Page 162 of The Score

Chapter 52

Pen

I'm putting the last of the lunch dishes in the sink when I get Bear's call. My heart picks up the pace, and I forget everything about cleaning up. I abandon plates and cutlery and run up the stairs to my room.

I've been wanting to talk to him all morning. I only managed to stop myself because he's busy with training, but I had to be harsh about it.You're acting like a teenagergot repeated over and over in my head.You know better than this.

Despite the criticism trying to flatten my heart, a soft little voice pipes up every time.

Teenagers love hard, and loving hard is brave.

Maybe not smart, seeing as that could still leave me in a place where the courage is all my own, and my affections unrequited.

I close my bedroom door and check my hair in the mirror, even if Bear has seen me in all states of disrepair. And undress. He's done the mess himself. But I can't help the instinctual response.

"Hey." I sit on my bed and smile at my screen. "Shouldn't you be in training…"

The words die on my tongue. His eyes seem dark in a different way, like he carries something sharp and heavy with him.

"What's going on?" I ask.

"Pen. Are you alone?"

I get tunnel vision on my phone. My palms turn sweaty.

I nod. "Tell me."

"It's bad news."

"Tell me, Leon."

He sighs. "There's a video online. It's… you and I in the storage closet two nights ago."

All oxygen disappears from the air around me. Or my breathing is too shallow for it to matter. Regardless, I can't make sense of what Bear just said.

Even through the camera, I can see Bear's gulp.

"It's not clear it's you," he adds. "You can't see much of anything on the video, but it's clear it's me. And it's obvious what we're doing."

The jig is up.

The first thought brings in a chain reaction in my mind, and a thousand new ones follow. Scrambled up and racing. My ears ring.

"I'm so sorry, Pen. I wasn't thinking—"

"I wasn't thinking either."

"It was on me to plan it. I didn't do a good job—"

Sure, we kissed in front of our friend group, but this video is much, much worse. It exposes us to the world. It changes everything for our— Leon's— future.

And now countless people know— something—

"Bear, stop. What happened? Who told you? Who knows?"

He explains about Evie and the guys. How the video is popular enough online, but not spreading like wildfire. How he'll have to have meetings with other people, and how Evie is looking into who leaked it at the club, too.How he's going to try to protect me from having this interfere with my potential job at the Strike.

"I'm going to get fined," he says. "Maybe suspended."