Page 19 of The Legend (Rivers Wilde 2)

All of the air steals from my lungs.

It’s not just because she’s the kind of pretty that makes you pay attention. Though she’s certainly that. Or that behind her dark-rimmed glasses, her eyes are perfectly symmetrical almonds centered with pools of brown molasses and cinnamon. It’s that, despite how different she looks now—from her hair down to her makeup-free face—I know right away she’s the girl from the library all of those years ago.

The girl who left her notebook of amazing stories behind. I should have expected that in the four years that passed that she would have had a growth spurt. But the girl I’m looking at has done much more than spurt.

She’s blossomed, and I am awestruck at the barefaced beauty standing in front of me.

I’ve wondered about her so often since that night. That night in the library, there’d been an openness and honesty in her eyes, that even as a fourteen-year-old, I recognized as special. And, I still have her notebook. I found it on the floor of the library the day after the party and put it on my bookshelf.

But it wasn’t until I was confronted with my own moment of truth that I truly understood it. My freshman year of high school, I tried out for a citywide basketball team. I’ve always been the best player in my school district. I didn’t even need to practice before games.

But those tryouts showed me that hard work beats talent every single day.

I didn’t make the cut for the team.

I’d been devastated. A few days later the coach called to say it had just been a mistake that they hadn’t called me after tryouts. I was fifteen, cocky and dumb.

In the locker room before practice, I heard some of the boys talking. Turns out that just days before, my grandfather donated a brand new athletic center to the city in exchange for my place on the team.

Humiliated is an inadequate word to describe the way I felt. The coaches barely paid attention to me when I joined the team for practice. And, I didn’t blame them. The day after our first game, I came home and was pulling something off my shelf when that book fell from where I’d put it. It opened to the inscription “All legends are lies. Make your own truth.”

Something clicked for me then, I may not have deserved to be on that team initially, but I was going to earn my place. I wrote the words “The Legend” on the side of my basketball shoes as a reminder when I was tempted to quit. And I busted my ass to make it true.

I practiced as many hours as I could. I worked harder than everyone else. And the first time they put me into the game—one we were losing and only had minutes left to play—I scored twelve points in less than two minutes with back-to-back three-pointers that snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. A few performances like that and I was moved to the starting lineup.

One day, someone in the crowd called out “The Legend” after I’d scored a triple-double and the crowd joined them in a chant. The name stuck. And now, it’s what everyone calls me.

The architect of that is standing right there. Close enough for me to touch. And I can’t seem to find the ability to string a coherent sentence together.

“Hello?” she says and peers at me. I look up to find her standing with her arms crossed over her chest and a scowl on her face. There’s no indication she remembers me from that night. That stings. But only briefly. It’ll be even better to see her face when she figures out who I am.

Besides, her scowl is fucking pretty.

“Why are you staring at me like that?” She sounds so annoyed. I smile at her and it deepens, her dark, lightly arched eyebrows wing upward, and she looks like she wants to kick my ass.

Oh, yeah… really fucking pretty.

“Like what?” I feign ignorance. I know just how I was staring at her and I don’t mind that she saw.

“Like you’ve never seen a girl before.”

“Well, maybe it’s because I’ve never seen a girl like you before.” I give her my most charming smile.

She grimaces like she just took a sniff of spoiled milk. She shakes her head and laughs out loud.

“What’s so funny?” I ask her. Now, I’m the one with a scowl and my arms crossed over my chest.

“You are funny. That line was so lame.” She rolls her eyes and turns back to her books.

I stand there, thrown by her clear dismissal. And also… very, very pleased by it.

I would have been disappointed if the girl from that night in the library, the one whose stories captivated and motivated me, turned out to be just like everyone else, after all.

I take an appraising glance around the store and whistle appreciatively as I see what they’ve done to the place. A dozen rows of gleaming dark wood, shoulder-height bookshelves take up the entire back of the store. I can smell the citrus from the wood polish mingled with the dry scent of cardboard boxes and all that paper.

The area of the bookstore directly in front of the door looks more like a really comfortable reading nook—complete with a huge round glass-top table with a bowl of what looks like M&M’s on it. I look to my left and see the small counter they’ve set up to sell the pastries they ordered, complete with an espresso machine.

“This looks great. You guys have really done a good job.”

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