Page 86 of On His Team

He keeps walking.

Rowan looks over his shoulder for a moment, watching him go.

“Cole knows now,” Rowan teases.

I blush. “You should go.”

He points at himself.

I nod. “Yeah.”

His eyebrows lift like he finds this deeply unfair, considering I’m the one who summoned him here by sending a screenshot and then accidentally detonated the conversation.

“You came all the way over here to bother me,” I tell him. “Mission accomplished.”

“I came because you got good news.”

That shuts me up for half a second.

He says it like it’s obvious. Like there was a perfectly reasonable path between me sending him a screenshot and him walking across the building just to stand on the other side of this counter while I talked too much.

I look away first. “Go.”

“Okay.” He starts backward toward the door.

I point at him. “And stop saying that.”

“Sure.”

“Worse.”

He grins, turns, and leaves.

I watch him until the door swings shut behind him. Then I stand there staring at the empty doorway.

For several seconds, nothing happens inside my head at all. Which would be nice if it lasted. It does not.

Cole comes back around the corner carrying a roll of tape and stops beside the counter. “He didn’t say it back.”

I look at him. There’s no cruelty in his face. He isn’t smirking. If anything, he looks mildly fascinated, the way somebody looks when they’ve accidentally walked into the middle of a conversation they absolutely intend to remember later.

“I know,” I say.

Cole nods once. Then he keeps walking.

I stare after him.

I know. That is the problem. Not that Rowan didn’t say it back. I didn’t expect him to. I didn’t even know I was going to say it until the words were already sitting between us, so expecting him to have an immediate response would be insane.

The problem is that Cole saying it makes me hear the entire conversation differently.

I like you.

I didn’t know.

That was what Rowan said.

Not I like you too.