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It’s like at the club Halloween night, when it felt like everything outside the bubble around Zoey and me was a million miles away from us. I feel my hand start to inch across the desk, as if pulled by an invisible force—and I can see her hand moving across the surface in the same direction.
Electric heat rips through me when our fingers brush together on the desk. It snakes through my body, spreading through my chest and wrapping around my heart.
Just this brief touch feels so good I can’t believe it, and it sparks new life in the memories of Halloween night; my hands gripping her wrists, the swell of her chest as I pressed her against me and stole her breath with a kiss, her hair wrapped around my hand as she moaned my name …
Suddenly, a bucket of cold water gets thrown on us and we both snap back to reality, pulling our hands back to our laps and sitting straight up in our seats.
“Oh, darn, looks like someone’s already got this table.” A group of underclassmen on the hunt for a big table to fit what looks like a study group appear from the stacks.
Zoey pushes back in her chair, snatching up her bookbag. “No, you can have the table. We were just leaving.”
The spell that we never should have found ourselves under in the first place is broken.
“Yeah, we’re just leaving now,” I echo, packing up my stuff and standing up to sling my bag over my shoulder.
I follow Zoey out of the library silently. I’m still in a daze, buzzing all over. My thoughts are a jumbled mess from that brief moment of contact we shared.
“I think I have everything I need for those social media posts now,” Zoey says as we stand in the cold afternoon air outside the library.
“Good,” I nod. “See you around, I guess?”
“Yeah. See you around.”
She sets off on her own way, and I set off on mine. With every step I take on my walk back home, I can only think about what might have happened if that group of students didn’t stumble upon us.
Or what might have happened other than a quick graze of our hands if that table wasn’t between us.
11
ZOEY
What Liam told me at the library the other day changes everything—at the same time, it changes nothing.
He wasn’t ignoring me for these last three months. He didn’t just take what he wanted Halloween night before tossing me aside.
No, he didn’t text me back because hecouldn’t.
For three whole months, it fucking killed me that I couldn’t contact you.
His words echo in my thoughts, the same shiver trembling down my spine that has whenever I’ve recalled them over the past several days; the same that makes me shudder whenever I recall the smoldering look that burned in his fresh green eyes when he uttered those words.
I wasn’t wrong about the connection we made that night. He felt it, too. Felt it strongly enough that the regret of not being able to follow up on it still gnaws at him, three months later. Just like it still gnaws at me.
When I got home after that conversation in the library, I fell face-first on my bed and buried my head in my pillow to hide the big, wide grin that I couldn’t wipe off my face. Butterflies fluttered in my chest as I held onto the thought that I’ve been in Liam’s mind for three months just like he’s been in mine.
The idea made me feel ecstatic, like I was coated in fuzzy sunshine.
Until reality came flooding back with a vengeance.
Maybe if he were anyone but Liam Newcastle, that would be something to be happy about. But he is who he is. A player on my father’s team. I’m off-limits to him. And since I’m working with the social media department, which has strict guidelines in place regarding relationships with players, he’s off-limits to me, too.
Maybe it would be easier if I still thought he intentionally ignored me. There are few emotions that make for thicker, more impenetrable emotional armor than anger.
At the same time, I’m glad I’m not angry at him anymore.
“What do you think, Zoey?”
Hearing my name pulls me back into the present. I blink quickly, trying to clear the cobwebs from my head. “Sorry, what was that?”
