Chapter 4 #2
“You’ll find out,” he said. “Trust me. You’re going to want to say no. You should probably say yes anyway.”
My breaths were coming in shallow gasps now.
I looked to the hallway now available behind me then to the boy I apparently now owed.
I could tell him no, I thought. I could walk away right now, ignore him any time he reached out to me, give him no chance to collect.
But I didn’t think Rhys was the kind of guy to let something go.
What would he do if I tried to brush him off like that?
My stomach sank as I imagined the most likely possibility: he’d tell Justin and Kelcey the truth—that I was here for Justin, that I did have a thing for him, that it was apparently a very intense thing like Kelcey thought.
And even worse? He would tell Sebastian about tonight.
About Rhys claiming to be my boyfriend in front of people. About me not shutting it down. My brother would be pissed.
Rhys would leave no stone of humiliation unturned. If I said no, he would make me deeply regret it.
I used my foot to kick the door shut again, revelling in Rhys’s mildly surprised look at the action.
“Fine,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “But I’m not waiting around for you to ask. What do you want?”
He smiled like the cat that caught the canary. “You still up for coming to the party tonight?”
Two hours later, the house had transformed completely. Now it was wall-to-wall people, the air thick with the smell of spilled drinks and over-applied cologne. A cluster of guys near the stairs shoving each other and laughing too loud at something on someone’s phone as I navigated my way down.
I recognized a handful of faces from my own school scattered through the crowd—a couple of girls from my grade, one guy from my math class who nodded at me like we were closer than we actually were—but they were vastly outnumbered by people I didn’t know at all, most of them wearing enough maroon and gold that I didn’t need to ask which school they went to.
Crofton kids, filling up Rhys’s living room like they owned it.
The living room furniture had been shoved back against the walls to make room for a crowd that had already started dancing badly and enthusiastically in the middle of the floor.
Someone had strung fairy lights along the mantel that hadn’t been there two hours ago, and the kitchen island was crowded with bottles and mixers and the stack of red cups I’d dropped when Rhys had pulled me upstairs.
Through the sliding glass doors at the back, I could see more people spilling out onto the patio, a few of them already half-submerged in what I assumed was a very cold, very ill-advised swim in the pool.
I would have been happy to flee from here immediately, but I knew I couldn’t.
Not only because I’d promised Rhys he could cash in his favor tonight—something he’d put as simply as “I need you to help me make my ex jealous” with no other explanation, which was a terrifying prospect but better than waiting around for him to cash in the favor some other time—but also because I knew it would look insanely suspicious to Justin and Kelcey.
While I knew it would become obvious at some point that Rhys and I weren’t dating, I preferred to push that moment off as long as humanly possible.
Rhys had split off from me to go talk to his friends—after making me swear up and down that I would stick around to put his plan into action—leaving me to fend for myself by grabbing a drink and hovering near a door trying to look busy.
I was happy to go out to parties, and normally I’d even consider myself pretty outgoing at them, but with none of my friends here, feeling like I was behind enemy lines in a Crofton party, and my stomach twisting at the thought of what was to come, all I could manage was this.
Rhys, on the other hand, was in his element.
He wasn’t standing against a wall pretending to have somewhere to be.
He was in the middle of everything, moving through the crowd with the loose, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether he belonged somewhere, fist-bumping a guy in a Crofton jersey as he passed, laughing at something a girl said to him near the drinks table, tossing a comment over his shoulder to someone else that made an entire cluster of people crack up.
I watched, with a mounting sense of disbelief, as four different girls found separate reasons to touch his arm in the span of about ninety seconds, and he handled all of them with the same easy, unbothered charm, like it happened so often it had stopped registering as anything worth noting.
A guy clapped him on the shoulder and said something that made him laugh, a real laugh, nothing like the smug half-smile he saved for me.
Someone else called his name from across the room and he lifted a hand in acknowledgment without even breaking stride.
I stood there with my untouched can of whatever it was, feeling something close to invisible, and found myself, against every instinct I had, watching him.
By the time he did make his way over to me, weaving through the crowd with two red cups in hand like he’d known exactly where to find me the whole time, I’d had more than enough time to feel out of place in a house I’d already been inside for two hours.
“Hey,” he said, handing me one of the cups without asking if I wanted it.
I sniffed it tentatively. “What is this?”
“Something better than whatever warm nothing you were nursing.” He nodded at the can still in my other hand, and I set it down on the nearest surface, mostly to have somewhere to put my hands other than fidgeting with the hem of my dress again. “You look like you’re waiting for a bus.”
“I don’t know anyone here.”
“You know me.”
“That’s not the same as knowing someone, that’s more like knowing of someone. Against my will.” I glanced around the room, at the volume of strangers laughing and shouting over the music. “How do you know all these people?”
“Some of them go to Crofton with me. Some of them are Justin’s friends.
It’s a mixed bag.” He said it like it was the simplest thing in the world, taking a sip of his own drink, glancing around the room with a curious glance as if he was a guest too.
Another girl passed close enough to say his name and trail her fingers briefly across his forearm on her way by, and he responded with some easy comment I didn’t catch, not even looking interested, and she laughed like he’d said something amazing.
“Does that happen a lot?” I asked, before I could stop myself.
“Does what happen a lot?”
“That.” I gestured vaguely at the space where the girl had just been. “Girls just touching you. Like that’s a normal thing that’s allowed to happen.”
He looked like the question amused him. “Jealous?”
“Disturbed, actually. On a sociological level.”
“Sure.” He didn’t seem remotely bothered by the accusation, which was more irritating than if he’d denied it.
He took another sip of his drink, eyes drifting back out over the crowd, nodding at someone who called his name from near the stairs, and I stood there beside him feeling more and more like a prop he’d picked up on his way past rather than a person he’d actually sought out.
“You could introduce me to people,” I said, mostly to have something to say, to fill the space where I was increasingly aware of how much of a non-entity I felt like standing next to him. “That would help your plan, don’t you think?”
“Don’t worry about the plan, I’ve got it under control.
” He said it with the same maddening calm he’d had when explaining his plan upstairs.
Then he checked something over my shoulder, and I followed his gaze to see Kelcey appear at the edge of the living room, scanning the crowd with the particular focus of someone looking for a specific person.
His jaw tightened, almost imperceptibly, and the easy version of him I’d been watching for the last five minutes turned into something more focused. “Actually—now’s good.”
“Now’s good for what—“
He didn’t answer. His hand found my wrist again, the same grip from two hours ago, and I barely had time to set my cup down on the nearest surface before he was towing me sideways through the crowd, cutting a path with the same unbothered confidence he’d used to navigate the entire party, except now there was an edge to it, a purpose, like whatever social performance he’d just been running had switched, mid-scene, into something else entirely.