Page 96 of The Longest Shot
So a beer it is.
And a meal.
Baby steps, but steps.
And after that, maybe some more.
It's absolutely terrifying.
It's also the first real thing I've felt in days…
Suddenly, I'm wondering why I agreed to leave my apartment.
Mills abandoned me ten minutes ago for a cluster of soccer players near the dartboard, sliding into their circle with that easy charm I’ll never possess. They’re laughing at something she said,leaving me at my corner table, which exists in its own social dead zone.
Because apparently, even when I'm being social, I repel anyone and anything.
I take another sip of my beer and scan the room. I look past the freshman girls whose November-issue crop tops are an exercise in hypothermia denial, past the two guys from my poli-sci seminar currently explaining the electoral college to a girl who’s been trying to escape for ten minutes, and past the?—
My entire body seizes.
He’s at the far end of the bar. For a second, my brain rejects the data, becausethatcan’t be James, the human embodiment of kinetic energy who treats silence like a virus. Becausethatguy is sitting motionless on a barstool, shoulders curved inward, one hand wrapped around whiskey.
The stillness is fundamentally wrong on him.
There's no drumming fingers and no restless shifting. Instead, his free hand lies flat on the scarred wood, utterly still. The neon Coors sign above the bar paints shadows under his eyes, aging him a decade. And, more than anything, he just looks alone and sad.
My body betrays me instantly. Heat floods my stomach. My pulse hammers in my throat. Every nerve ending suddenly decides to make its presence known. Every synapse is screaming at me to walk over there, wrap my arms around him, and tell him I forgive him.
Stop,I try to command my heart… hell, my whole body.Please, don't!
But stopping requires control I don’t have, because his profile in the dim light is the sexiest thing I've seen, jaw rough with stubble and hair falling across his forehead in that way that demands fingers through it. And, at the exact moment I'mfeeling alone and vulnerable and a little sorry for how I drove him away…
Well, he's lethal.
His thumb circles the rim of his glass slowly, methodically, as he silently works through whatever is on his mind. It's the same way his hands moved across my skin in the library, with the same reverent touch that made me feel like something worth keeping.
Every trained instinct screams at me to leave, but then I remember the protein bar wrapper in the freshly painted locker room, the evidence forcing me to change my charge sheet, and how I got scared, ran away, and then treated him like radioactive waste.
The guilt arrives sharp and immediate, because it’s what I’ve been avoiding: I helped trigger the gala disaster. Not deliberately, but through silence and cowardice. I ran, and James did what damaged people do when they're shocked and upset.
He reverted to form.
He made a loud, grand gesture, when for the last month he'd been showing me there's more to him than that. And now he’s paying for it, suspended from his team, all because he tried to help using the only method his programming allowed once I'd closed him out.
Mills tracks my stare and whistles low. “Holy shit. You and Rook?”
Mills's words hang in the air.
The denial rises automatically to my throat—a reflexive defense mechanism, the same one that's kept me safe for years—but as I open my mouth to deliver it, something fundamental shifts, because the lie tastes like ash before I can even speak it.
Because this is the moment I can choose a different path.
I can choose to feel and to live.
So I don't lie. Instead, I just nod. A single, terrified admission.
Then, before logic can intervene, I’m standing.
