Chapter 4
four
For one horrible, suspended second, nobody moved.
Kelcey’s face was twisted up in judgement.
Justin looked both terrified and bewildered.
And I stood there, frozen under the weight of Rhys’s arm, feeling the exact texture of every single thread of his shirt against the back of my neck, too stunned to do anything except let it happen.
“Since when?” Kelcey asked, her gaze raking over me and then over Rhys’s hand resting around my shoulder.
She seemed just as suspicious and angry about this as she had about the idea of me being here for Justin, which confused me, but even if I could get my mouth to work enough to ask questions, it was obvious that right now was not the time.
“A while.” Rhys shrugged, like this was a conversation he found only mildly interesting. “We weren’t advertising it.”
Justin’s gaze snapped to his step-brother, so fast that I thought I heard his neck crack. “But, I thought she wanted m—”
He stopped himself half a second too late, because the rest of that sentence had already landed in the room whether he finished it or not.
I thought she wanted me.
He hadn’t even had the decency to be subtle about it.
“Yeah, okay, dude,” Rhys said. He didn’t look annoyed, just unimpressed as if he himself hadn’t been teasing me about my crush less than twenty-four hours ago. “Get over yourself.”
“No, he’s right,” Kelcey said. “I thought you were, like...” She glanced at me, then at Justin, then back at me, and laughed.
The sound made me bristle, even though she wasn’t technically doing anything wrong.
Something about it made me feel like she was trying to be bashful, but instead was laughing at me.
“I’ve seen you at the studio drop-off, like, three times this month.
I thought you had a thing for Justin. I was going to say something to him about it, actually, because it was getting a little…
” She made a face, searching for the word. “Intense.”
I felt every drop of blood in my body relocate to my face at once.
“That’s so funny,” I said, in a voice that did not sound like my own voice. “No. No, that would be—that’s not—“
“She’s just there a lot because she takes ballet three days a week,” Rhys said smoothly, cutting through my sentence before it could finish collapsing in on itself.
I barely even noticed that he’d named the right number of days that I was at the studio without missing a beat.
I guess it was an easy number to assume.
“You really assumed she was doing all that for Justin?”
His voice was dripping in condescension.
Kelcey’s face flushed red, whether from embarrassment or anger I wasn’t sure.
All I knew was that my face probably mirrored it exactly, because even though he was saying the words to her, it felt like they were directed at me.
A little side remark, reminding me that he knew everything the two of them were saying was correct.
That I was just that pathetic, as he’d put it.
“Right.” Kelcey nodded, already losing interest and turning back toward Justin. “Well, good for you two. Sneaky.”
Justin still looked baffled by the entire exchange, glancing between Rhys and me like he was trying to work out if this was a bit he’d missed the setup for, but he didn’t ask any questions.
I wouldn’t have minded staying for another moment, waiting to see what conclusion he came to, but Rhys’s arm was already steering me—gently, but with a firmness that made it clear this wasn’t a request—out of the den and toward the stairs.
“Just going to show her something upstairs,” he called back over his shoulder, breezy and unbothered, like this was the most normal sentence in the world to say about a girl he’d spoken to exactly twice.
I let him walk me up the stairs because I didn’t have a better plan, my brain still stuck somewhere back in the den, replaying Kelcey’s words—I thought you had a thing for Justin—on an endless, mortifying loop.
It wasn’t until we reached the top landing and he pushed open a door into what must have been his room—a mess of soccer cleats and hoodies and a desk that looked like it had never once been used for its intended purpose—that some of the fog started to clear.
And unfortunately that clarity came too late, and accompanied by rage.
The second the door clicked shut behind us, I spun around so fast I nearly lost my balance.
“What was that?” I demanded. My hand was curling into a fist by my side, ready and waiting to take another swing at him like I’d done last night, even though that had been an epic fail.
Rhys didn’t even have the decency to look startled. He dropped onto his bed like we were having a perfectly relaxed conversation, propping himself back on his pillows, too pleased with himself. “That was me saving you from a situation you had no idea how to get out of.”
“I didn’t need saving!”
