Chapter Twenty
Chapter
Twenty
I don’t get very far.
I hear Wesley’s heavy footfalls echoing behind me in the hallway leading from the closet to the Dungeon Room.
I finish stuffing my notes and dice haphazardly into my bag before I turn to look at him.
He stands silhouetted in the doorframe, the plastic torches mounted to the wall flickering ominously on either side of his head.
He’s holding on to his composure by a thread, his hair unruly, hands shoved stiffly into his pockets, and cheeks spotted with color.
His shoulders visibly rise and fall with each breath, like he’s struggling not to pant.
I can’t tell if he looks frustrated or just hurt.
With deliberate slowness, Wesley shuts the door behind him.
“Reagan,” he snaps, the desperation in his voice making his tone hard. “Sit. Down.”
This nearly unravels me. My heart thunders against my sternum, my knees turn to jelly, and I feel an unexpected but not entirely unwelcome spear of heat straight to my core.
He pauses, and his voice softens to a strained whisper. “Please.”
I fall heavily into the chair I occupied during this session and all the ones before it—the one that sits across the long table from Wesley. Slowly, he lowers himself into his own spot, the DM’s screen shielding him from view.
Although our jaws are locked shut, sound fills the room.
Wesley arrives to each session with a bespoke soundtrack prepared, and long, drawn-out notes from an organ croon hauntingly through the speakers, the perfect mood for a masquerade—and the perfect encapsulation of the tension strung tight between us.
We might as well just grab our dice and roll for initiative.
Instead, Wesley folds the DM’s screen shut with a snap, lays it down on the table, and laces his hands atop it. There’s nothing between us now, nothing to shield me from the piercing stare of his dark eyes.
Finally, he speaks.
“We can’t keep doing this.”
I swallow thickly; my throat has gone tight. “It won’t happen again,” I say, a hollow echo of my words from just a few weeks ago.
But Wesley shakes his head. “That is not what I’m saying. I don’t want to keep dancing around each other like we don’t want this. This”—he gestures wildly toward the door, toward the hallway I stormed through on my way back into this room—“is exhausting.”
I stare at him.
“Can you tell me I’m wrong?” He’s asking almost nicely, like it would make everything so much simpler if I could just say yes. His pupils are blown wide enough that I can barely see the sliver of chocolate brown that rings them. “Can you tell me that you truly don’t want it to happen again?”
Fuck me, but I can’t. I can’t say that the intensity of his stare isn’t making my blood pound in my ears, that the sight of his swollen lips doesn’t make me want to kiss him harder.
“It’s a bad idea, Wes,” I insist. The words don’t even taste convincing in my own mouth. “Every time, it’s a bad idea.”
“Why?”
My jaw works for a moment. “It could throw off the table dynamic.”
He laughs—actually laughs. “Oh, come on. Shay and Mona are hardly weird. Why would we make things uncomfortable?”
But I’m not thinking of our current group—I’m thinking of everything that went down with my last one. Maybe if Owen and I hadn’t gotten so wrapped up in each other, maybe if I’d set better boundaries, I wouldn’t have ruined it all.
I try another excuse. “It could complicate things with NEWT.”
He rolls his eyes before setting an even gaze on me.
“There’s not a thing on earth that could stand between you and something you’ve set your mind to, Reagan,” he says dryly.
“Not even me.” The corner of his lips ticks upward, and his voice drops lower.
“And for me—I’d find it more motivating than anything. ”
The compliment spurs my heart to a gallop again; I have never found him more attractive than I do in this moment. But I can’t get distracted. I have more reasons for my uncertainty—plenty. Ones I refuse to say out loud.
I don’t want to be the thing you return to only when you’re at your lowest.
I don’t know if I can trust that you won’t change if you win.
I can’t be sure that you won’t just leave again.
“It’s a bad idea,” I say slowly, enunciating every syllable, “because of what happened last time.”
“At the bar?”
“No. In college.”
His eyes melt from flints of obsidian to syrup in an instant.
It’s the last reaction I expected. He rises from his chair, rounds the table, and sinks down into the seat to my left.
He leans close enough to tuck my knees between his and circle my wrists with his hands.
As he holds my gaze, I can see every sliver of color in his eyes: the dark umber, threads of caramel, and specks of gold only a few shades off from his hair.
He takes a long inhale before slowly releasing it in a shaky sigh.
“I was going to come back, Reagan.”
He looks down then, which is a relief; I might have caught fire under his stare if he’d held it any longer. He toys with my hands, turning my fingers this way and that, running his thumb along the chipped black paint on my nails.
This is it, I think. He’s about to tell me the truth. Only now I don’t know how to feel. It’s an answer I’ve always wanted from him—but what will I think after he’s laid it all bare? What will be left?
Wesley swallows, and his grip on my hands suddenly tightens.
“I was filling your water bottle in the sink when—when Owen found me.”
I suck in a sharp breath. “What?”
I understand now why he’s knotted our fingers together; as I try to jerk my hands back, he holds tight.
