Semua Bab Puck Me, One More Time: Bab 141 - Bab 150

Liam's POVI was still standing in the corridor, and the feeling in my chest was doing something I was trying very hard not to show on my face.It wasn't working particularly well.‘Nobody believed me except Ken.’The thought moved through me slowly, taking its time, settling into something I could not push sideways the way I usually pushed things sideways. I had been on that floor with my arms pinned and the crowd already decided, and the one person who had raised a hand and said ‘’wait’ — without evidence, without obligation, without any reason that served his own interest … had been the person I had told myself was the enemy.‘If not for him, I would have been expelled right now.’I pressed my lips together and looked at the space where Ken had been standing.He had turned and was already walking away with Prince Zane, their backs to the corridor, maybe moving in the direction of the classrooms. He hadn't looked back.‘I really owe him. For real.’The blushing was the part I was mo

Liam's POV.“Come with me.” I said to him, the moment he caught up with the helmet.After then, he went on still turning the helmet over in his hands … rotating it slowly, looking at it the way people looked at things when they were using the object as a reason to think rather than actually examining it.I watched him for a moment.Then I said, "Just us."He looked up from the helmet and found my eyes, and something in his expression was doing the quiet calculation I had come to recognise … the version where he was weighing something against something else and hadn't landed yet."I can't," he said. "My schedule is full. Today."The way he said ‘today’ instead of ‘for the evening’ told me he was leaving himself a small door, which was enough for me to work with."Just an hour," I said at that moment.He looked at me."One hour," I said again, and I kept my voice easy because pressure would close the door and easy would leave it open. "That's all."The doubt was still there on his face

Prince Ken's POVHe turned the box over all over again, still looking at it the way he had looked at the first gift I had sent to him that day which had turned out to be a dog collar… with that specific, careful suspicion of someone who had learned not to trust things that arrived in nice packaging. And funny, I wouldn't have to blame him because I understood how broken that must have made him feel that very day."A gift?" He looked at it again. Then at me. "For me?"I huffed out a short breath and smiled. "It's for you. Open it."He took his time about it. More time than the situation required, if I was being honest, turning it in his hands like he was still running the calculation of whether something was going to jump out at him. Which, given our history with gifts, was not entirely unreasonable.Eventually, he worked the gold ribbon loose and lifted the lid.The moment he took out what was inside, his face did something I had not seen before …in the specific expression of someone

Prince Ken's POVKen let me stand at the edge for a moment..Let's say, just long enough that I thought maybe he had accepted that I was not getting in — and then I said it before he could try again."No." I held my ground, which was literally the bank of a cove, that I was choosing to remain on. "Princes don't just skinny dip. Like that."I said it clearly, with the tone I used when something was settled.Liam looked at me."Sure you do," he said.And then he reached forward and pulled me in anyway. You know, Liam could be that mischievous.The water came up all at once… cold and immediate which left absolutely no room for the dignified protest I had been preparing — and I went under for a second before coming back up, sputtering, pushing my hair out of my face with both hands.This time, Liam was already laughing.Not the quiet kind. The real kind … the kind that took over his whole face and made him look younger than he usually did, and I had never seen him laugh like that, and I w

Prince Ken's POVWe had not noticed anyone until the voice landed.One second it was just us … the water behind us, the clothes half-sorted, the afternoon still holding the warmth of everything that had been in it — and then the voice cut through all of that and the afternoon became something else entirely.We separated immediately and turned.There were three of them. Standing at the edge of the path that led down to this spot, in school uniforms, which meant they had come from the same building we had. But then, I did not recognise two of them. But the third one … the one whose voice had been the first sound — had a quality to him that I had seen before or better still, his face seemed kinda familiar. Although not in a classroom or a corridor. That face seemed to have appeared in the footage I had watched from the day Liam dealt with a group of guys outside the lower buildings after I had a glimpse of that ... the first day at school that I saw them from a distance . The same energy