Page 112 of Hate You, Maybe
“Hey.” I tilt my head as something occurs to me. “Is Clara the reason you got so worried when you thought I went missing at the retreat?”
He looks down at my hand, still on his knee. “I’m sure I’ve got that instinct programmed in me. I don’t ever want to feel like that again. The sense of helplessness and loss. It’s why I never let myself get close to anyone new. Close enough to care.” He lifts his gaze, eyes softening at the corners. “Until now.”
Emotions catch in my throat, but I swallow them down. “You feel close to me?”
“I tried not to,” he says.
“And I tried not to get tangled up with a coworker.” I shake my head and sigh. “Guess we’re not so great at achieving our goals after all.”
“Or we could just say we’re flexible.”
“No one’severcalled me flexible before.”
“It’s about time, then,” he says, and we both fall quiet for a moment.
“So.” I scrunch my nose. “What do we do now?”
He lays a hand over mine—the one on his knee—and presses tenderly. “We do our best to get that four-year accreditation from the SACSS. Then I tell Dr. Dewey I’m not leaving Stony Peak. And then you … Well, I hope you’ll decide to stay, too.” He glances around the room. “I mean, stay in Harvest Hollow. At the school we both love. Not stay here in this apartment, specifically.”
“Ah.” I test a soft smile of my own. “Does this mean you aren’t holding me hostage anymore?”
“Not unless you want me to.” A small laugh slips out of him, but his eyes are still wet at the corners.
“What if Dr. Dewey makes your transfer to Harvest High a condition of the grant?”
“We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”
I put my other hand on top of his hand, that's on top of my hand, that’s on top of his knee. A hand sandwich. “Or …”
“Or what?”
“Or maybe we’ll find a way to get both our projects funded.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Dex
“You know, if you hurt my best friend, Iwillhave to kill you.” Loren eyes me sideways, one brow cocked high. “And I’m a lot scarier than I look.”
“I believe you.” I lift my palms in surrender. “But the good news is, I’d rather lose an arm than hurt Sayla. Both arms, probably.”
“Good man.” Loren shifts her focus back out to the field where Sayla’s pacing the sidelines. She’s got a whistle permanently glued to her lips, and I have a pencil behind my ear for taking notes during this morning’s final rehearsal.
The end-of-October chill is in full force, and the temps dropped further this morning. Cold enough to fog our breath while we were running play lines. And yard lines.
“Speaking of killing it,” Loren says. “Our girl really stepped up, didn’t she? Like, all the way up.”
Our girl.
“She sure did.”
“Actually, you both stepped up,” Loren adds, and my chest expands at the praise. Not so much for what her words indicate about me. But for the volumes they speak about how Sayla feels about us now. Which is to say a whole lot different than last month.
Sayla blows her whistle and calls the team over. And by that, I mean the group of theater kids in borrowed uniforms. They’ve spent the past hour playing their hearts out, representing the Gray Squirrels in a scrimmage. Hopefully, they’re also having a little fun in the process. That’s kind of the whole point.
The superintendent and the school board are up in the stands along with the rest of our faculty and students. So is the team from the SACSS.
They’ve been here all week, visiting our classrooms, meeting with department heads. I’m surprised that reading over the two-hundred-page report our team wrote last spring didn’t murder them with boredom.
