Then the doors at the back open, and Jasmine Dixon walks in, and every plan I’ve ever made lies down and dies.
The hoodie’s gone. There’s no gray sweater. The sleeves she lives inside, gone. She’s in an ice blue dress that stops just above the knee and skims every curve she’s been hiding from the world.
Fuck me.
She is incredibly gorgeous.
Her hair is down for the first time since I’ve known her, styled in a loose style around a face she usually spends all her energy hiding.
There’s no clipboard. No earbuds. Just her, walking into the party on purpose…or should I say with a purpose. To completely annihilate me.
I can only imagine what this display is costing her. Nobody else can see it. They see a knockout in blue, but I see the tight grip around a little gold clutch like it’s a life preserver.
I see her chin up at that stubborn angle she uses when she’s bracing for impact. I see her eyes doing the scan thing she does, clocking who’s in the room, where the bathrooms are, and locating the exits.
She’s scared shitless, but she walked in here anyway.
She didn’t do it for the boosters. She didn’t do it for her father, who glances over, double-takes at his own kid, and goes right back to his conversation.
She did it knowing I’ve spent two weeks pulling back from her an inch at a time. And the message lands loud and fucking clear.
You don’t get to decide this for me, Adams. Look at what you’re missing.
She finds me. Of course she does. Looking for each other is the one thing we’re both good at.
She crosses the room slowly, with a slow switch of her hips, and stops a polite, professional, completely unconvincing three feet away.
“Long time, no see,” she says.
“You’re not wearing a hoodie.”
“Who would wear a hoodie to a gala?” Her thumb works the clasp of the clutch, open, shut, open, shut.
“You look…amazing.”
She ignores the compliment and gets right to it.
“You’ve barely spoken to me in two weeks.”
“I know.”
“Practice ran conveniently late eleven times?” she rhetorically asks. “I counted you know.”
“I know you did.”
“So is this the part where you end it? Because I’d like it done fast, if so. I don’t do slow.”
“It’s not that.”
“I thought we were cool.”
“We are.”
“Then what is it, Caleb?”
And then a tray goes down somewhere behind her, glass shatters, and she flinches like a gunshot went off. I watch it tip.
Between the mood lighting, the volume of the live band, and two hundred conversations blending together like a noisy symphony, she’s been holding herself together by her fingernails since the door.
