“I’m just kidding,” he said.
“Kidding,” I repeated stupidly. “Right. I know.”
He was watching me expectantly. After a brief silence, he said, “Do you want to go now or…”
“Yes! I have to go. My dad’s waiting.”
My dad’s waiting. I just told him my dad was waiting for me. I might as well have told him I’d carried a watermelon.
I turned around quickly, stumbling over my feet because he was so close behind me and I just knew if I brushed up against him I would lose any ability I had left to function. I opened the door and looked left and right before going into the hallway. “All clear.”
I’d meant to say that in my head but it sort of…slipped out.
“Are you sure?” Tristan poked his head out and looked back and forth before meeting my eyes with a gaze that was so amused it might have been funny if he wasn’t laughing at me. “Do you want me to scope it out. Someone might be hiding around the corner.”
“You’re hilarious.” I crossed my arms over my chest as I turned away from him, heading in the direction I’d been going before I’d darted into the weight room. I heard him shut the door and his footsteps followed me. I swung back around, suddenly panicked at the thought of being alone with this guy for one second longer. “You don’t have to come with me.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I don’t want you to.”
“Why not?” He didn’t seem offended, just curious. And amused. Like I was his own personal comedian.
“Because…because…stranger danger.” It was the first thing I could think of and…it was lame. As if he didn’t already think I was young and awkward. Way to be cool, Harley.
He tilted his head to the side and considered me like I was some weird specimen again. “Okay,” he said slowly. “You’re going to want to follow signs for the west wing. Take a right and then two lefts.”
I spun around as he was talking. “Okay, got it. Thanks.” I started speed walking in my haste to be away from this guy.
“Hey, Harley?”
I stopped. “What?”
“You’re heading the wrong way.”
“Oh. Right.” There was no way to avoid him as I turned around and walked past him but I didn’t lift my head as I passed. “Thanks.”
His low voice was tinged with laughter at my expense. “See you around, Harley.”
Not if I could help it.
2
Tristan
All anyone was talking about on Monday morning was the new guy.
I typically tried to steer clear of the gossip and the drama of Talmore High, but this morning there was no getting away from the excited buzz about this Conner dude. Some poor unfortunate soul who’d started his first day at this school by offending the biggest jerks on the football team and then hitting on one of their girls.
Danny’s ex, Rosalie, to be precise. Strange girl. Quiet, reserved, cold as ice. But she’d never been mean to me and I’d never seen her pull any mean girl crap on anyone other than her own little clique, so I had no beef with her and I didn’t care who hit on her.
The thing that was bothering me was that everyone was talking about the new guy…but what about the new girl?
I hadn’t heard a single word about Harley, and I hadn’t caught sight of her despite the fact that I’d been on the lookout.
“Hey, man, you going to the party after practice tonight?” my friend Leroy called out as he passed me in the hall.
“Maybe.”
He was surrounded by some girls from the squad and laughing over something I had no interest in as he gave me a knowing smile. Leroy and I had been playing ball together since junior high so he knew very well that ‘maybe’ meant ‘no.’
Once upon a time I did the whole party scene, but those days felt like another life. A lot had changed since then. My mom got sick, my grandpa had passed, and I’d figured out how meaningless all the high school drama was.
Besides, who had the time? I went out after games as a team bonding thing, but other than that I had too much on my plate to spend it drinking beer and watching girls get drunk. As a senior with recruiters watching my every move, my grades had to stay decent and my game needed to be better than ever.
As for girls…?
I found myself holding my head up higher. I was already taller than most and by craning my neck a bit I could see over the crowd. There was one particular girl I was looking out for. A tiny little thing with funny hair and big dorky glasses.
I’d been keeping an eye out for her all morning with no luck.
Why the interest?
I couldn’t exactly say. See, here was the thing: I didn’t do girls. Not anymore. Not just because I didn’t have the time—which I didn’t—but because I didn’t have much interest.
Don’t get me wrong. I liked girls. I just didn’t like any of the girls at Talmore High. Sort of like how I liked my teammates, for the most part, but I didn’t have many close friends.
I just couldn’t relate to my peers. I found gossip boring and most conversations to be a carbon copy of the last… Maybe it was me.
Yeah, it was definitely me.
My buddies on the team told me I could have any girl I wanted, but not one of them had caught my interest and I couldn’t tell you why. Like everything else at this school, the girls seemed to blend together for me. School life in general was like that—boring.
That sounded mean, huh? But really, I’d been going to school with the same people in the same building for so long now…boring was the only word I could think of. I was just going through the motions until college.
