CHAPTER THREE: Caught in the locker room

She shouldn't have been in the boys' locker room. She knew that. She'd known it when she snuck in through the side door, and she'd known it while she was moving quietly past the wooden benches toward the row of lockers at the back, and she very definitely knew it when she heard the showers cut off.

The plan had been simple: find Adrian Hale's phone, which she knew was kept in his locker, and delete the bikini photo herself before he decided eventually had arrived and she can eventually get out of this ridiculous deal. She'd been thinking about the photo for three days. She'd been thinking about the way he'd said I'll do it for you with that smile that meant he was in absolutely no hurry.

She needed to be in control of at least one thing. His locker was number twelve. She found it, tried the handle—unlocked, because of course it was—and reached in for the phone just as the shower room door opened.

She had two seconds. She shoved herself inside the locker, pulled the door mostly shut and stood in the dark with the phone in her hand and her back against someone's training jersey, breathing through her mouth.

Voices. Adrian Hale's, and at least two others.

"What are you actually doing with the Reyes girl?" That was Marcus, one of the linebackers. Lena had seen him at three games.

"Something dead serious." Adrian Hale's voice. Closer now.

"Since when do you do serious?"

"Since now." A pause. The sound of a locker opening one row over. "You know she's kind of different and makes me feel different."

"Different how?"

A longer pause this time.

"Just different." And something in the way he said it made the small hairs on Lena's arms stand up. He wasn't performing. There was no one to perform for.The thought was dangerous and she put it down immediately.

The other boys drifted out, the conversation shifting to something about Saturday's game, and then there were footsteps, closer, and she realised with a sinking certainty that he was coming to his locker.

The door opened.

They stood there looking at each other for a suspended moment, her crammed in among his training gear with his phone in her hand, him in a towel and nothing else.

He reached in and pulled the door back closed.

"Oh," he said, very quietly. "Shit." A beat. He opened it again to be sure he was not imagining things.

She held out the phone, face burning. "I can explain."

"Don't move." He looked down the row, confirmed his friends were gone, and looked back at her. His expression was doing something complicated. "My friends just left. Come out when you're ready. But—" he glanced down at himself, then back at her, with that infuriating half-smile, "—you might want to look at the ceiling for a second."

She looked at the ceiling. There was a sound she refused to identify.

"Okay, you can look; I am decent now," he said.

She stepped out. He was in shorts now, standing with his arms folded, looking at her with that expression that was half-amused and entirely too perceptive.

"You came here to steal my phone," he said. It was not a question.

"I came here to delete the photo."

"Which you planned to do by stealing my phone."

"I was going to delete it and put it back."

"That's still theft." He stepped closer. Close enough that she was aware of him in the specific way she was always aware of him lately and could not explain and refused to name. "You know what happens to little thieves?"

"They get expelled and lose their Harvard application?" she offered.

"They get punished." And he said it so quietly, with the smile tucked behind the word, that her traitorous pulse did something embarrassing. He took the phone from her hand. Their fingers touched, lingering this time, unmistakably. "What was your plan, exactly? Delete it, break our deal, and go back to making eyes at my brother?"

"That was the plan, yes."

"And has the plan changed?"

She looked at him. He looked back at her. This close, the grey-green of his eyes had more green in it, and there was a scar she'd noticed before on his jaw and wondered about but never asked.

"Give me the jacket," she said.

He frowned.

"I can't walk out of the boys' locker room without a reason to be here. If I'm wearing your jacket, people will assume—"

"Ah." The smile arrived fully now, warm and slow, and she wished it wasn't because it made things worse. He shrugged off the training jacket and held it out. She put it on. It was too big across the shoulders, and it had his name across the back, and it smelt like cedar, which she already knew and had been trying not to think about.

"The whole school is going to think you're mine," he said.

"The whole school already thinks that."

"Fair." He looked at her for another moment. "You're staying in the deal."

"I didn't say that."

"The photo stays on my phone until the end of term, as agreed. And you're staying in the deal because you're smart enough to know it's working." He tucked his phone into his pocket. "Julian noticed you. He's been asking about you. You've been here for three days, Lena; it's working."

She knew it was working. That was the problem. She walked out of the locker room wearing his jacket, with his name across her back, and three separate people saw her and pulled out their phones, and the photo would be on everyone's feed before sixth period. She knew that. She'd done the math.

What she hadn't done the math on was why none of that seemed to bother her as much as it should have.

She kept the jacket on until she got home. She told herself it was a strategy she has to put up with to get the boy of her dreams.

At least that is what she convinces herself with.