3. Breaking the Ice

“Hey Rob,” Emily calls out, starting towards the football coach again. “This is Cecilia Thornill, my new assistant. Cecilia, this is Robert Harris, the football coach.”

The coach is a fit man in his mid thirties, not a single grey hair and only the barest hint of crow’s feet when he smiles. He’s probably only recently retired from professional play; I remember hearing something about the coach being a former major league player.

“Just call me Rob,” he says, extending his hand.

I smile at him in return as we shake our hands.

“I’m surprised they found another one so quickly,” Rob comments, then turns away to holler, “BOYS!”

To my mortification, all of the football players immediately stop, looking our way.

“New med assistant,” Rob tells them. “Her name is Cecilia.”

I give an awkward wave. A couple of them call back greetings, but number 07—Emeric, apparently—barely glances at me before he turns away again. I don’t know why, but it leaves me feeling strangely empty. I almost wish he would stare me down again.

Emily lingers for a bit, discussing plans for a physical after practice tomorrow, then leads me away to find the cheer team, who are in the middle of a complicated pyramid structure. As varied as they are, they all seem to have an Amazonian grace and stature.

“They’ve got a competition coming up, so they’re meeting more often,” Emily tells me as we approach them. “Otherwise, they only meet in the afternoon on Mondays and Thursdays.”

Their coach, who introduces herself as Megan, is a short-haired brunette with very sharp features. To my immense relief, she doesn’t call any attention to my arrival, content to let her cheerleaders do their thing. I always feel much more nervous around girls my age than I do around boys my age. Mostly boys just ignore me, but girls are much worse.

“I was afraid they’d send you a boy this time,” Megan says, mostly to Emily, but half to me as well.

Emily chuckles. “Nope, another girl. Besides, if you didn’t antagonise Debbie so much, maybe you wouldn’t have to be so concerned about it.”

The two of them gossip as the cheer practice continues, and not much happens over the course of the next few hours beyond Emily beginning to explain in more detail what my duties will be. We stay on the cheerleaders’ side of the field until their practice winds down.

Most of the team barely spare me a glance when Megan finally introduces me to them, but a few greet me amicably.

“Oh, I know you,” says a girl with chestnut-brown hair and unnaturally grey eyes. “You’re Lily’s lab partner, aren’t you? I’m Grace.”

I smile at her. “She mentioned she had friends on the team. It’s nice to meet you.”

Their captain, who’d told me to call her Callie (short for Caroline), tilts her head. “Oh? Your friend in pre-med? Call her up, then, and see if you can’t stick around. Ben will want to take Cecilia out for initiation, and she’ll definitely want some moral support.”

Seeing my expression, she laughs, going on to say, “Those eyes! Don’t you worry, darling, it’s just a dumb tradition. We’ve gone through so many med assistants that we’ve streamlined the icebreaker routine. You don’t have anything going on tonight, do you?”

I shake my head. Callie’s got a bit of a southern drawl that deepened just now. It’s very comforting, but I’m too wary right now to let myself be comforted.

“There’s a bar downtown, Baleman’s Lounge and Parlour—Ben knows one of the owners, so we’ve got an open invitation there. Actually, if you’ll excuse me, I should go call them to see if one of their function rooms is open.”

I can only nod as Callie departs in a toss of her ponytail and a whiff of fruity antiperspirant spray.

“Don’t worry,” Grace offers. “Ben—that’s the football captain this year—he’ll just try to buy you a round or two of drinks. You’re not twenty-one, are you? You can use the underage excuse if you don’t drink.”

I don’t, in fact, drink. I haven’t been able to test out how alcohol affects me in a safe enough environment yet (since I’m, as Grace has pointed out, not yet twenty-one), so I haven’t let myself drink in public—not, of course, that I’ve had much opportunity to do so.

I wasn’t very popular in high school, not in any of the three that I’ve attended, and even on the rare occasion that I was invited to a party in my senior year, my last pair of foster parents were quick to shut down any plans I might have wanted to make.

