Page 156 of Out of Bounds

"On a scale of one to ten?"

"On a scale of one to five."

That didn’t do anything to temper down my excitement. Maybe I should’ve been kinder to the guy who just ate me out sobeautifullyon his couch but this was too much of a temptation.

The locker room was completely silent. Which made sense, everybody was out on the field. I made a beeline towards his locker but he easily beat me there. I tried to open it but he shut it just as quickly, keeping his palm against the door

He wasn’t my boyfriend Ryan, he was Ryan Cross, captain of the football team, trying to put me in my place.

"Let’s go get the banner," he said, his voice firm.

"I want to look inside."

"No."

I shrugged. "I’m going to look inside anyway. Either now, when you’re here, or…"

"How about you look inside next month?"

"So I’ll forget about it?"

"Christ, I hope so."

"Ryan." I folded my arms over my chest, unable to keep the smile off my face. "Please?" I fluttered my eyelashes the most I’d ever done before and pouted. Actually pouted. “Pretty please?”

For a long moment, I thought he was going to put a hand on my back and lead me on a scavenger hunt to go find the banner. His dark eyes stayed on mine for a beat too long. Muttering under his breath, he slowly swung open the locker door.

The thrill offinallygetting to see what was inside was only masked by the confusion of…Ryan’s regular locker?

The jerseys were hung up properly. Everything was clean and in its place. Ryan’s natural habitat. Literally, there wasn’tanything wrong with his locker that I could see, but Ryan stood quiet next to it, watching me.

My eyes flickered to the top shelf and I saw the hint of a piece of paper hanging half-an-inch over. Just the hint of a piece of paper, really. With a frown, I turned back to Ryan. His stance tightened. He was waiting for something.

How bad can it be?

I reached up to the piece of paper and felt a stack of them. Worn papers, crinkled papers. They were loose, unconnected by anything in particular, and I brought them down in a huge pile. My heart thumped in my chest for no reason. I didn’t know what I was expecting but I could feel the tension rolling off of Ryan while he counted down until my reaction.

My eyes widened as soon as I spotted the first paper.

They were my…sketches.

The very first one was a basic expressive chart I’d finished for practice. There were six different poses, my chin lifted, the tight-lipped smile, the wink in the corner, my nose crinkled to the side, all little sketches I’d worked through on a piece of torn-out legal paper while I’d been waiting for Ryan during a gym session.

It’d definitely been tucked away in my sketchbook. I’d been convinced it’d fallen out somewhere but here it was, with new crease lines.

I slipped the page underneath the pile and the one underneath was an anatomy drawing. That’d been at the beginning of October, when I had him take a dozen pictures of my hands atGianna’s.Below that, the step-by-step of a football, tumbling over the ground, the shadow study of my hair, and me, bunching up his jersey to see if I could draw the folds in the fabric.

There were…so many papers. I flipped through them, faster and faster. An entire collection that I’d thrown in the trash or left at Ryan’s dorm or he’d clearly nicked from my sketchbook.

They’re all right here.

My fingers curled around the pages. There was a hard lump in my throat. Ryan had kept all of them. Every scrap, every sticky note, every receipt that I’d drawn on the back of.

I looked up at him, and slowly, he tugged out a worn paper from the bottom, with deep indents and creases, like it’d been folded and unfolded a hundred times.

Oh my god.

The exercise was the very first time I’d drawn Ryan. When he’d modeled for my art class and ripped the paper out. My fingertips tingled just touching it. How many times did Ryan open this?

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