Page 45 of Ruthless Edge

Knox accepts this with a nod and says nothing else. Laura fills the silence with something, a question about the event, the sponsors, I'm not tracking it, because I'm watching Knox's face and something is there that wasn't there before. He heard it. He caught what was underneath it, and he looked at it, and he looked at her, and he said something, which makes something inside me soften. If only just a little.

"Third place overall."

Owen appears beside us, breathing hard but clean, in a way that confirms he ran the perimeter for most of it. The obstacles are optional, technically, since this is a charity run and not an actual race, and Owen apparently took that technicality as a personal challenge. He's pleased with himself, which is fair.

"That's great," I say. "Seriously, that's really good."

Owen grins. "What place did you finish?" he asks Knox.

Knox looks at him. "I wasn't paying attention to that. I was trying to finish with Emma."

Owen goes still.

I go still.

Laura, very noticeably, goes still.

Knox says it like it's just a fact. No performance to it. He was trying to finish with Emma. That was his metric for the race.

Owen recovers first. "Right." He looks at me. "Still on for lunch?"

"Yes, I’m starving," I say.

"Emma, you better hope there’s no prize for finishing your meals first, or you might get left behind by old Owen here," Knox says pleasantly.

Owen looks at me in a way that's asking something. I don't have an answer.

"We should all go," Knox announces. He's already standing, reaching a hand down for me. "Campus café, eat on the lawn. We're already filthy. Easy."

"Knox—" I start.

"Owen, you're coming." Knox says it as if the logistics are already settled. "Laura, you're welcome to tag along too, if you have nothing else to do." He pulls me up. "Let's go."

He starts walking, which is the thing about Knox Carter. He makes decisions and starts moving and somehow everyone ends up following, which is annoying when I'm the one doing the following and also somehow not surprising at all.

I fall into step beside him.

I'm still missing a shoe.

He notices, looks down at my foot, and doesn't say a word. He just adjusts his pace so I'm not limping to keep up.

Which is kind of nice.

Chapter Twelve

Knox

Emma has blue powder in her eyelashes.

I don't know why that's the thing I keep coming back to, but it is. We're sitting at a campus café table in the sun and she's got mud drying on her arms and pink in her hair and she lost a shoe and there's a stripe of color across her cheekbone from when we went through the powder station, and the blue in her eyelashes is the thing that keeps catching me. She blinks and it moves and I lose whatever Owen was just saying.

I've seen Emma dressed up. I've seen her in the neckline that nearly put me through a wall in a restaurant hallway. I've seen her in her SAB meeting clothes, put together and deliberate. I have genuinely never seen anything better than Emma right now, hair down and tangled, completely wrecked from an obstacle course, laughing at something Owen just said loud enough that it surprises her and she covers her mouth after.

I am in serious trouble.

Lunch is technically fine. The four of us grab food from the campus café and find a patch of grass, and the weather cooperated, which is the best thing I can say about the arrangement. Owen is sitting close to Emma. Laura is beside me. The conversation is functional. Nobody is being openly terrible.

Emma reaches over and steals a fry from the box between us without looking at me. I push the whole box toward her.