“Thanks,” I tell Grace. “You’re right; alcohol is definitely not for me.”

Grace leads me to the bleachers, where a group of her friends have settled, most of whom have just come back from the change room. I’m startled to recognise one girl from Friday, the platinum blonde. She’s out of uniform already, wearing a well-tailored blouse and a high-waisted pencil skirt in neutral tones that set off her tan.

The girl sitting between her and Grace—a strawberry-blonde dabbing fresh concealer over her freckles—laughs. I don’t think she meant it in a particularly cruel way, but it’s dismissive enough to be mean. She snaps her compact closed and leans towards the platinum blonde to whisper a question.

“No,” comes the reply, loud enough for me to hear, “but we had coffee together after his hermeneutics lecture.”

“Shh, Tori,” Grace says, glancing nervously around. “They might hear you.” It’s clear that her anxiety is directed towards the other side of the bleachers, where Emily and Megan are quietly conferencing with Rob.

“Tori” ignores her. “I’ll see what happens tonight. Em’s deffo gonna come, and La Lune is, like, two streets over from Baleman’s. If he plans to continue this, he’s got no excuse not to take me there for dinner afterwards.”

“I still can’t believe Emeric took you there,” says the strawberry blonde.

“It’s sooo expensive,” Grace says in agreement. “La Lune Bleue,” she adds to me in an aside. “Do you know it? It’s the best-rated restaurant in town.”

It sounds familiar, certainly. I remember when I got hired last year my boss mentioned that I was only getting the job because some newly opened French restaurant poached a bunch of her wait staff.

“It opened last summer, yeah?”

Grace nods, then seems to remember herself. “Oh, right. Cecilia, this is Amy, Lily’s friend and roommate”—the strawberry-blonde girl, who’s since returned to applying concealer, waves her makeup sponge at me—“and Tori. Amy’s doing Sociology, and Tori’s a junior in—what was it, Art History?”

“Yup,” Tori confirms. I smile at her, but her answering smile is decidedly fake. “Well, I hope you won’t be worse than our last med assistant,” Tori scoffs.

“Claire wasn’t that bad,” Grace says, but her heart isn’t really in it.

“I know you always like to think the best of people, Gracie,” Amy says, “but the thing is, you just don’t notice all that much—”

“You guys only like to pick on her because she kept fawning over Emeric!”

Tori interjects, voice laden with disdain, “And look where that got her—humiliated so bad she had to transfer away.”

“Tori!” Grace exclaims, and at this point I stop paying attention to their devolving argument.

Emeric, Emeric, Emeric. His name keeps coming up. I look at him, dirt-streaked and covered in so much football gear that I can’t even make out his eyes. What was it about this boy that had so many girls falling all over themselves for him? And these cheerleaders—it’s like highschool never ended for them, all catty gossip and petty arguments.

But then again, maybe that’s the normal school experience, pretty girls all swarming the rich and handsome star quarterback for attention. I managed to avoid getting caught up in all of that during high school, since I’d been the designated loser because I was a scholarship student.

But it’s different now. In college, scholarships are more common, and nobody here thinks I’m the weird orphan girl who likes to sleep in the shed. (As if I slept in the shed because I wanted to! God, if there’s one thing that I like most about college, it’s that my foster brother isn’t here.)

For the first time, I’m not infamous, but instead simply invisible, and I can’t help but revel in the feeling. Maybe, if the girls on the cheer team are okay, I might even find out what it’s like to have a friend group. They all seem like the type that used to bully me the worst—beautiful, popular, and rich—but maybe the girls at my high school were the exceptions.

﹒﹒﹒

Nope, I decide two hours later at Baleman’s Lounge and Parlour. Popular girls are the same everywhere. All they want to do is humiliate you and cement their own superiority.

Earlier, the coaches let us go with a wink (Rob) and a stare-down (Megan), and Emily explained to me (after I swore to her that I was alcohol averse) that they like to keep plausible deniability about the massive amounts of underage drinking that the football and cheer teams enable. With them gone, the three dozen or so cheerleaders and football players had all split up into groups of five to eight to carpool downtown in five individual vehicles.

