Chapter 7 #3
“You cannot just show up at my school,” I hissed.
“I think it would be more suspicious for me to bail on something that got scheduled three weeks ago,” he said lightly.
He wasn’t even looking at me, too busy examining a poster about the dangers of vaping with mild interest, like this conversation was only about seventy percent as urgent as I currently believed it to be.
“I don’t control the school board’s calendar.
If I did, believe me, I would’ve scheduled this somewhere less likely to end with me getting kidnapped into a bathroom. ”
I deflated a little. I guess that was true. But I was still angry and I couldn’t just let this go completely. “Well, you could have told me.”
“Told you what, exactly? ‘Hey, quick heads up, on Monday I’ll be at your school for forty-five minutes doing something that has nothing to do with you’? Forgive me for not treating my entire schedule as information you’re entitled to.”
“You had to know I would freak out.”
He finally glanced at me. “Actually, I assumed you’d react like a normal person, but I guess that was too optimistic of me. I probably should have guessed that much from the girl who nearly punched me three days ago.”
I glared at him. “You called me your girlfriend just now. In public.”
“Kind of the point of a fake relationship.”
“Not around people at my school! If Sebastian heard you—”
“He didn’t.” His mouth quirked up and he pushed off the counter to close the distance between us before I’d fully processed he’d moved.
He came close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, close enough that I could smell the same laundry-detergent-and-grass smell from the closet two nights ago.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
He lifted a hand and, before I could pull back, ran his thumb slowly across the space between my eyebrows, unhurried, like he had every right in the world to be touching my face in a school bathroom. “Did you know you get these little lines here whenever you’re stressed?”
I scoffed. “I do not get lines.”
“Yes you do.” His thumb was still there, tracing the spot like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I hated myself for not being able to step away. “You should relax.”
“I can’t relax when you’re not taking this seriously.
” I had a whole argument prepared, something about Clementine realizing we knew each other and how if she picked up on it then other people were bound to as well, but it was extremely difficult to hold onto a coherent thought with him standing this close, one hand still ghosting near my face like he didn’t even notice he hadn’t moved it.
My voice came out meek as I said, “People saw you looking at me.”
“Like I said—”
Behind me, the bathroom door swung open.
I jumped away from Rhys like I was on fire, then without thinking about any potential consequences, I turned toward the door and screamed—a full, ear-splitting, completely undignified shriek that bounced off the tile and the mirrors and probably reached the front office—loud enough that whoever had started to push through the door immediately yanked it shut again with a strangled “oh my gosh, sorry, SORRY,” followed by the unmistakable sound of trainers sprinting away down the hallway.
Silence settled back over the bathroom, broken only by the drip of a faucet.
What the hell was wrong with me?
I turned back around to find Rhys watching me with his eyebrows raised, an expression on his face that was somewhere between impressed and delighted. “Nice,” he said.
“Don’t.”
“No, seriously. It worked and I respect it.” He was fighting a smile now, the corner of his mouth twitching in a way that made me want to scream again, purely out of principle.
“You probably terrified the poor girl but at least now she just thinks you’re insane instead of possibly dating somebody from,” he fake gasped, “the rival school.”
“Get out,” I snapped, shoving at his chest with both hands, which accomplished absolutely nothing because he didn’t move so much as an inch, just looked down at my hands on his blazer with the same infuriating amusement.
“Getting there,” he said, not moving. “Eventually. When I feel like it.”
Somewhere down the hallway, the bell rang, and I realized with a fresh wave of horror that I now had exactly ninety seconds to get to class, compose my face into something reasonable, and pretend that this entire morning had been a completely normal one.
“Move,” I said.
He moved, finally, stepping back just enough to let me get to the door, though not without one last look that lingered a half-second too long, something warmer underneath the smugness that I decided, very firmly, not to think about for the rest of the day.
“See you around, girlfriend,” he said, right as I yanked the door open, and I didn’t even have a comeback ready, because I was too busy praying that whoever had just heard me scream bloody murder in the second-floor bathroom hadn’t already texted the entire school about it.