Page 65 of When to Call a Blitz

“I’m just feeling a bit overwhelmed and I really need to get this suit off,” I huff, my heartrate picking up. The room is packed full of bodies and yet I feel like my skin is ice cold.

“Babe are you okay?” Izara steps in, taking me in her arms. She places her hand over my forehead. “You’re burning up.”

“Let’s get her outside,” Isla calls, already making a path for us through the crowd.

Owen catches us as we pass looking concerned. “What’s going on?”

“We just need to go outside, we’ll be back,” Isla assures him.

Instead of going out the main entrance, which would mean making our way through all of the bodies in the next room, wehead out the back door I followed Emmett through that night I chased him.

I chased him. Why in the world would I chase a man? And why would Ikeepchasing him? The man clearly never liked me. Clearly wanted nothing to do with me, and him ghosting me was a message I, for some reason, decided to completely ignore.

Like a damn idiot.

I feel a little better the second we’re through the doors. Hunched over against the wall, I dry heave a couple of times before I can breathe regularly again, and when that happens, I stand up against the brick, feeling the sting of the cold against every inch of my back.

Five women stare back at me.

“What was that?” Mila asks first, looking over me.

I shake my head. “That was embarrassing. We can go back in.”

Isla catches my arm as I turn. “No, you’re not going back in there just yet. Are you okay?”

Sighing, I rub my arms. “I don’t know how he found out that I still have feelings for him but he just made it clear back there that there would never be anything between us,” I say quickly before I can stop myself. “I’m fine. I expected it. It is what it is, I just wasn’t expecting it tonight, that’s all.”

“I thought you guys were starting to be good friends?” Izara asks, her head tilted.

“They were, and then we all told her to go for it,” Amara fills her in, and Zara nods.

I look around at their concerned faces and want to be anywhere but here. Zara’s cat ears are crooked in her locs, and she’s shivering. Isla’s nose is red, and not because of the paint that’s covering her whole outfit—the painting to Owen’s Van Gogh costume. Mila looks like all she wants to do is finally sit down, but she can’t because of the literal stinger sticking outof the ass of her costume. Amara looks like she wants to beat someone up, and I can’t tell if it’s Emmett or whatever issue she has with Cooper that’s keeping her angry.

And Briar just looks sad, which is tragically funny in her sexy ladybug costume. Leo had pulled her close when he first got here, saying “There’s my lady.” One of her antennas are bent, I’m assuming from shuffling through the crowd.

“I promise I’m fine guys.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.”

“But I am.”

The silence settles around us as we all start getting cold.

“Well,” Amara says finally. “I don’t really want to go back in. Why don’t we walk a little and do something else?”

I glance at the door, wanting more than anything to go back in and show the boys how unaffected I am. How happy I can be, despite just being randomly told I have no future with someone I really liked.

Because I was starting to really like him.

A lot.

“What do you have in mind?”

We end up at the inner harbor, just outside of Briar and Isla’s place. Normally, we would be a little nervous out and about at night. But Lulu’s is just down the road. Running distance, and thr—two of us happen to be seeing athletes.

My feet are dangling off the edge, the freezing water beneath us sloshing against the concrete as the nippy wind hits our cheeks.

“I feel like this is the dumbest, most cliché shit I’ve ever said, but men are really overrated,” Amara mumbles, laying back on the concrete.

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