Lily, seemingly familiar with their modus operandi, drove her car home and got a rideshare over to the bar, which is actually more of a club. Baleman’s has a main bar area for the outsiders, but most people seem to congregate upstairs in the members-only area.

The greeter posted at the door apologised to us for not having “the usual room” available, then led us up past the upstairs lounge to one of the larger function rooms, a chic parlour with its own bar (and bartender), sound system, and more than enough seating for all of us.

It’s been barely an hour, and everything around us has already descended into what amounts to a miniature mosh pit, with half of the party jumping up and down in time with the music. I’d like to call it a mosh pit, at least, since with the state of undress that some of them are in, it probably wouldn’t be wrong to call it an orgy.

Most everyone in there is absolutely plastered, but the half-dozen designated drivers and the few who knew moderation had split off to form a circle to play a bit of a party game. An icebreaker, the football captain had called it, as if there was any more ice to be broken when I already saw him with his hands up the skirt of a freshman cheerleader.

I played along, though, much to my regret, because now I’m staring down a circle of vulture-like eyes, facing two absolutely mortifying options: truth (was I a virgin?) or dare (make out with the next person to join our circle for at least two minutes).

Lily, the traitor, cackled beside me. She’s had more than a little to drink, but I think she’s playing up her tipsiness, because a handsome football player with very kissable lips is sitting beside her.

“Look at her blush,” says Ben to Callie (both captains having volunteered to be designated drivers). “I bet twenty bucks that she’s not. That’s a guilty conscience right there. You know the quiet ones are always—”

Callie reaches out a toned arm to slap him upside the head. “Perv,” she says. “And sure, I bet that Cecilia will just take the dare. Two minutes is nothing.”

I hide my inner trepidation at that pronouncement.

Tori asks, “What if the next person to join is a girl?”

It’s clearly rhetorical, but the girl who gave me the dare, a hispanic girl named Alexandra, doubles down. “So what if it’s a girl?”

“Hot,” says more than one of the other boys (Ben included, though that only earns him another smack from Callie).

“So no,” Tori continues, shaking her head emphatically, “the dare’s too risky.” She looks across the circle at me, eyes dark in the atmospheric lighting of the room.

Suddenly, she smirks. “And I’ll take that bet too. She definitely hasn’t had sex before.”

My ears feel like they’re going to burn right off, that’s how hard I’m blushing. I brace myself, ready to announce that I’m going to take the dare.

Except, just then, a voice from behind me says, “Excusez-moi. Hey, Luke, you said tequila’s fine, right? I couldn’t find any decent rum.”

Grace shoves me unceremoniously into Lily, and we all squish over as a new body settles down between Amy (sitting on Grace’s other side) and a boy who was presumably called Luke.

“Thanks, man,” Luke says, breaking the tense silence that’s suddenly descended upon the circle.

I bite my lips together, suddenly extremely glad that I hadn’t already announced that I’d choose the dare.

“Hey, Em,” says Alexandra from across the circle.

Emeric looks up at her, scowling.

“You realise this is the truth or dare circle, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So you’re gonna stay?”

Emeric looks around, his gaze passing over me as if I didn’t exist. He shrugs. “Why? Do you want me to leave?”

“No, no,” Callie quickly says. “We said at the beginning that anyone who wanted to join could. Alex was just making sure that you knew you’d be fair game for any dares.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

Tori, who’d had her mouth open for the past few moments, snaps her jaws shut and begins to glare at me with all her might.

I look quickly away from her sharp grey eyes, which is a mistake, because I manage to catch a glimpse of Emeric’s gaze, dark and turbulent in the exact same way they’d been on Friday.

“Wait,” he says, “whose turn is it right now?”

I swallow, then say in as steady a tone as I can, “Mine.”

