Page 124 of Her Goal
His smile drops. “Are you suggesting weunarrange our marriage?”
“Too late for that.”
“Are you using me for a place to live?” Hudson’s tone is lilting, but I worry he’s serious.
I slug him in the arm. “Don’t be dumb.”
He takes my hand in his and slides the pads of his fingers along my skin before lacing his fingers through mine. He gazes at our clasped hands and then rubs the soft spot by my thumb. His palms are rough with calluses, but I welcome his touch. My breath is shallow and my ordinarily noisy thoughts fade into a certain kind of fog before I resurface, realizing I’ve been gazing into Hudson’s cocoa-brown eyes.
Clearing my throat, I say, “In Gracie’s book club, we read a romance where the female main character was in love with her best friend’s brother.” I clear my throat again. “And the hero, the male main character, was secretly in love with his sister’s best friend. Of course, it was a bit forbidden because of this …”
Hudson meets my gaze. “I wasn’t secretly in love with you.”
This crushes my fragile little teenage heart and I do my best to brush it off. He doesn’t let go of my hand which sends another message.
I take a deep, steadying breath, preparing to admit something. “Being part of a bigger family, so often, my feelings don’t get airtime, so they just circulate in my head.”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“No.” I so do anyway. “The Smiths move as an amoeba, a blob. A singular unit. That’s what was so great on your side of the duplex. With Hunter, it was like I had the potential for all the attention rather than having it split among the four of us, plus whatever accompaniment of cousins were at our house. I wanted to be seen rather than be part of a pack oflobos.”
“If anything, Hunter was the wolf.”
I nod regretfully, seeing this more clearly now.
Hudson says, “You used the wordpotential.”
“I know I was the annoying girl on the block who always wanted to play hockey with you guys, but eventually he was the one guy who noticed that I was a girl.”
Hudson gets very still and then his eyebrow arches. “Trust me, Leah. We all noticed.”
“Didn’t seem like it.”
He rubs his hand down his face. “It was a challenge for all of us not to notice. We didn’t want you to feel out of place when those physical changes happened. It seemed like that’s what you wanted. For things to be normal for you.”
“Well, I did, but?—”
He looks me up and down, sending a rush through me that I wouldn’t have been able to handle at sixteen. “Leah, I have a lot of hockey stats and plays memorized.”
That must mean he used them as a distraction from me … How can that be true? The noise in my head and the space between us fills as he shifts closer.
“To us, or at least to me, it seemed like you wanted to be accepted and not looked at like the one girl in the group, so I worked hard to convince myself otherwise. We all did.”
“Except Hunter.”
“Debatable.”
“Half the time you acted like you could hardly stand me.”
“What about the other half of the time?”
Realization dawns. “It was when Hunter wasn’t around. That was when we were younger. I’m talking about when we were teenagers and you really, truly realized I was a girl.”
“That was the problem.” Hudson gets to his feet and slides his cell phone onto the kitchen counter.
I sag into the couch because I find what he’s telling me hard to believe and it conflicts with the story Hunter told me and the one I’ve chosen to believe.
Hate to love?
