Page 32 of Fraternizing with the Enemy
Red and black. Teeth bared.
And when I lifted my eyes, I met two blue ones.
Logan gasped in a short, sharp breath, like he’d been the one almost flattened by the car. His hands still held my arms, but his grip had a tremor now, betraying the shock beneath his controlled exterior. “Are you okay?”
The heat of him, the proximity, the suddenness of it all, left my legs trembling. I knew he was asking about the fact that I was nearly flattened by a car. “Am I okay?” I echoed, and hearing my voice sort of snapped me back to focus. “Am Iokay? You’re seriously asking me that?”
Logan looked down the direction toward Expresso’s, and without a word, he grabbed my wrist and tugged me. I was too stupefied to dig my heels in. He drew me into the nearest empty alleyway, and it was like we weretransported to another place entirely—where the sun was obscured and everything was shadowy.
He dropped my wrist and his eyes, focusing on the gritty ground. “You shouldn’t have followed me,” he said in a quiet voice. “You—you should go back.”
The numbness of shock I’d felt in Expresso’s was fully wearing off now, waking up two warring emotions—anger and hurt. They shook within me like a multi-colored pom-pom, reaching every inch of my chest. “What,” I began in a low voice, “is going on?”
He looked away quickly, jaw tight, shoulders hunched, as if he wanted to shrink out of sight. That softness I’d always seen—the easy grin, the steady warmth—was gone, replaced by a tight, defensive edge. “You should go,” he repeated. “Before they start talking.”
“They?”
“Your friends.”
“Oh, sure.” My voice was tight. “You put me in this situation, butnowyou’re thinking about how my friends will react.”
Logan actually flinched.
My gaze dropped to the Bulldog patch. “Jade will cover for me, so unfortunately for you, I’m here until you explain.”Explain what universe we’d just stepped into.
Some of the tension in his face cleared, but almost as if I’d given him bad news instead of good news. As if he couldn’t stand the thought of standing in the alleyway with me for another moment. “Jade won’t?—”
“Are you Jefferson’s quarterback?”
“Yes.”
Just that. One word. One syllable. No panic. No apology. Logan’s jaw flexed like he wanted to say more, like he had a hundred things to tell me. But in the end, allhe did was stand there. Anger dulled for a moment, Hurt taking the upper hand. “Why were you even at Brentwood’s open house, then?”
“I was—dared to.”
And just like that, Anger put Hurt in a chokehold. “You toured Brentwood on adare?” How was it possible that it just kept gettingworse? “Was flirting with a Brentwood cheerleader part of it?”
My words were laced with sarcasm, because while I said it, I didn’t actually think Logan would do that.Thisguy, golden retriever to the max, flirting and taking a rival out on a date, on a dare? No way.
But his silence stretched out longer and longer, and I realized that he wasn’t going to answer.
He wasn’t going to deny it.
“You’re joking. You’ve got to bekidding me. Itwas?”
And again, Logan said nothing.
“You—we—I—” I actually had to close my eyes to orient myself. “We called each other almost every night before bed, you?—”
“I muted the call.” There was a tremor in Logan’s voice as he spoke, as if his tone dropped too low. “After ten minutes, I muted the call so you’d hang up.”
I muted the call so you’d hang up.So Logan never fell asleep talking to me. That was the reason I could never hear his sleepy breathing—he simply muted his phone and pretended. Waited until I hung up first. That was another giant blow, hitting me square in the chest.
My mouth actually hung open, because the world had been so clear. The sky had been blue and the grass had been green, but it was like he stood there, telling me that the grass was actually what was blue. I couldn’t even reconcile it.
He wasso perfect. He was sweet and funny and easily flustered. He was a football player, and he wascute.
All the perfections fell apart now, a betrayal of the highest order.