“The truth is if Cissy’s still a virgin or not,” Callie volunteers cheerfully, “and the dare is for her to kiss whoever next joins the circle.”

Ben groans dramatically. “Why couldn’t you wait to come into the circle, man? I had money on her admitting that she wasn’t. Now she’s never gonna answer!”

Almost everyone laughs. I don’t, and Emeric doesn’t, but Tori also doesn’t.

“I bet that she’s still a virgin,” Tori says cooly.

She sounds so certain, and I hate that she’s right.

It’s like she can see right through me to my past, as if some part of her can sense that I’ve been the school outcast for my entire life.I still don’t want to admit that she’s right, but knowing now what the dare entails…

I peek at Emeric through my lashes, but he hasn’t even glanced my way. Instead, he’s typing one-handed on his phone and sipping from a tall glass of something carbonated at the same time. I remember back to Friday, when we kissed. It’d started out so awkwardly, but even then it’d been so good. I want that again, to feel him on my lips, to feel his arms around my waist, to hold him and never let go—

But another part of me is screaming. It’s that pervasive sense of danger that appears whenever I’m on the brink of approaching him, I realise. That first time, meeting his eyes before the parade, then again during the parade right after he saved my life. And now, as I consider the dare I’ve been given to kiss him, the same instinct is flaring yet again.

Emeric is dangerous. I don’t know how, but he is, and if I ignore my instinct to approach him of my own volition, I know—I just know, somehow—that my life as I know it will be over.

So, no matter how much I want to feel his lips on mine again, to open my mouth to his tongue, I can’t.

“You’re right,” I say instead. “Tori’s right. I’m still a virgin.”

There’s a moment of silence as what I just did sinks in.

Then, Callie laughs. “And now I’ve seen it all!” she says, genuinely impressed. “A girl who can resist the one and only Emeric Garvalle.” She shakes her head a little. “Maybe you’ve finally lost your touch, kid,” she says to him.

“Wanna come find out?” he shoots back.

Callie just rolls her eyes, but I can tell that Emeric’s words riled her up a little.

On impulse, I say, “Then I dare you, Callie. Go sit in Emeric’s lap until it’s your turn again, or…” I try to think of a good enough question to ask as the truth part of truth or dare.

“Oooh!” Lily says, then whispers to me, “or have her name everyone she’s ever dated or hooked up with.”

I repeat Lily’s suggestion, and Callie’s eyes widen. “Kitten’s got claws,” she says.

I stick my tongue out, feeling brave. “What’s it gonna be?”

Callie shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think I even remember all the names…” She trails off, looking at Emeric. “So I guess I’ve only got one option.”

I follow her gaze even as she finishes her sentence, only to find Emeric’s eyes already fixed on me. I freeze, pinned again by his gaze. It’s like all my layers of defences are being peeled back one by one, until the only thing left is a raw and quivering core.

For all that this is only, like, the third time that it’s happened to me, it’s a strangely familiar feeling. There’s a different feel to it this time, however. It feels plaintive, somehow, as if all the vulnerability I’m currently feeling is a penance for some wrongdoing or another.

I swallow back my restlessness, smiling tightly at Emeric before tuning back into the game of truth and dare, resolving to ignore him for the rest of the night.

I fail, of course. Only two rounds later, it’s his turn. Tori asks him how the people at La Lune Bleue know him so well, and dares him to take someone there on a date tonight.

He smiles, thin and cold. “You didn’t have to spend a truth on that, babe. I’d have told you if you just asked normally—I know the owner.”

Everyone laughs, though nobody else seems to realise that his smile has fallen away. He looks around the circle, and our gazes lock again. This time, he breaks it first, raising his drink as if in toast before looking away again.

I feel frozen and electrified at the same time. Now, more than ever, I get the sense that Emeric is dangerous. For all that everyone here is a party animal, they’re mere housepets in comparison to him, who feels to me like a sober predator wearing only the skin of a gentleman playboy.

I don’t know if I want to find out why he makes me feel this way, or if I want to run.