Chapter 3 #3
And before I could respond, she shoved two piles of red plastic cups into my arms. Then she headed off toward the kitchen, already talking to herself about whether they had enough ice, and I stood alone in the front hall for a second, doing one last mental check of the situation.
I was the only guest at this party so far.
I had implied to a total stranger that Justin and I knew each other pretty well.
And now, to even spend time with Justin, I was going to have to be in the same room as Rhys Montgomery.
I followed the sound of a video game—tinny gunfire, muffled commentary, someone groaning about lag—down a hallway lined with school photos I didn’t have time to look at as closely as I wanted to.
I stopped in the doorway of the den long enough to take the scene in before either of them noticed me: Justin sprawled sideways across one end of a big leather couch, controller balanced on his knee, hair falling into his eyes in a way that made something in my chest do its usual embarrassing little lurch.
Rhys sat angled toward the TV in an armchair across from him, one leg hooked over the armrest, looking exactly as irritatingly unbothered as he had every single time I’d seen him yell something at Sebastian across a soccer field.
“Hey,” I said, because someone had to say something, and apparently it was going to be me.
Justin glanced over first, and something moved across his face—surprise, I decided, rather than confusion, though if I was honest it could easily have been either. “Oh, uh, hey. What’s up?”
“Your mum let me in. She said to bring you these.” I lifted the cups a little, like that would prove it. “I figured I could help set up if you need it.”
“Cool,” Justin said, distracted, thumbs already back on the controller. “Kitchen’s through there, if you want to, like, put stuff away or whatever.”
I stood there half a second too long, holding the stack of red cups his mum had shoved into my arms on her way past—since you’re here, sweetheart, would you mind?—like they were a prop in a play I hadn’t been given a script for.
“You gonna keep standing there, or...” Rhys said.
I hadn’t even clocked that he’d stopped watching the screen. He was watching me instead, one eyebrow up, one leg still hooked over the arm of the chair.
“I’m helping,” I said.
“With what. The cups?”
“Yes. With the cups.”
“Impressive work so far.” His eyes dropped, deliberately slow, to the cups still sitting in my arms, untouched. “Really thorough.”
Heat crawled up my neck. “I was getting to it.”
“Sure you were.” He didn’t smile, but something in his face shifted like he was enjoying himself, which made it worse. Like he was laughing at me. “Didn’t peg you as an early bird.”
“Well…” There was no easy way to respond to that was there? But he was staring at me and I could see Justin cocking his head in my direction as if he was waiting for a response too, and oh gosh, my mouth was doing that uncooperative thing again where I couldn’t get any words out…
And as it turned out, I didn’t need to. Because right then, the front door opened and a voice, bright and already halfway down the hall, was calling out like she owned the place. And based on the way Justin dropped his controller and sat up straight, she basically did.
“Justin? I thought you said you’d text me when you got home.”
“Oh, great,” Rhys muttered, low enough that I wasn’t sure I was supposed to hear it.
I turned in time to watch the girl fill the doorway.
She was unfairly pretty, the kind of pretty that looked effortless.
Dark hair in perfect it-just-happened-to-fall-this-way waves, a jean jacket that probably cost more than everything I was wearing combined, and the posture of someone who had never once worried about being in the wrong place because she knew she belonged anywhere.
Her eyes did a slow lap of the room—Justin, upright now, controller forgotten in his lap; me, standing a few feet away clutching a stack of red cups like a shield; Rhys watching the whole thing unfold with an uncanny stillness.
“Kelcey—hey.” Justin was on his feet now. “I thought you were still at your thing.”
“It ended early.” Her eyes didn’t leave me. “Who’s this?”
My whole face went hot. I opened my mouth—cups, his mum asked me, I swear, ask her—and what actually came out was a strangled, “I was just—helping—”
“Helping.” Kelcey repeated in clear disbelief. “Does she have a name?”
“Ainsley,” I said too quickly, like offering it up might buy me some goodwill.
“Okay. Ainsley.” She said my name the way you would discuss something stuck on the bottom of your shoe. “And you’re—what, exactly? Leah’s babysitter?”
My face flushed. “No?”
Her gaze slid to Justin. “So you just let people wander into the house now?”
“She’s not—I mean, she’s—“ Justin looked at me, then at Kelcey, then back at me, like I was a math problem he couldn’t figure out how to solve. “She’s, um...”
He didn’t finish that one either. I had never in my life wanted a floor to open up and swallow me whole more than I did in that exact second.
It was even worse than Rhys calling me out last night by the baseball diamond, what with all the witnesses—and the boy I’d spent a year trying to get close to unable to produce a single sentence in my defense.
“Oh my gosh,” Rhys said, and pushed himself up off the armchair like the whole thing was mildly exhausting him. “Are we really doing this?”
He crossed the room before anyone could answer that, and his arm landed around my shoulders like it had been there a hundred times before, easy and unbothered, the exact opposite of how I felt standing under it.
In the tone of someone explaining something painfully obvious, he said, “She’s with me.”