Page 110 of The Ruse

He already didn’t like Nash and might treat him like he’d treated my desk chair.

“What are you talking about?” Nash asked.

“I’m talking about the fact that you told the police Bailee and I had a fight the night she disappeared, and that it must mean I did something to her.”

“Who told you I did that?” Nash asked, taking a step back.

“It doesn’t matter,” Asher said, thankfully not bringing me in to this part of their argument. “But just so you know, if you had asked me about it first instead of going straight to the police, you would have understood that we weren’t having some big argument. The reason I was upset that night was because I had just told Bailee I was in love with her, but she decided to break up with me.” He stopped, like he needed to take a deep breath. Then he added, “I would never hurt Bailee.”

“Oh,” Nash said, seeming like this was the first time he’d ever considered that Bailee might have been the one hurting Asher that night. He rubbed his cheek with his hand. “I-I didn’t know.”

“Yeah, well, maybe next time you should get your stupid biases out of the way before you jump to the kind of conclusions that could ruin someone’s life.”

"I'm really sorry. I thought I was doing the right thing," Nash said, regret in his voice.

They stared at each other for a moment, and Nash looked like he might be a little scared about what Asher would do next.

I held my breath as I waited, getting ready to jump in the middle if I needed to.

But then Asher shook his head and started walking toward my hiding place, and Nash went the other way to exit the stage.

I stepped back, hoping Asher wouldn’t see me. But when he got behind the curtain, he looked my way, almost like he’d known I’d been there all along, and said, “Don’t worry, I’m not going to punch your boyfriend’s pretty face.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, we just…” I started to say.

“Seems like you’ve said that to me before,” Asher said. He looked around the room. “In fact, I think you said it in this very spot a few weeks ago.”

“I know.” I sighed. “It’s just complicated.”

Everything was so complicated because I was trying to figure out my feelings for two boys who hated each other.

Two boys who were so different from each other, but magical in their own way.

I was torn between the bright summer day and the cool autumn night.

“It’s complicated?” Asher scoffed and shook his head in disappointment. “Well, I’ll make it less complicated for you.” He took a step closer. “I’m not going to play a game where I fall in love with a girl who’s already in love with someone else. I did that once before and it didn’t turn out so well.” He glanced at the now empty stage where he and Nash had been standing, before turning back to me and saying, “This is me tapping out.”

He was tapping out?

So soon?

So easily?

Before even letting me know he had entered the match?

“I didn’t even know until just now that you saw me like that,” I said, my voice suddenly wobbly and sounding like I was on the verge of tears. “I thought it was you just teasing me.”

Had I hoped that there was something behind all the looks and the flirting? That when he’d kissed me, some tiny part of that had been real? That when we sang the song where our characters declared their love for one another, maybe just a little bit of that had been him saying those things to me?

Yes, I’d hoped there was something real there and that I hadn’t just been imagining it all.

But he’d never said or done anything to make me actually believe it could be real for him.

He stepped closer, so close that his chest pushed against mine. Then looking down at me with his big, hooded eyes, he said in a husky voice, “You say you don’t know how I feel about you?” His gaze bobbed back and forth between my eyes. “That you didn’t know that every time you caught me looking at you in class, I was hoping you could see me as something more than the boy you accidentally kissed one night?”

Was he saying what I thought he was saying?

That what had started as an accident had turned real for him?

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