Page 24 of Love Me Boldly

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Because it’s none of my business, but I do have to admit that you worry me.”

He chuckled, almost in surprise. “I worryyou?”

“Yeah…you’re gone on the weekends, you show up at random times when you know where I’ll be, but I never see you, and when we’re together, you don’t…”

Thatcheekkiss outside his apartment came back to me, but I couldn’t finish it.

“I don’t what? Show you how much I want you? How much I think about you and like being around you?”

When he put it like that…

“Yeah, kind of.”

“I do,” he whispered. My heart leaped straight into my throat, making it difficult to breathe and to think clearly. “I do like you, but I didn’t want to scare you off. Figured if I did, that’d definitely send you running.”

Once again, silence stole my thoughts. I wasn’t prepared for this. I wasn’t prepared to meet someone who did these things to me. Made me feel something.

Made me hope.

Graham was becoming more dangerous by the minute.

“How about this?” he asked, and that teasing tone was back in his voice.

“What?” I couldn’t help it. He teased me, and I fell for it. He was pulling me in when I should have been showing him my back.

“Friday, you’ll have to come find me.”

“And how do I do that?”

“I’ll give you a clue. Later.”

“That’s it?” I laughed. “A clue?”

“You’re a smart girl, you’ll figure it out. Are we okay?”

He’d managed to be honest without telling me everything, or much at all. Which was okay because I wasn’t ready to give him everything of me. But he was trying.

Maybe it was time I started thinking about doing the same.

“We’ll see.”

SEVEN

HOLLY

“Hockey,” Tracey stated. “We should have known he was an athlete.”

Before I left for campus, I’d received a text from Graham.

Bring a blanket.

Choosing to trust him, said blanket was now draped over my arm as Tracey and I walked into the campus’s ice arena. And I figuredthatout because my second text came from Graham two hours later. I was sitting in my finance class next to Dallas when a picture popped up.

It was a picture of clear glass walls with metal bleachers behind it. The half wall beneath the glass had NCWU’s painted Wolf mascot on it.

For assuming I was such a smart girl, I had to show the picture to Dallas.

“What is this?”

---