Chapter 8 #3
Before I could finish the threat, he shifted his grip, stepping seamlessly beneath me, loading my back onto his chest and wrapping a supportive arm under my knees and shoulders like a human bench press.
He dipped his knees, bracing his core, and smoothly pressed me straight up toward the ceiling, his arms extending fully while I let out a squeak that was decidedly not graceful.
“One,” Rhys counted out loud, lowering me an inch before driving up again with ease. “Two.”
“Put me down!” I hissed, though a ridiculous, traitorous laugh bubbled up in my throat anyway.
Landon snorted from the cable machine. “Look at you, Rhys. Reaching your daily PR.”
Justin didn’t even look up from his phone, but Kelcey’s eyes had gone completely flat, all the fake brightness draining out of her face as she watched Rhys laugh—a real sound that vibrated right through his chest and straight into mine—as he brought me safely back down to earth.
My feet hit the floor, but he didn’t immediately let go of my waist. He kept his hands there for a second longer than necessary, steadying me while my head spun from a mix of altitude and adrenaline.
For a second, looking up at his flushed face and the curls damp against his forehead, he didn’t look like my brother’s arrogant rival or the boy forcing me into a fake relationship.
He just looked... ridiculously, infuriatingly cute.
I hated it.
I immediately shoved the thought into a dark corner of my mind and slapped his arm away. “You are an idiot,” I grumbled, smoothing down my oversized T-shirt with hands that weren’t as steady as I wished.
“You’re welcome,” he murmured, his grin too satisfied as he turned back to the weight rack.
Kelcey’s smile finally cracked into something colder and more honest, and for one unguarded second I saw exactly how much this was costing her to sit through.
Then she turned and dropped onto the bench beside Justin, looping an arm through his and leaning into him with a little too much intention, like she wanted to make absolutely sure everyone in the room saw who she belonged to.
I was shocked to find that as I watched her cozy up to my crush, her boyfriend, I actually didn’t feel much at all.
No jealousy, no twitch of the eye, no cracking heart.
Interesting. But while I was surprisingly fine, I could tell by the stiffness in Rhys’s posture beside me that he was not.
He watched her go with something tight around his eyes that didn’t match the rest of his face, and it took him a second longer than it should have to shake it off.
“You okay?” I asked, and immediately wished I hadn’t, because it wasn’t my job to check in on his feelings about his ex, and it came out sounding far more genuine than the amount of hatred I was supposedly maintaining toward him at all times.
“Fine,” he said, too fast, reaching for the next set of weights like the conversation was already over. “Round two. Try not to hurt yourself.”
“I didn’t hurt myself the first time.”
“You dropped the dumbbell on your own foot.”
“That was on purpose.”
“Sure it was.” But some of the tightness had eased out of his shoulders, and when his hand found the small of my back again to guide me toward the next station, I let it stay there a full three seconds longer than the walk required before I stepped away, and neither of us said anything about it.
By the time we made it back to the car, I was sweating in a way that had nothing to do with the dumbbells, my whole body still humming from an hour of being touched, guided, corrected, and steadied by a boy I still hated on principle, in front of an audience I was equally sure I never wanted to see again.
Rhys didn’t say anything as we pulled out of the lot, and for once, neither did I, both of us quiet in a way that felt different from our usual silences—less like a truce and more like something neither of us wanted to be the first to break.
“She’s not usually like that,” he said eventually, eyes on the road, jaw tight. “Kelcey.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
“She’s worse when she’s trying to prove something.” He said it carefully, like he was choosing each word off a shelf and checking it twice before setting it down, and I got the distinct sense he wasn’t just talking about tonight.
“Prove what, exactly?”
He didn’t answer right away, and the silence stretched out long enough that I turned to look at him properly, at the muscle working in his jaw, the way his hands had tightened slightly on the wheel.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said finally.
“It clearly matters. You’ve been weird about her since the closet.”
“I have not been weird.”
“You have been extremely weird. Weirder than you are about literally anything else, and you’re weird about most things.”
That got the corner of his mouth to twitch, at least, some of the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. “Careful. Almost sounds like you’re paying attention to me.”
“I have to pay attention. It comes with the job of a fake girlfriend.”
“Sure,” he said, dragging the word out long.
I poked his (very muscular) arm. “You didn’t answer my question. What’s she trying to prove?”
“I told you it doesn’t matter.”
“I know we don’t know each other very well,” I told him matter-of-factly, “but I am not good at letting things go.”
He stayed silent. I sighed and leaned back in my seat, crossing my arms.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll guess. She wants you back.”
He snorted. “She barely wanted me when she had me.”
His words made me think of Sebastian’s ex-girlfriend, Tiffany—I’d never hated anybody more than that girl.
All she ever wanted was to control Sebastian, for him to practically fall at her feet while she went off and cheated on him every other day.
If Sebastian had a brother, would she have gone after him just to annoy Seb?
Probably. I thought of Kelcey as being like her, and all the pieces clicked into place.
“Of course,” I murmured to myself. I turned my head to look at him, though his eyes were still trained on the road. “She doesn’t want you, but she doesn’t want anyone else to have you either. She wants you to keep pining after her forever, even though she’s moved on.”
He didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. The way his hands tightened even harder on the steering wheel, knuckles going white, was enough of an answer for me.
He pulled onto our street a minute later, pulling up in front of my neighbour’s house instead of mine and immediately cutting the engine so my siblings would be less likely to look out and notice him here.
“You did good in there, by the way,” he said, not looking at me, one hand still resting on the gearshift. “With Kelcey. Most people don’t hold their own against her that fast.”
I paused for a second, debating whether I should share my revelation with him.
I had a feeling he wouldn’t like to be compared to Sebastian in any way, but maybe he would relax more if he knew that I knew how to handle a girl like Kelcey.
“I’ve had practice. My brother used to date someone exactly like her. ”
Rhys just nodded, still not looking at me. After a good ten seconds of silence, I unlocked my door. “Well, thanks for the ride.”
“You didn’t have to come tonight,” Rhys said, before I could get out. I froze, not sure what he meant. “I know I didn’t exactly give you a choice, but you could’ve made it a lot harder on me than you did.”
It was the closest thing to a compliment I could imagine getting from him. I wasn’t sure how to respond genuinely, so instead I said, “Don’t get used to it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.” He almost looked like he was going to smile but the look passed so briefly I thought I must have imagined it. “You should go. Before your siblings see you getting out of my car and start asking questions neither of us wants to answer.”
“Right.” I fumbled for the door handle, my face hot for reasons that had nothing to do with the dumbbells. “See you around, Rhys.”
“See you around, girlfriend.”
His tone was just sarcastic enough for me not to blush. I didn’t look back until I was already at the front door, key in hand, and when I finally did, his car was still sitting at the curb, engine off, like he was waiting to make sure I was safely inside before he left.