Page 20 of Catching My Dreams

“Miss Montgomery is correct,” the man said, giving her a grudging nod of approval. “Mr. Crowley, do you have anything else to add? Maybe about the limitations of analyzing characters through a Freudian lens?”

Ella tried to concentrate for the rest of the class, but she barely heard another word. She wanted to cry. Or scream. But most of all, she just wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep and not dream of Brett. She wanted to get through one night without being woken up by nightmares and without dreamwalking.

She was the kind of exhausted that made her just as likely to kill someone, burst into tears for no reason, or manically laugh at something that was barely even funny. She was the kind of tired that made her even jumpier than normal and about a thousand times more irritable.

Which is why she could practically feel the steam coming out of her flared nostrils when she left her class and saw Noah chatting to some of his teammates, his stupid jawline looking so chiseled and his stupid muscular chest and arms filling out his blue shirt so well.

True, he had dark circles under his eyes, but standing under a tree on Copley Lawn, he still looked like some annoyingly sexy Greek deity who’d deigned to join the mere mortals down on earth for a spell.

She hated that darned jawline and those irritating strong arms that she knew for a fact felt amazing under her hands. She hated that she was even thinking of his sharp facial features and sturdy limbs.

“Ugh,” she groaned, disgusted by herself.

She forced herself to look away, but not before his gaze moved in her direction, and those sparkly blue eyes of his met her boring brown ones. It was a most unfortunate turn of events. Being caught staring at the man you hated was never a good look, and Ella could only hope her sunglasses had protected her from the shame of it.

“Ella, hold up!”

She paused briefly, the sound of her name being shouted making her instinctively stop. She was off again a second later, her steps fast enough to match the beat of her heart that she could feel in her skull.

“Ella, wait!”

Nope. She wasn’t dumb enough to do that.

“Ella!”

A hand landed on her shoulder, making her jump and spin around. A scream got caught halfway up her throat, the trapped sound making her throat ache. “Fucking hell, Noah,” she shouted, her shaking hands lifting to run through her hair. “Don’t sneak up on me like that.”

His eyebrows furrowed, leaving creases on his forehead. “I called your name three times. I wasn’t really being covert about it.”

“Whatever,” she grumbled.

Of course he wouldn’t understand why she was so jittery. He was far too much of an asshole to care how his actions affected other people. Although, that wasn’t entirely true, seeing as his asshole ways only extended to her. He was the perfect gentleman to everyone else. She was the only one he treated like trash.

“What do you want?” she snapped when he failed to fill the silence with an insult. He was in poor form that day, it seemed.

He flinched and lifted a hand to rub the back of his neck. “Look, about yesterday, I’m sorry for what I said.”

Ella would have been more surprised if he’d started rapping about chickens laying rainbow-colored eggs. She would have been more taken off-guard if he’d led her off the brick path they were currently blocking and onto the grass to play a game of Croquet.

“You’re…sorry?” she asked, her eyes narrowed so far, she could barely see out of them.

Noah swallowed. “Yes. I was a total ass.”

Ella stared. And stared some more. She took her sunglasses off in case they were somehow affecting her vision and hearing, but no. Noah Warner was still there. Standing in front of her, apologizing. “I’m sorry, what?”

He shifted on his feet, looking oddly nervous. “Look, I’ve been completely unfair to you. I got it in my head that you were self-absorbed, but I was wrong. Asher cleared up some things with me last night, and I—”

“Is this a joke?” Ella asked sharply.

“What?” He had the audacity to look offended by the question. “Of course not.”

She looked to the side and found his teammates looking at them with interest. She scoffed and turned her attention back to Noah. “Oh, I get it. You and your buddies thought it would be funny to mess with me, right?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Let me guess. You told them about how you slept with me and then called it a mistake before I even had the chance to get dressed, and you all wanted to see if I’d be naïve and desperate enough to believe you’re sorry and didn’t mean it.”

The thought alone made Ella never want to show her face in public again. Who knew how many people Noah had told about what he’d done? Maybe it was something he and his teammates laughed about on a regular basis in the locker room.

---