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Her eyes scan my face once our lips separate.
“Good night.”
Whatever she’s wondering, she doesn’t voice it. Cassia smiles and walks away, out of the room and into the hallway. The door shuts behind her and I sink back down onto the bed, resting my face in my palms and then scrubbing them over my face.
Trying to reconcile how that felt right and wrong.
Like everything and nothing.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CASSIA
The familiar shape of Pembrooke High School appears. I rub at the condensation that’s formed on the inside of the window. The trees that separate the main brick building from the football field are nearly bare, just brown branches waving in the wind with only a few orange leaves stubbornly clinging to the bark.
The bus comes to a stop along the curb. Immediately, the rustle of activity picks up around me as my peers stand and stretch. Grab belongings and say goodbyes.
I stand and pull my backpack on before following the flow of traffic down the few steps and onto the sidewalk. The leaves that left the branches crunch beneath my boots as I scan the bags being unloaded from the luggage compartment beneath the bus. I finally spot my duffel bag and pick it up, slinging it over one shoulder.
“I got it.” Suddenly, there’s no weight on my shoulder.
I spin around, then take a step back.
Holden is close, closer than I expected him to be. He grips the handle of my bag since his own is slung over his shoulder.
I clear my throat. “You don’t have to.”
“I know.” There’s something warm and soft in his expression, an intimacy that makes my insides feel like toasted marshmallow.
I shift my weight from one foot to the other, not sure what else to say to him. We haven’t spoken since I left his hotel room last night.
The night itself was perfect, everything I imagined and more. But it wasn’t reality. I thought Holden and I were fated before. That fantasy crashed and burned. My expectations are rock bottom this time. I wanted Holden to be my first, and he was. Maybe—hopefully—that was the closure I needed.
The butterflies in my stomach say otherwise.
“You saw my text?”
“Yeah. I did.”
His message saying he was riding with the guys because they had to go over something for the team was unexpected. It felt like something you’d send to your girlfriend, not the girl you had a one-night stand with.
“Sorry I, uh, forgot to respond. I fell asleep.” I didn’t know what to say in response either, but that feels harder to admit.
“Did you not sleep well last night?” Holden asks innocently. For anyone eavesdropping on our conversation—which I hope is no one—it’s innocuous.
But I catch the teasing glimmer in his eyes. The upward curve of his mouth.
I want to be the girl who’s suave and unaffected. Who has a flirty, clever response ready for any teasing. Instead, I’m the girl with warm cheeks and a tied tongue. Who’s spent all day replaying parts of last night, worrying about what I might have done wrong.
I smile, then look at the ground. I’m so far out of my depth here, it’s not even funny.
My familiarity with him is a double-edged sword. There’s the scrawny six-year-old I moved in across the street from and used to play H-O-R-S-E with. Then there’s the eighteen-year-old version who avoids commitment and who was inside me last night.
I know him and I don’t.
Sometimes I hate him and I also might be in love with him.
Complicated doesn’t begin to cover it.
