Page 7 of The Love Dare
It’s longing.
I like her.
Fuck.
I really like her.
He needs to say something. She’s staring at him with those hopeful doe eyes, and he needs to say something—anything. Well, not anything. But something. Now.
“I would,” he confesses softly, hating himself on the inside. He should be shutting this down, but he just…can’t. The idea of looking up in the stands to see her in his jersey is too strong a pull. By the time next season rolls around, she’ll probably forget anyway. Let him at least have the dream for a few meager months. “I’d really like that.”
“Then I’ll do it.” She peeks at him, grins, looks away.
He should go—find the rest of the team, board the bus, leave—but he doesn’t.
“Can I ask you something?” he says instead, because there’s a question he’s wanted the answer to for as long as he’s known her. She looks up with an open expression and nods. “What do you like so much about books, anyway?”
Winnie laughs outright, as if that was the last thing in the world she expected. For a moment, he wonders if he should be embarrassed, but he’s not. In fact, the sound makes him want to laugh too, so he does, softer and not so freely, but it still leaves him feeling lighter in the end.
“I don’t know…” She sighs, thinking.
He doesn’t mind the silence. He’s always found it so revealing. And right now, it’s saying everything she doesn’t know how to express. It’s brimming with energy and life, a train zipping from one stop to the next while all the reasons dance inside her head, too many to explain.
“I guess I like the escape. I get to be, well, anyone really, except myself.”
That’s silly, he thinks. Not the escape part. He understands that. But the idea that she should want to be anyone else when she gets to be herself.
“What are you reading now?”
“It’s this fantasy book about six outcasts who have to work together to free this prisoner from an ice fortress. It probably sounds strange, but it’s really good. I promise.”
“Yeah?”
“I can’t put it down.”
“Can you read me some?”
She narrows her eyes with a curious air, then cracks the spine. “Sure. I’ll start at the beginning of this chapter. It might be a little hard to follow, but this scene is great, even without the backstory.”
He drops his head back and listens. It’s the most relaxed he’s felt in he can’t remember how long, sitting there surrounded by her voice, allowing himself to get lost in it. They don’t make it very far before someone breaks the moment—people he doesn’t recognize, searching for a way out—but it’s enough that he understands what she means. For the first time in his life, he finds solace in a book, instead of stress.
It’s a gift that Alex wasn’t the one to come traipsing down the hall. Tyler understands this, so he gets up to leave, but she stops him.
“Hey, Ty?”
He looks back over his shoulder. “Yeah?”
“Maybe this isn’t my place, but I know how much time you guys spend on a bus, so if you want to keep going, or you know, start from the beginning like a normal person, they have the audiobook at the library. You might like it.”
He likes the sound of her voice more, but he doesn’t say that.
He just mutters, “Thanks.”
A week later, though, her suggestion still lingers. So he goes to the library, gets a card, and checks it out. The narrators don’t sound a thing like her, to his initial dismay, but the more he listens, the more he feels her there. So he keeps listening, and damn if she isn’t right. To his complete shock, he does like it.
He likes it a helluva lot.
Until the day Alex snatches his phone after practice.