At least, I had been.
I felt a grin tugging at my lips at the memory of Friday’s bizarre little run-in. A moment of color and clarity in an otherwise monotonous routine. Harley had been so very different and nothing she’d said was what I expected to hear. She’d been so…weird.
I shook my head at the memory. What an odd duck. She’d looked at me like I was some big bad monster. No one ever looked at me like that. I was a nice guy. A gentleman. Everyone knew that.
But apparently not the new girl. That bothered me, maybe more than it should. I didn’t normally waste too much time worrying about what anyone thought of me.
I scanned the crowd again but no little weirdos wearing giant sweaters were visible.
“Looking for someone?” Erika fell into step beside me on the way to my next class. The head cheerleader and a fellow senior, she was probably the closest thing I had to an actual friend in this school. My buddies were great to joke around with and all, but Erika had been the only one who’d even known that my mom was sick and the only one I’d talked to about it. We weren’t super tight—she had her girl friends and I had my guys—but she was cool and knew me better than most.
Which was why I didn’t lie. “New girl.”
She arched her brows. “I heard there was a new guy, not a new girl.”
I shrugged.
“Rumor has it he’s a total loser. A druggie, maybe homeless, definitely from the wrong side of the tracks.” She gave me a sidelong look and we shared a knowing grin.
My guess was all high schools had rumor mills, but I’d be shocked if any school was as quick to spread lies or as eager to believe them as this one. Erika and I had both been gossiped about enough to know that there was likely no truth in any of it.
“There’s a new girl, too,” I said. “Luckily for her, she hasn’t made any enemies yet.”
Erika gave a little snort of amusement. “Give her time,” she said.
Something weird happened then. My chest tightened. Not like I was going to have a heart attack or anything but just a twinge of…something. Worry, maybe.
I frowned at that. I was worried about Harley. A girl I barely even knew.
Huh.
She really had gotten under my skin. Probably because she was so unapologetically different. That was something we didn’t see much of at Talmore High. Everyone I knew at Talmor
e seemed determined to fit in as well as possible and they usually succeeded.
But not Harley. She looked like she wasn’t even trying to fit. Like she was above all that, or maybe just unaware of it. She’d said things that were so…unexpected. I couldn’t remember the last time someone had shocked me like that, or made me want to laugh.
Besides that, she was cute.
Not some crazy beautiful hottie like Erika, or some sexy curvy flirt like Erika’s best friend Allie. No, this new girl was all baggie clothes and braids, no makeup, no sexy style, and no pretenses. If anything, someone might call her plain.
Except that she wasn’t, not if you looked close.
She was understated, yes…but kind of pretty, in a unique sort of way. Those brown eyes of hers were huge behind her glasses and her chin was narrow, giving her a heart-shaped face. Her nose was pert and her lips were pink and lush. All combined, she’d looked sweet and vulnerable, scared but ready to fight.
She’d looked like a sweetheart and a little warrior all at once.
She was an enigma, and that was so very appealing. It made me want to find her, to talk to her, to—
And there she was, hovering by a locker, looking like she might try to crawl inside it to avoid being seen. She was wearing a dark gray hoodie and baggie jeans again—the whole ensemble was as good as a shroud, hiding her tiny frame and making it look like she might disappear right in front of your eyes. The hair was in long, loose braids again, with a bandana holding stray curls back from her face. When she turned so I could see her profile, I had a memory of Wednesday Addams from The Addams Family—all goth cute and just a little scary.
“Dude, are you smiling right now?” Erika had stopped beside me as I paused by the lockers across from Harley’s.
Erika spotted her. “Let me guess. New girl?”
I nodded, unable to take my eyes off her. Erika laughed softly and mumbled something about how this would have everyone talking. That jarred me out of the moment. People talking…about Harley.
There it was again, that tug of worry. That feeling of protectiveness that I hadn’t felt since…well, I didn’t know when. Maybe never. I stopped Erika with a hand on her arm. “Hey, do me a favor?”
“Of course.” She didn’t try to hide her surprise. I never asked for favors. “What is it?”
I glanced over at Harley again. “Tell the girls to be nice.”
She widened her eyes slightly. “I’m not the welcoming committee, you know,” she teased.
Oh, I knew. Most people were terrified of Erika, and that was the way she liked it. But she knew what I meant. She was the girl all the other girls looked up to, so if she told some of her underlings to be nice, they would.
I didn’t expect Erika or her besties Allie and Rosalie to take her under their wing or anything, but a single word from Talmore’s revered head cheerleader and no one would dare to give the new girl a hard time.
