Page 24 of Enchanted to Meet You

Silence settled back over the bathroom, broken only by the drip of a faucet.

What the hell was wrong with me?

I turned back around to find Rhys watching me with his eyebrows raised, an expression on his face that was somewhere between impressed and delighted. “Nice,” he said.

“Don’t.”

“No, seriously. It worked and I respect it.” He was fighting a smile now, the corner of his mouth twitching in a way that made me want to scream again, purely out of principle. “You probably terrified the poor girl but at least now she just thinks you’re insane instead of possibly dating somebody from,” he fake gasped, “the rival school.”

“Get out,” I snapped, shoving at his chest with both hands, which accomplished absolutely nothing because he didn’t move so much as an inch, just looked down at my hands on his blazer with the same infuriating amusement.

“Getting there,” he said, not moving. “Eventually. When I feel like it.”

Somewhere down the hallway, the bell rang, and I realized with a fresh wave of horror that I now had exactly ninety seconds to get to class, compose my face into something reasonable, and pretend that this entire morning had been a completely normal one.

“Move,” I said.

He moved, finally, stepping back just enough to let me get to the door, though not without one last look that lingered a half-second too long, something warmer underneath the smugness that I decided, very firmly, not to think about for the rest of the day.

“See you around, girlfriend,” he said, right as I yanked the door open, and I didn’t even have a comeback ready, because I was too busy praying that whoever had just heard me scream bloody murder in the second-floor bathroom hadn’t already texted the entire school about it.

eight

The last thing I expected when I walked out of the ballet studio doors that night—still dressed in my leotard but with a sweat set pulled on over top and my bag half-zipped because I’d been in too much of a hurry to bother doing it properly—was to find Rhys Montgomery leaning against his car in the parking lot like he’d been standing there for hours.

I stopped dead in the doorway long enough for a girl from the class below mine to walk directly into my back, mutter a sorry, and keep going, and it took me an embarrassing few seconds to get my feet working again.

“Finally,” Rhys said, pushing off the car and checking his phone. “Your friends left, like, twenty minutes ago.”

“It was ten,” I said, walking toward him anyway, because standing in the doorway indefinitely wasn’t really an option. “And I had to talk to my teacher about—” I cut myself off. “You know what? I don’t have to explain my schedule to you. What are you doing here?”

He flung open the passenger-side door, then said, “Get in.” He didn’t wait to see if I would, just circled around to the driver’s side and dropped into his seat like the matter had already been settled, which, aggravatingly, it had, because the only other option was standing around an empty parking lot in full view of anyone still trickling out of the building, and I’d learned enough over the last few days to know that wasn’t a risk worth taking.

I dropped into the seat with a dramatic sigh, my bag hitting the floor between my feet harder than it needed to. “What are you doing here?”

“We’re hanging out.” He said it like it was the most obvious sentence in the English language, already pulling out of the lot before I’d gotten anywhere near my seatbelt.

“That’s not an answer. And also,” I tugged experimentally at the door handle, confirming to myself that the car was locked and I couldn’t get back out, “this is kidnapping.”

He was just lucky Sebastian wasn’t due to pick me up after ballet tonight. Normally he would be, but he had a group project meeting on Monday evenings for the next few weeks so I’d been planning to walk home, as ridiculously far as it was. Since swim team ended a few weeks ago, I didn’t mind getting a little extra exercise in, although I couldn’t say I was totally complaining about Rhys saving me from that fate.

Not that I would ever admit that to him.

Rhys took the turn out of the lot fast enough that I had to grab the door, and I decided, not for the first time, that there was something wrong with boys who played competitive sports. For some reason, it seemed to give them a predisposition to treating speed limits like gentle suggestions.

“Some of us would like to survive the school year without a concussion,” I said, finally getting the seatbelt buckled as he slowed down a fraction then blew past a yield sign. “And where are we hanging out?”

“The gym,” he said simply.

Well, there went my relief about not needing to walk home.

I turned my whole body toward him, pulling a leg up on the seat and ignoring the way the seatbelt was digging into my neck. “I just spent an hour and a half on pointe. My legs feel like they’re on fire. I’m still wearing ballet tights. And you want to take me to a gym.”

“Justin and Kelcey are meeting us there,” he said, completely ignoring my words.

I knew we were pretending for their sake, but it still felt like there were easier ways of pretending. Maybe I could pitch a chill movie night—we wouldn’t even have to do anything but snuggle up on the couch. Okay, sure, cuddling Rhys Montgomery wasn’t high up on my list of favorite activities, but it still seemed preferable to weight lifting with him.

“My dad and step-mom have decided that Justin and I need more,” he lifted his hands off the wheel long enough to make quotation marks with his fingers, “‘common ground as brothers’ and since we’re both athletes, it became this. Gym as a group sport.”