8 - Screw This!

Nova

“Truth or dare?”

He said it like he already knew the answer, that smirk sitting in the corner of his mouth like it had been there all evening waiting for exactly this moment.

I ran the calculation in approximately two seconds.

Truth was a trap. Ryker Lennox with a direct question and a legitimate excuse to ask it was the last situation I needed in front of forty witnesses. Dare at least gave me the illusion of control.

Except.

If he dared me to kiss someone, and I kissed someone, and I had never actually kissed anyone, then forty people at Harper Caldwell's party were going to watch me freeze up like a first-year student who had accidentally walked into the wrong exam room. Which would dismantle every single piece of the persona I had spent three weeks constructing.

"Nova."

I snapped back. Ryker was watching me with those grey-blue eyes, patient and deeply entertained.

"Dare," I said, then repeated it because the first time came out too quiet.

His face gave nothing away. Not surprise, not satisfaction, nothing. He just nodded slowly, like he was considering.

"I dare you to..." He paused. Let it sit. Looked around the circle with the air of someone who had just thought of something and was deciding whether it was too good to use. "Actually, let's make this more interesting."

The room cheered before he had even finished the sentence, because rooms full of people who have been at a party long enough will cheer for almost anything that promises escalation.

"Here's what we'll do," he said. "Someone else spins the bottle. Whoever it lands on, you have to give them a French kiss." He looked back at me. "No matter who."

My heart dropped straight through the floorboards into the basement.

The room loved it. Of course it did.

Harper was already reaching for the bottle, smoothly, like the idea had been hers. "I'll spin," she said, and nobody argued with her, because nobody ever argued with Harper.

She looked at me as she set the bottle on its side. Her usual smile plastered on her face. She spun it.

The bottle turned, slowed, wobbled.

Stopped.

The neck was pointing directly at Ryker.

Everything in the room went briefly, genuinely still.

"Oh." Harper laughed lightly. "That can't be right. I can spin again, that was clearly—"

"No." Ryker's voice was easy, unbothered. "Everyone saw it. There's no mistake."

He turned to me.

"Well," he said, and that smirk was back, unhurried and absolutely certain of itself. "Are you going to do it, or are you going to be a coward about it?"

I looked at Chase. He was already glaring at Ryker with his jaw set, that easy warmth of his compressed into something considerably less easy.

"You don't have to do this," he said to me, quietly. "It's a stupid game."

The room watched me.

Ryker watched me.

I thought about everything I had packed into the past three weeks. The scholarship, the rented clothes, the double shifts, the plan, Lily's heart beating steadily in my chest like a reminder of what I was here for. I thought about how much I could not afford to look like someone who backed down.

I thought about how this was going to be my first kiss, in front of forty people, with the most infuriating boy I had ever met.

"Screw this," I said.

The room erupted.

I set my hands on the floor and crossed the circle slowly, which I had decided was better than rushing, better than looking like this was affecting me, better than any of the other options currently available. The carpet was soft under my palms. The room felt very loud and very far away at the same time.

I stopped in front of Ryker.

Up close, with the crowd noise dropping into something that sounded like it was coming from another room entirely, he was looking at me with an expression I hadn't seen on him before. Not the smirk. Not the amusement. Something quieter, more careful.

I looked at his face and lost every single piece of nerve I had assembled for this moment.

I didn't know what to do. That was the truth of it, bare and unhelpful, sitting in the center of my chest like a stone. I had built an entire identity from scratch in three weeks. I had walked into this school and made a room stop. I had sat at Harper Caldwell's table and smiled through the worst conversation of my life without flinching.

And I had absolutely no idea what to do with my face right now, or my hands, or the fact that my heart was beating so hard I could feel it in my ears.

I was just about to pull back, to stand up, to accept whatever damage control this retreat would require, when his hand came up and curved gently around the back of my neck.

And then his lips were on mine.

The world went somewhere else.

It was nothing like I had expected and exactly like I had feared, which was to say it was overwhelming and fascinating. I held onto his jacket with both hands because it was either that or fall over, and somewhere in the back of my mind a voice that sounded like the only sensible part of me was saying this is a problem, this is a significant problem. But it was very easy to not listen to that voice because his mouth was warm and certain and I forgot completely that we had an audience.

The kiss deepened.

I forgot where we were.

Then a glass hit the floor.

The sound cracked through the room like a starting pistol. We broke apart. I sat back. The room came rushing back in, the noise and the light and forty people looking at us with varying expressions that I didn't have the capacity to read right now.

I turned.

Harper was standing, her drink shattered at her feet, her face arranged into something that was trying very hard to be fine and not quite getting there. The composure was cracking at the edges, a hairline fracture spreading across porcelain.

The room had gone very quiet.

I looked at Ryker. He was watching Harper too, expression unreadable, but his hand had dropped from my neck and was now resting loosely on his knee. He looked entirely unbothered.

I needed to regain control. Now.

I let out a breathy laugh and leaned back on my hands, projecting an ease I absolutely did not feel. "Not bad, Lennox. You've had practice."

The room laughed, nervous and relieved. Ryker's eyebrow arched, and something like grudging respect flickered across his face. "You're one to talk, Reyes."

The tension broke. People turned back to their drinks, their conversations, their phones. Harper sat down slowly, her smile rebuilt to its usual polished shine, but I caught her hands shaking as she reached for a napkin.

Chase was looking at me with something I didn't want to examine too closely. I looked away.

And in that quiet, in the space between Harper's expression and Ryker's steady breathing and the feeling of his jacket still warm under my hands, I understood three things simultaneously.

My plan had just changed shape again.

Ryker Lennox was a much bigger problem than I had accounted for.

And that had absolutely, categorically, without any question, not been a terrible first kiss.