“You were standing there making a noise like a dying fax machine. I was doing you a favor.”
“I would have figured it out.”
“Would you?” He tilted his head, and the smugness on his face notched up another degree, which I hadn’t thought was possible. “Because from where I was sitting, your plan seemed to be repeating the word “helping” until everyone forgot what they’d walked in on.”
“That’s not—“ I felt my face heat all over again, which was infuriating, because I was supposed to be the one making him uncomfortable right now, not the other way around. “I had a perfectly good explanation.”
“Sure you did. The cups.” He said the word like it was the punchline to a joke only he found funny. “Very smooth. Very subtle. Nobody would ever suspect a girl showing up at a boy’s house hours early for a party of having an ulterior motive.”
I crossed my arms and glared at him instead of answering, which felt like the only dignified option available to me.
Rhys watched me do it, clearly enjoying himself far too much, and then he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, like he was settling in for the good part.
“You’ve had a thing for him for what, a year now? Longer?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No? You have the imprint of your shoes outside the baseball diamond.”
I opened my mouth to argue and then shut it again, because there was, unfortunately, nothing about his words that I could refute.
I saw a little patch of dirt in the grass the other night where I stood, but I’m still choosing to believe that it wasn’t my fault.
I settled for glaring harder instead, which had no effect on him.
If anything, it seemed to be improving his mood.
“This is exactly like you,” I said instead, going for a different angle. “You just can’t help yourself, can you? You have to make everything worse for everyone around you.”
He scoffed, which only made me glare harder at him. “Worse? I made your night better about four minutes ago.”
“You embarrassed me!”
“I saved you from embarrassing yourself infinitely worse, and then I took the fall for it instead. There’s a version of tonight where Justin’s girlfriend thinks you’ve been stalking him for a year, and now she thinks you and I have some cute secret thing going on instead. I’d say I did you a favor.”
“I never asked you to.”
“No,” he agreed easily, “you didn’t. Lucky for you I did it anyway.”
I decided, at that point, that the conversation had reached the limit of what my pride could withstand, and that the correct move was to leave with whatever scraps of dignity I still had before he could say anything else that was both true and unbearable. I uncrossed my arms and made for the door.
He let me get almost all the way there before he moved, unfolding himself off the bed with an unhurried calm, like he had all the time in the world.
Somehow, by the time my hand found the doorknob, he was already close enough that I could feel him behind me, and when I turned it, the door didn’t open—because his palm had landed flat against it, just above my head, holding it shut.
I went very still.
I turned to look at him, my back pressed against the door now, and found him closer than I’d expected, one arm braced against the wood beside my head, effectively boxing me in without touching me.
“What are you doing?”
“Waiting a couple more minutes,” he said, looking too calm for someone standing this close to his rival’s little sister who he had just announced to his family as his girlfriend.
“If you walk downstairs looking like that right now, it’s going to look weird.
We need it to look like we were up here talking. ”
“We were up here talking. You were insulting me, remember?”
I tried to shift sideways, put some distance between us, and he adjusted too, like he was blocking me in. He looked satisfied with himself, like he already knew how this was going to go and was simply waiting for me to catch up.
“You should probably know,” he said, “that you owe me one now.”
“I don’t owe you anything.”
“You do, actually. A pretty significant favor.” His eyes stayed on mine, steady, and something about it put me on edge, though I couldn’t have said exactly why. “And I’m not the kind of person who forgets when someone owes me a favor.”
“I didn’t ask for your help,” I repeated, but the words were weaker this time. It was hard to argue with a boy when his face was mere inches from yours.
“Doesn’t matter. You got one anyway.” He straightened, dropping his arm from the door, and stepped back just enough to let me breathe normally again, though the space between us still felt smaller than it should have. “So I’ll be collecting.”
“Collecting what, exactly?”
He reached past me—close enough that I caught, unwillingly, the smell of laundry detergent and something faintly like grass, soccer-field grass, the smell that clung to Sebastian’s gear bag after practice—and opened the door himself, holding it for me with a mock-politeness that made my teeth ache.