Page 30 of Blocked Score

Oh, here’s a decent place. It’s too expensive.

Oh, here’s a shitty place. Eventhat’stoo expensive.

Maybe I could get a job washing dishes at this café, and instead of paying me they’d let me sleep on a cot in the backroom?

Geez. I thought of that as a sort of self-deprecating joke … but it actually sounded appealing. I’m screwed, aren’t I?

I continue to scroll through apartment listings on every website or app I can think of, until I realize there’s someone standing across from my table … and they’ve been standing there for a couple seconds.

Before I lift my chin, I can tell that whoever’s standing there is tall, broad … and a jolt of realization hits me. I know who it is.

For the first time in eighteen months, I’m looking at Lane Larsen.

The intensity that rims his deep green eyes and sharpens the lines of his face provides a surprising answer to a question I’ve asked myself too many times since I got my acceptance letter: he definitely recognizes me.

“Scarlett …”

The sound of my name from his lips after all this time hits me like a shockwave.

The weight of his eyes riveted to mine sends an electric current racing up and down my spine.

I thought I understood what happened between us a year and a half ago. Thought I understood what I must have really meant to him all along.

But now that I see with my own eyes whathelooks like when he sees me, all this time later …

I don’t know if I understand anything anymore.

16

LANE

Maybe it’s because I can’t think straight.

Maybe it’s because the decision-making part of my brain is deactivated from the shock of having Scarlett in front of me so close that I can see the hazel ring of her eyes and remember how I used to drown in them.

Maybe it’s because, as much as I’ve tried to ignore it, for all these months I’ve missed being near her so much that it’s been like having withdrawal symptoms that I’ve never truly recovered from.

But after I take a seat at her table, ask her breathlessly what she’s been up to, and she tells me what happened to her apartment yesterday and the desperate position she’s now in, I don’t even think before the words rush from my mouth.

“Stay with us. We have an empty room. As long as you need.”

Her eyelids pull back wide enough to reveal the full circumference of her irises, and my chest clenches at the sight. “What?” she asks, taken aback.

“Me and my teammates live in a big house just a couple blocks off campus. One of my roommates moved out the otherday and the room’s going to be sitting empty for the entire semester. Take it. No charge.”

She blinks away the disbelief in her expression, shaking her head. “Lane. I can’t do that.”

My lips pull down, like there’s a weight attached to their edges. It feels like there’s a weight in my chest, too.

She can’t do that because she made it clear a year and a half ago that she had no interest in us developing our relationship beyond the brief summer fling it was?

But she has nowhere else to go, and that’s totally unacceptable to me. If that is the reason she’s holding off on accepting my offer, I have to make sure she knows she doesn’t have anything to worry about.

I shrug, trying to summon a casual tone and expression. “Sure you can. We’re just old friends at this point, right? I have an extra room, and you need a place to stay. Win-win. Nothing more complicated about it than that.”

Her brows tug together, and something flashes in her eyes that I can’t quite read. But it’s not the relief that I expected to show in them.

“Friends, huh?” she asks.

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