AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’ll play better if you’re watching me.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
I need more. “Because isn’t a reason. Tell me why.”
He leans his head against the wall of the window seat, folding his burly arms across his buff chest as he props his long legs against the opposite side of the window seat. “Because you’re my dream girl. If I know you’re watching, I’ll play out of my skin.”
Okay, wow. “Please,” I scoff, but it breaks my heart a little, that he’s so beautiful and also that he’s got a knack for saying the nicest things to me that anyone has ever said. “How can I be your dream girl? You met me yesterday. You have no idea what I’m even like. What if I’m secretly a psycho? What if we have nothing in common?” I’m teasing him—I think. This is new territory for me.
“I’m pretty good at reading people.” He’s relaxed with that edge of playful charm that’s—as if the rest of the package wasn’t enough—hypnotically alluring. “I can tell you’re not a psycho.”
“How?”
“You’re too gorgeous to be a psycho.”
It’s hard not to melt under all this sweet talk. “Psychos can be gorgeous.”
“Your beauty is half physical and half spiritual. I can just tell. That sparked light in your eyes makes you the exact opposite of a psycho. It’s the light of a creative genius who’s basically perfect in every possible way.”
God. I almost laugh. “Would you stop?”
“Stop what?” All innocently.
“Stop telling me I’m perfect.”
“But you are. I mean, look at you.”
This is getting out of hand. If I don’t do something—like protest or kick him out—I might end up falling for him before I can stop myself. “You might be surprised by how strange I am. I’m an awkward introvert, a hermit and a person who avoids the spotlight at all costs. Not like you, the superstar. We’re complete opposites.”
“You’re not strange, Zara. You’re sad. You’ve suffered.”
God. He just nailed all my vulnerabilities and summed up years of my life in one off-hand comment. “We’ve all suffered. I definitely don’t have a monopoly on grief.”
“You’re going to be okay. You’ve got me now.”
There’s a sting behind my eyes that I haven’t felt for a long time, since the day I stopped crying after basically crying myself out. I don’t even trust myself to reply to that. He just beat his own record at saying the nicest thing anyone’s ever said to me.
His eyes flash a little at my silence, like he’s tuning in to deeper levels of me, protectively. “You can treat college as a new beginning. You’re going to be a huge success, you’ll see. And as for having things in common, we have tons in common.”
“Like what?”
“We’ve both grown up around football. We’re both close to our dads—too close, maybe, and it’s cost us in some ways. We’ve given up certain things about ourselves to make sure they’re okay.”
I shrug a little, wetting a sponge and trying to concentrate on fixing my mistake. I’m hiding it but he’s killing me with his super-powered perceptiveness that’s so accurate he’s stirring up emotions that I’d buried, along with new ones too. “My dad warned me about people like you.” I start out meaning it as a joke, but by the time I get to the end of the sentence, it doesn’t really come out that way.
“But not me specifically.”
“His warning definitely included you.”
He’s not fazed in the least. “It might have. Before.”
“Before what?”
“Before I knew you were real.”
I sigh more heavily than I mean to, taking a minute. “So…” I have to ask it. “You don’t play both fields, then?”
