Page 12 of Enchanted to Meet You

I decided, at that point, that the conversation had reached the limit of what my pride could withstand, and that the correct move was to leave with whatever scraps of dignity I still had before he could say anything else that was both true and unbearable. I uncrossed my arms and made for the door.

He let me get almost all the way there before he moved, unfolding himself off the bed with an unhurried calm, like he had all the time in the world. Somehow, by the time my hand found the doorknob, he was already close enough that I could feel him behind me, and when I turned it, the door didn’t open—because his palm had landed flat against it, just above my head, holding it shut.

I went very still.

I turned to look at him, my back pressed against the door now, and found him closer than I’d expected, one arm braced against the wood beside my head, effectively boxing me in without touching me.

“What are you doing?”

“Waiting a couple more minutes,” he said, looking too calm for someone standing this close to his rival’s little sister who he had just announced to his family as his girlfriend. “If you walk downstairs looking like that right now, it’s going to look weird. We need it to look like we were up here talking.”

“We were up here talking. You were insulting me, remember?”

I tried to shift sideways, put some distance between us, and he adjusted too, like he was blocking me in. He looked satisfied with himself, like he already knew how this was going to go and was simply waiting for me to catch up.

“You should probably know,” he said, “that you owe me one now.”

“I don’t owe you anything.”

“You do, actually. A pretty significant favor.” His eyes stayed on mine, steady, and something about it put me on edge, though I couldn’t have said exactly why. “And I’m not the kind of person who forgets when someone owes me a favor.”

“I didn’t ask for your help,” I repeated, but the words were weaker this time. It was hard to argue with a boy when his face was mere inches from yours.

“Doesn’t matter. You got one anyway.” He straightened, dropping his arm from the door, and stepped back just enough to let me breathe normally again, though the space between us still felt smaller than it should have. “So I’ll be collecting.”

“Collecting what, exactly?”

He reached past me—close enough that I caught, unwillingly, the smell of laundry detergent and something faintly like grass, soccer-field grass, the smell that clung to Sebastian’s gear bag after practice—and opened the door himself, holding it for me with a mock-politeness that made my teeth ache.

“You’ll find out,” he said. “Trust me. You’re going to want to say no. You should probably say yes anyway.”

My breaths were coming in shallow gasps now. I looked to the hallway now available behind me then to the boy I apparently now owed. I could tell him no, I thought. I could walk away right now, ignore him any time he reached out to me, give him no chance to collect. But I didn’t think Rhys was the kind of guy to let something go. What would he do if I tried to brush him off like that? My stomach sank as I imagined the most likely possibility: he’d tell Justin and Kelcey the truth—that I was here for Justin, that I did have a thing for him, that it was apparently a very intense thing like Kelcey thought.

And even worse? He would tell Sebastian about tonight.

About Rhys claiming to be my boyfriend in front of people. About me not shutting it down. My brother would be pissed.

Rhys would leave no stone of humiliation unturned. If I said no, he would make me deeply regret it.

I used my foot to kick the door shut again, revelling in Rhys’s mildly surprised look at the action.

“Fine,” I said, putting my hands on my hips. “But I’m not waiting around for you to ask. What do you want?”

He smiled like the cat that caught the canary. “You still up for coming to the party tonight?”

Two hours later, the house had transformed completely. Now it was wall-to-wall people, the air thick with the smell of spilled drinks and over-applied cologne. A cluster of guys near the stairs shoving each other and laughing too loud at something on someone’s phone as I navigated my way down.

I recognized a handful of faces from my own school scattered through the crowd—a couple of girls from my grade, one guy from my math class who nodded at me like we were closer than we actually were—but they were vastly outnumbered by people I didn’t know at all, most of them wearing enough maroon and gold that I didn’t need to ask which school they went to. Crofton kids, filling up Rhys’s living room like they owned it.

The living room furniture had been shoved back against the walls to make room for a crowd that had already started dancing badly and enthusiastically in the middle of the floor. Someone had strung fairy lights along the mantel that hadn’t been there two hours ago, and the kitchen island was crowded with bottles and mixers and the stack of red cups I’d dropped when Rhys had pulled me upstairs. Through the sliding glass doors at the back, I could see more people spilling out onto the patio, a few of them already half-submerged in what I assumed was a very cold, very ill-advised swim in the pool.

I would have been happy to flee from here immediately, but I knew I couldn’t. Not only because I’d promised Rhys he could cash in his favor tonight—something he’d put as simply as “I need you to help me make my ex jealous” with no other explanation, which was a terrifying prospect but better than waiting around for him to cash in the favor some other time—but also because I knew it would look insanely suspicious to Justin and Kelcey. While I knew it would become obvious at some point that Rhys and I weren’t dating, I preferred to push that moment off as long as humanly possible.

Rhys had split off from me to go talk to his friends—after making me swear up and down that I would stick around to put his plan into action—leaving me to fend for myself by grabbing a drink and hovering near a door trying to look busy. I was happy to go out to parties, and normally I’d even consider myself pretty outgoing at them, but with none of my friends here, feeling like I was behind enemy lines in a Crofton party, and my stomach twisting at the thought of what was to come, all I could manage was this.

Rhys, on the other hand, was in his element. He wasn’t standing against a wall pretending to have somewhere to be. He was in the middle of everything, moving through the crowd with the loose, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once in his life worried about whether he belonged somewhere, fist-bumping a guy in a Crofton jersey as he passed, laughing at something a girl said to him near the drinks table, tossing a comment over his shoulder to someone else that made an entire cluster of people crack up.

I watched, with a mounting sense of disbelief, as four different girls found separate reasons to touch his arm in the span of about ninety seconds, and he handled all of them with the same easy, unbothered charm, like it happened so often it had stopped registering as anything worth noting. A guy clapped him on the shoulder and said something that made him laugh, a real laugh, nothing like the smug half-smile he saved for me. Someone else called his name from across the room and he lifted a hand in acknowledgment without even breaking stride.