Page 25 of Wild Card 13

Colored festival lights reflected gold and pink across her face while music drifted through the warm night air from somewhere near the beer garden downtown.

She looked happy.

The version of her nobody else really got to see.

She stopped walking suddenly near the edge of the park where the crowd thinned out closer to the lake path.

“What?” I asked.

“You’re staring at me weird.”

“I literally am not.”

“You are.”

“I’m handsome. It’s confusing you.”

She rolled her eyes so hard I thought she might injure herself.

Then she smiled anyway. “You know,” she said quietly, stepping a little closer, “you’re significantly less annoying when you’re not around other hockey players.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“It wasn’t a compliment.”

I grinned and pulled her gently into my arms while people moved around us farther down the path.

Humid summer air.

Lake breeze.

Fireworks waiting somewhere downtown later that night.

Lucy tilted her head back to look at me.

And there it was again. That expression. The one that always knocked me stupid because it felt so honest. Like she loved me so openly she didn’t even realize she was doing it.

My chest tightened.

The words slipped out before I could overthink them. “I love you.”

Her entire face changed. Beautifully soft. Like something inside her had been waiting for me to say it first.

The festival noise blurred quietly around us.

Lucy reached up slowly and touched the side of my jaw with her fingertips. “I know,” she whispered.

I laughed. “That’s cold.”

A tiny smile pulled at her mouth. Then she looked directly at me and said the words that changed my whole damn life. “I love you too, Ty.”

CHAPTER 3

BUZZ

THEN

The hallway outside Peterson’s biology classroom smelled like industrial floor cleaner, dry-erase markers, and the burnt coffee teachers apparently survived on exclusively.