“Please. Let me say this. Owen found me. He saw me coming out of your room, and I knew—I could tell he liked you by the way he watched you dance, and refused to leave your side all night.” I’d never known Wesley had paid such close attention to me at the party. “And in the kitchen, he told me that—”
Here Wesley cuts himself off, and his gaze jumps away. His pale cheeks glow lightly pink, and his expression fills with shame.
“He told me that it was all a game to you. That dating, relationships, hookups, all of it…” He sweeps a hand messily through his hair as he recites the words woodenly.
“He told me that I was a game to you. That you never took anyone seriously, that your walls were impossible to break down, and that you’d throw me to the curb the second you were done with me.
“I know I shouldn’t have cared what he said—I didn’t know him—but…I was so young and dumb, Reagan. I had so much pride, and at the time, something about it just…got to me.”
Wesley’s words and the crescendo of the music fade to a low buzz in the back of my head. Fury is a familiar emotion for me, one I can grip on to with both hands and hone to make myself stronger. Fury is what I should feel in the wake of Wesley’s confession—but I just feel…
Empty. Hollow.
I’m disappointed that Wesley was so easily convinced—but more than that, I’m overcome by bitter hate, which spikes through me, directed straight at Owen.
Owen, who was one of my closest friends through college, who never missed a D of course they dared me. But I wanted to go with you all the same.”
“What about the time you stole the topic you knew I wanted to do my project on, because you got to pick before me?”
He grins ruefully then. “Sure, maybe that one was selfish. But only because I wanted to see what you would do when you had to work outside of your box. Remind me how that went for you?”
I’d gotten best in class, but I stay silent to spite him.
He goes on. “Do you remember when I tried to join your group during the last workshop in our final semester?”
“You wanted to sabotage us from the inside.”
This time, though a smile curls at his lips, his stare turns deadpan. “I’m not that cartoonishly villainous, Reagan. I am capable of some sincerity.”
“You weren’t that night,” I accuse.
His face falls. “You’re right,” he admits. “I wasn’t.”
“Because all of this, and whatever Owen said—it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t excuse the way you ghosted me. I—” I try to claw a hand through my hair, but my fingers catch in my curls. “I tried to text you. I called once, very late one night the week after. Fuck, Wesley, I even emailed you.”
I didn’t think he could get paler, but his face turns an ashy gray.
“I know,” he says quietly. “I saw it. I deleted it.” His fingers tighten around my wrist, and then he releases his grip entirely and pulls his hands back to his lap.
“I was so stupid back then. I didn’t want to hope, and I didn’t want to let myself be… distracted.”
He doesn’t have to elaborate; I understand. Whatever we might have meant to each other at the time, our creative dreams—our goals—meant more.
They still do.
The silence between us feels weighted with uncertainty—and possibility.
Maybe he was right when I confronted him after our first session—does this even matter anymore? Should it?
“Do you feel the same way now?” I ask.
I have to know.
“Stupid? Absolutely.”
“No, that’s not what I meant.”
Do you still feel the same way about me? I think.
Wesley is quiet for a moment. “It’s been a long time, Reagan.
So much has changed. I’m not the same person I was back in college, or even last year.
These last few months have been some of the hardest of my life.
” He lets his head fall slightly to the side, his sad smile a little crooked.
“You’ve changed, too.” He sounds admiring when he says it.
“God, I hope so.”
“In good ways, I mean.”
“Thanks for clarifying,” I say dryly.
So he doesn’t feel the same, then. I can’t decide whether I feel disappointed or relieved, but at the very least, I can be grateful that it won’t complicate things.
Wesley turns my hand over in his and traces the lines of my palm. “Listen. What if we just give it until the competition? See what happens?”
His earlier words echo in the back of my mind.
A tentative truce. Until the competition.
“We can be allies, like we agreed, and give each other feedback. And in the meantime, we…” His eyes dip down.
I feel their path like a line of fire across my collarbone, tracing over where my dress clings to my breasts, my hips, my thighs.
He lingers there, then flicks his gaze back to mine as he clears his throat. “We explore.”
After the year I’ve had, I’ve grown so used to jumping headfirst into these things.
I’ve spent the year listening to my body, indulging every temptation and new experience I can.
Anything to get me out of my head. And I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t aching to bury my hands in his hair again, to feel the mind-numbing pressure of his hips on mine.
All year, I haven’t denied myself anything that felt good—let alone this good.
And yet—
“This is a lot,” I say.
“Okay.”
“I need some time. To think about it.”
“All right.”
I stand carefully, like I can’t fully trust that my knees will hold me. His own knees still press against either side of mine, and he moves his hands to curl lightly around the backs of my thighs.
Gently, I reach forward and press my fingertips against his cheek, drawing them down until my thumb rests where his dimple would be if he were smiling. As if I could make it appear just by pressing down.
Lightly—so lightly—I swipe the pad of my thumb along his lower lip.
His mouth parts, and I feel the urge to bend forward and kiss him again. But I can’t trust the way my thoughts swim, the way the memory of him from six years ago is stained against the back of my eyelids every time I blink, overlapping with how I see him now. I have to clear my head.
“I’ll see you Saturday, okay?”
“Okay.” Wesley lets his hands slide down my legs before he drops them to his sides.
I shoulder my tote bag and don’t look back as I turn and leave.