Page 43 of Blocked Score

Fuck, I can’t wait to get home.

These shoes looked so cute when I tried them on while out shopping with Harper, but my feet are screaming after standing in them for two hours.

Story of my life, right?

Every year at the beginning of the semester, there’s a traditional mixer event for pre-law students and faculty. Fittingly, it’s a dress-up affair, so I’m rocking a frilly blouse with a pencil skirt and the black heels that I picked up at a local boutique.

I loved how I looked when I glanced at the mirror in my room before I left, but now I’m just dreaming of kicking off these shoes and jumping into something loose and comfy.

It's just my luck that the mixer is being held in the very furthest building on campus from where I’m living.

I groan in discomfort as I clumsily clamber down the front steps of the building in these toe-pinching shoes.

“Hey!” A sudden booming voice cuts across the still air of the early night, giving me a start.

I turn to see Lane, getting up from a bench on the other side of the building and striding toward me.

“Lane?” I ask, the startle morphing into surprise. “What are you doing here?”

His mouth slides into a grin, and he hoists up a tote bag in his left hand. “Thought you might want a change of shoes for walking home.”

He reaches into the bag and pulls out my regular pair of sneakers. Suddenly, I don’t feel the pinching in my feet anymore—I feel it in my heart. My mouth pops open, and all I can do for a minute is blink silently with my eyes fastened to the shoes in Lane’s hand.

He steps forward, holding them out to me. “I know sometimes your flair for fancy footwear bites you in the ass,” he says with a nostalgic wink.

My stomach feels like it’s turned upside down. A warm feeling seems to make every molecule in my body hum and buzz.

“Flair for fancy footwear, huh?” I say, taking the shoes from him, using a joke to try and keep myself from feeling so sappy that the corners of my eyes water. “Try saying that three times fast.”

Which Lane promptly does; five words into the attempt, his tongue is contorting and spewing out sounds of blabbering nonsense, making both of us laugh like idiots.

But even as I laugh, a tender, nostalgic feeling sweeps through me while I tug off my tight heels and slide my sore feet into my roomy, comfy daily sneakers.

An intense feeling shoots up my spine. For a beat of time, I’m overwhelmed by a powerful sense of déjà vu, and it’s like I can hear the roar of the downpouring rain outside the bar that day in Chicago when Lane also brought me a pair of shoes to change into.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been waiting out here all evening,” I say to him.

He shrugs, taking my heels from me and carrying them by hooking his index and middle fingers against their backs. “Didn’t really have anything else to do.”

There’s no way that’s true. The captain of one of the best teams in college hockey, who just made his victorious return to the ice, probably the single most popular guy on campus, had nothing to do with his evening other than sit on a bench in the cold and wait to give me a pair of shoes?

I can’t figure Lane out. This isn’t something you do just to be a good roommate. It isn’t something you do just to be a good friend. This is bonafidedown badbehavior.

But then I remember how things ended for us in Chicago. Blowing off our last meeting to hang out with another girl at a house party? Not exactly the actions of a lovesick romantic …

Is he just playing some game right now? Is that what he was doing back then? But it’s so hard to square that with how genuinely caring and thoughtful he seems.

I’ve seen people fake thoughtfulness before—trust me, I’ve seen it a lot—and Lane’s never shown any of the warning signs. Maybe he’s just that good at it? An unpleasant feeling curdles in my stomach at the thought, though I still can’t bring myself to believe it.

Is it possible I … misinterpreted what happened at the end of our stay in Chicago?

Hmph. Fat chance. I know what I saw with my own two eyes. Another girl in his lap, hours after he blew off our date. It’s really, really hard to misinterpret that.

But I spent that whole day without my phone, without contacting him. Is there a sliver of possibility that I missed a text, or a call, or something that would have somehow explained …

No. It’s not possible. The last thing I need is to indulge in false hope.

“When’d you get that one?”

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