7 - Scarlet

Nova's POV

Chase was mid-sentence about the Eiffel Tower at night when the air shifted.

I felt it before I heard the footsteps, before the conversation paused, before Chase looked up with that carefully neutral expression he had deployed every time Ryker Lennox entered a five-foot radius since the sweater incident.

"Lennox," Chase said.

"Chase." Ryker pulled up a seat like he had been invited, which he had not. His eyes moved to me briefly, warm and entirely too amused. "And the mysterious transfer student. Great party, right?"

"Wonderful," I said, in my flattest voice.

He settled in, easy and unhurried, and Chase, because Chase was fundamentally gracious, picked the conversation back up.

"We were talking about Paris," he said. "Nova's never been."

"Interesting city," Ryker said pleasantly. "Expensive, though." A brief pause. "Although I suppose it depends on your situation." Another pause, timed perfectly. "Just curious, do you think someone working at a restaurant could realistically save up for a trip to Paris? On a server's salary?"

My hand tightened around my glass.

Chase looked mildly confused. "I mean, if they budgeted—"

"The thing about waitstaff," Ryker continued, thoughtful, genuinely working through a hypothetical story he had absolutely constructed on purpose, "is that the hours are brutal. Late nights, early mornings. Can't be easy, maintaining, say, a whole other lifestyle on top of that."

The glass was going to crack if I held it any tighter.

"Sounds exhausting," I said, very pleasantly. "Maintaining a whole other lifestyle."

He looked at me. "Doesn't it?"

Chase glanced between us with a small frown, picking up a frequency he couldn't quite name.

I set my glass down carefully. Touched Chase's arm. "I need some air," I said, and smiled at him like everything was fine, like I was not approximately four seconds from saying something in front of forty people that I would not be able to take back.

_____________________

Harper's pool glowed cold and blue in the dark.

I stood at the far end with my arms crossed and counted my own breaths. A technique my cardiologist had given me for moments of stress and here I was currently using it for a category of stress she had absolutely not intended.

Footsteps on the tiles behind me.

I didn't turn around already aware of who it was. "What do you want from me?"

"I haven't decided yet," said Ryker.

I turned. He was standing closer than I expected, jacket off, hands in his pockets, watching me with those grey-blue eyes that had the deeply inconvenient quality of looking like they understood things.

"Why haven't you told anyone?" I said.

"What makes you think I won't?"

"Because you would have already." I held his gaze. "So what is this? What do you want?"

"Why are you really here?" he said. "Not the scholarship story. The real one."

I looked at him and ran the calculation and came up short every way I tried it. He knew enough to destroy my perfect plan, or what was left of it. He had chosen, for reasons I didn't understand, not to. Yet.

"I need you to keep what you know to yourself," I said. The words tasted like surrender and I said them anyway. "Please." The please was the worst part. "I'll do anything. Just don't tell anyone."

I regretted it the moment it left my mouth.

The word hung in the pool light between us.

Anything.

He took one step closer. Then another. The distance between us became something that no longer had the right to call itself distance, and I was suddenly, inconveniently aware of every single thing about him. The way he was looking at me. The way his eyes dropped, just for a fraction of a second, to my mouth.

I swallowed.

My heart did something that had nothing to do with cellular memory and everything to do with the fact that Ryker Lennox was inches away in the dark, and he was infuriatingly, almost aggressively good-looking, and that was a genuine problem I had not accounted for in any version of the plan.

He leaned in slightly. I did not lean back.

"Ryker."

Harper's voice came from the doorway like a bucket of cold water applied directly to the situation.

"It's your welcome back party." Her laugh was light and perfectly calibrated. "Don't you think you should be inside?"

Neither of us moved for one full second.

"The games are about to start," she added, in a tone that expected compliance.

Ryker straightened. Looked at me one last time with an expression I couldn't read and didn't have time to try.

"We're not done," he said, quietly enough that Harper couldn't hear it.

Then he turned and walked back inside without looking back.

I stood at the edge of the pool and did not move.

Ryker Lennox was just about to kiss me. Right there, in the cold blue light, with Harper Caldwell twenty feet away. And the part that was going to keep me awake tonight, the part I could not explain or excuse or fold into any version of the plan, was that I was anticipating it.

What was wrong with me.

I pressed both hands to my face. My cheeks burned against my palms, which was absolutely not something I was going to think about.

I counted to sixty. Fixed everything that needed fixing and walked back inside.

The living room had rearranged itself while I was gone. Everyone was seated in a loose circle on the floor, furniture pushed back, Harper presiding from the center with quiet satisfaction.

Spin the bottle.

Of course.

I found a spot next to Chase and sat down with my chin up and my expression neutral and my heart still doing things it had no business doing.

The bottle spun twice before I had even settled. Third spin, it slowed, wobbled, and stopped.

Pointing directly at me.

I looked up.

Across the circle, Ryker was watching me with that smile, the specific one that lived in the corner of his mouth and meant he knew exactly what he was doing.

Only then did I register whose turn it had been to spin.

Could this night get any worse, I had wondered, approximately five minutes ago.

I had my answer now.