking him to kiss me again, for real this time, with no audience and no excuse and no way to pretend it was part of the deal.
Inside my dorm room, my back against the closed door, I released a breath I’d been holding for hours.
I was so screwed.