Page 80 of Beyond the Lines
“No, he’s?—”
“Hey, Em.”
Declan’s voice sends an electric current straight through me. I freeze, crouched awkwardly behind Em like the world’s worst game of hide-and-seek. I know he can see me, but so far, he’s doing an awfully good job of pretending he’s got the eyesight of a ninety-year-old.
“Heyyy, Declan!” Em’s voice rises about three octaves. “Fancy running into you here! On this path! That countless people use! Every day!”
“Right,” Declan says slowly.
“I thought the hockey team was playing away this weekend?” Em stammers, desperately trying to cover up my awkwardness.
“Yeah, some issue with the stadium, so the game got switched at the last minute.” He pauses. “Is your back OK?”
“My back?” Em squeaks.
“There’s some weird growth behind you,” he says, and I can hear the smirk in his voice. “Looks bad.”
“Oh! Yes! My back! It’s… something serious. Very sudden-onset. The doctor says I might need to be put down.”
Declan laughs, and I know he’s sharing a smile with Em. “Well, when you see Lea, tell her I said hi, I miss her, and I’ll see her tomorrow.”
He misses me?
Argh!
I count to ten before whispering, “Is he gone?”
“No, I’m not,” Declan calls from somewhere behind us.
I jolt upright so fast I almost knock Em over, but when I whip around, there’s no one there. Just the empty path and the sound of distant laughter. My face burns so hot I could probably melt the ice at the Pine Barren rink.
Em skips beside me, thoroughly unrepentant. “That was incredible! I should have filmed it!”
“Don’t you dare laugh,” I warn, but it’s too late. Em dissolves into giggles, clutching her stomach.
“You should have seen your face!” she wheezes. “And the way you were trying to make yourself invisible!”
“I haven’t seen him since… you know,” I say as we approach our dorm building. “The Great Bathroom Incident.”
“Is that what we’re calling it now?” Em asks, swiping her ID to let us in. “Because that doesn’t conjure the moment anywherenearwell enough.”
“Better than ‘that time I let my brother’s teammate mouth fuck me in a public bathroom,’” I mutter, grateful the lobby is empty.
“Clever,” Em acknowledges as we head for the stairs. “I like that it’s very SEO-friendly.”
We reach our floor, and once safely inside our room, Em flops onto her bed and fixes me with a look I’ve come to recognize as her “I’m about to say something outrageous” expression.
“You know what you need to do, right?” she asks.
“Invest in an invisibility cloak?”
“You need to bang it out.”
I nearly choke on air. “Excuse me?”
“Bang. It. Out.” She punctuates each word with a pillow thump. “Get him out of your system. One night of hot, steamy, no-holds-barred, no-strings-attached, come as many times as you can sex, and bam—sexual tension gone, awkwardness resolved, and everyone moves on with their lives.”
Heat rushes to my face as I drop into my desk chair, pointedly not looking at my sketchbook in the bottom drawer—the one containing page after page of Declan. But those drawings—and the…recreational activitythat went with them—didn’t help.
