Chapter 4 #3
“Where are we even going?” I had to half-jog to keep pace, dodging a guy who nearly spilled his drink down my arm, catching a glimpse of Kelcey’s head turning in our direction just as Rhys pulled me down a narrow side hallway I hadn’t noticed on my way in.
“Closet. Two seconds.”
“Excuse me, what?”
He didn’t answer, just steered me down a narrow side hallway I hadn’t even noticed on my way in, past a bathroom with the door shut and a muffled argument happening on the other side of it, to a door at the very end that I would absolutely have mistaken for a linen closet if he hadn’t opened it and pulled me straight inside, shutting it behind us with a soft click that immediately swallowed most of the party noise into a low, muffled hum.
“Okay,” I said, wrenching my wrist free the second there was room to do it, “you cannot just grab a girl and drag her into a closet. That’s the setup to a true crime podcast episode.”
“Relax, I’m not going to murder you in a coat closet.”
“That’s exactly what a murderer would say right before doing it.”
“I don’t even have anywhere to put a body in here. It’s a coat closet. There’s a vacuum.” He gestured, with something close to offense, at the vacuum cleaner wedged into the corner behind him, and the gesture nearly made me laugh, which annoyed me more than the closet itself did.
“I think if anything, that proves you could soak up my blood easier.”
“I’m concerned if you think vacuuming is the ideal way to get rid of a body.”
He leaned back against a shelf stacked with folded blankets, arms crossing over his chest, and in the dim closet light—a single bare bulb overhead, throwing everything into soft yellow shadow—he looked completely unbothered, like this was any other Friday, like he dragged girls into closets to deliver bad news on a regular basis.
“When someone opens that door,” he said, his voice dropping slightly, losing some of its usual smugness and replacing it with something quieter, “I’m going to kiss you.”
That stopped me completely. The closet suddenly felt about half the size it had a second ago. “What?”
“You heard me.”
I stared at him. The music thudded faintly through the wall behind me, and for a second it was the only thing I could actually process, because the sentence he’d just said clearly hadn’t landed the way real information was supposed to.
“Nobody’s going to open that door.”
“Great.” His mouth shifted, not to a full smile but something close to it that made my pulse speed up. “So you won’t mind agreeing to it, then.”
“That’s not—that logic doesn’t even hold up, that’s not how agreements—“
“It holds up perfectly. Either nobody opens the door and it’s a non-issue, or somebody does, and two people who are apparently dating get caught doing something two people who are dating do.
Either way, you walk out of here fine.” He tilted his head, watching me with a level of focus I didn’t know what to do with, the smugness gone now, replaced by something more careful.
“Absolutely not.”
“It’s not really up for debate.”
“Everything is up for debate. That’s the entire premise of a debate, and I am telling you right now that I am not kissing my brother’s rival in a closet.”
“You agreed to owing me a favor.”
“I agreed to owing you a vague, unspecified favor, I did not agree to kissing you in front of an entire party of people I have to see at school on Monday!”
He snorted. “Most of the people here go to Crofton and don’t even know who you are. And you promised to help me make my ex jealous—and guess what? She’s here.”
I looked around dramatically. “In this closet? Because I don’t see anybody but us in here.”
He didn’t rise to the bait. “I can promise you right now that she will end up over here and see us kiss.”
I opened my mouth to say no, not because I was totally opposed to being kissed but because this was Rhys freaking Montgomery and this was not happening, right up until the door handle behind him rattled, someone laughing on the other side, fumbling at the closet like they were hunting for a jacket or hiding from someone of their own, voices dropping into a conspiratorial whisper just outside.
Rhys’s eyes flicked toward the sound and back to me, steady, waiting, and I had just enough time to think he wouldn’t actually—
He would, and he did.
His hand found my jaw first, tilting my face up with a gentleness that felt completely at odds with every single interaction we’d had up to that point, thumb resting just below my cheekbone like he had all the time in the world to get this right.
He kissed me slowly, testing, like he was giving me one last second to pull back and prove him wrong about all of it.
I didn’t. Whatever protest I’d been building dissolved somewhere between the first brush of his mouth and the second, replaced by something warmer and far more complicated than I had any interest in examining, his other hand settling at my waist and pulling me in just enough that there was no space left for the door, or the party, or the fact that I was fairly sure I still hated him.
The door swung open behind him.
Neither of us stopped.