Crosby
“You really sure you love me?”
She says it as if this is somehow news. As if I hadn’t been telling her with my eyes, my body, my very breath since the moment we first kissed. “I do. I have. All along.”
She sucks in a breath and stares at me agog. “Wow. This is a first.”
“What?” he asks. “You’ve never noticed a hapless man throwing himself at your mercy?”
She smiles. “No, that’s not it. This is the first time I’ve ever—oh god, am I really saying this?—felt the same thing in return.”
Crosby shakes his head and he’s so close I can feel his breath on my cheek; his nose nearly brushes the tip of mine.
“Then say it,” he commands.
“I think I just did, Crosby.”
He’s so close now that the full length of his body presses me against the wall. “You know what I mean. Say it back.”
“OK, but only because you’re being super bossy. I love you too, Crosby.”
It feels like someone has squeezed all the juice out of my heart and left it only with an urgency not to waste another second of my life.
“Then that’s it. We’re together. You and me against the world. And who cares what anyone thinks.”
“Except you might get in trouble dating a student.”
“But you’re not my student.”
“Do you not remember how schools work? The whole student/teacher dynamic? I’m pretty sure my swim teammate Addie … or Maddie, is thirsting heavily for the swim coach, but if he so much as stepped one toe out of line, it’d be all over for the team. They would fire his ass so fast it would be out the door before the rest of his body.
“And I heard a rumor that Headmistress Moody actually met her husband when he was a student here nine years ago. But they couldn’t do anything about it, or at least she wouldn’t. She will destroy you if she knows what’s going on.”
“Well, then,” Crosby says. “How good are you at keeping secrets.”
24
Ridley
Hadley stares at me like she’s hurt.
“Something is going on with you. Spill it.”
My best friend since kindergarten, Hadley may enjoy frequent shopping sprees with me courtesy of my daddy’s credit cards, but she does deserve some credit of her own.
She did warn me that Roland Peek was no good over a year ago.
“Hadley,” I say, my gaze landing on the door of Crosby’s classroom, my gut clenching at the same time my heart is expanding.
“Let’s walk,” I tell her.
“I thought we could get through the rest of my senior year without telling anyone apart from our parents. None of them are thrilled about our relationship, but as we’re adults, none of them can do anything about it.”
“What relationship?”
“Listen, Hadley, you cannot tell a soul.”