“Only for you,” she said, with a pat on my arm. “I’ll spread it to Tara and the others.”
Tara was one of the meaner mean girls. Unlike Erika and her besties, Tara and her friends were slightly lower on the social totem pole so they had something to prove, and more often than not they made their point with cruelty. A new girl—especially one who looked and dressed like Harley—would be a prime target for their unpleasantness.
Erika walked away, muttering something else I couldn’t hear because I was too busy watching Harley duck her head and maneuver an armload of books. There was a pause in the flow of pedestrian traffic and I was across the hallway and at her side in three strides. “Need a hand with those?”
She jumped. Like…a foot. It was kind of impressive, actually. When she turned those wide brown eyes up to me, I asked, “Have you ever been on track and field?”
“W-what?”
I tried not to be amused by her confusion or concerned by her fear. Seriously, I knew I was a big guy and all, but did she have to keep looking at me like I was about to pounce? I mean, sure, I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to.
“Let me give you a hand,” I said, taking one of the books from her arms before she could protest. “Where are you headed next?”
“Biology.” She eyed me warily. “I know where it is.”
“Studied the blueprints for Talmore High this weekend, did we?” I teased.
“Yes.” She said it so seriously I honestly couldn’t tell if she was joking and had a super dry sense of humor or if she really had spent her weekend learning the layout for the high school.
The fact that both seemed likely made me want to laugh aloud, and that was something I rarely did.
“May I walk you to class?” I don’t even know what happened to me. One minute I was Tristan O’Hare, star quarterback, and the next I was some dorky teen from the fifties. I supposed this was one of those side effects from being raised by my mother and my grandfather. My grandfather, in particular, had been big on the manners.
She was back to eyeing me oddly. “Is this a prank?”
I frowned down at her. “Excuse me?”
“This.” She waved a hand at me. “You, being nice, the whole ‘let me carry your books and walk you to class’ thing. This is some prank on the new girl, right?”
“What? No. What sort of—No.” I cut myself off because I was just that shocked. I was a good guy. A nice guy. Everyone knew that.
She started edging backward, knocking into Leroy, my buddy from the team. “I can get to class on my own, thanks.”
Her glare was mutinous like she expected me to do something to her…like, I didn’t even know what. Shout ‘psych!’ and make everyone point and laugh? That was the sort of scenario I thought she might be expecting.
I found myself staring at her, wondering what on earth had just happened. Yet again, Harley had not acted like I’d expect. She seemed to have taken an instant dislike to me and maybe I was a sicko but…I kind of loved that. A smile tugged at my lips as I watched her looking left and right like she was figuring out the fastest route to get away from me.
Now, I know how this will sound, but—people loved me. It sort of came with the territory when one was a star quarterback at a football school. Lots of girls hit on me and the guys wouldn’t dream of going up against me. I didn’t have to flaunt power in this school because…well, because I owned this school.
But like I’d said before, popularity didn’t mean much to me. When your mom is so sick you’re certain she’s going to die? You get a better sense of what’s important in life. You learn who really cares and who really knows you, and I’ll let you in on a spoiler right here and now…it wasn’t the sycophants and the fans. It was a small group of people who didn’t even seem all that warm and fuzzy on the surface. Like Erika, for example, or Leroy.
Popularity and all that came with it? It wasn’t what it was built up to be. The moment my mom got sick, I saw that scene for what it was. Shallow. Unfulfilling. Useless, really. Just a waste of time.
Harley lunged forward and plucked her book from beneath my arm, eyeing me warily the whole time like I was a wild animal with rabies. I let her take the book, but I was even more determined than ever to get to know this girl.
She didn’t care about my status, either. She not only didn’t care that I owned this school, she seemed turned off by it, and for a reason I couldn’t quite explain, that made me like her all the more. It made me want to get to know her—it made me want her to know me.
“I told you I didn’t need you to walk me to class,” she mumbled as I fell into step beside her.
“See, now I beg to differ.”
She stopped, not seeming to care that we were in the way of people hurrying in both directions. I didn’t care either. I was big enough that they had to walk around me. I tried to keep my expression harmless and bland when all I really wanted to do was grin at the irritated look on her face.
Man, this girl was cute when she was annoyed with me. It was way better than that look she gave me when she was scared.
“I don’t need your help,” she said.
I tried not to laugh. “You’re walking the wrong way again.”
Her eyes flared wide and her head swiveled back and forth as she got her bearings. “Wait, really? But I thought—”
“No, not really,” I said.
She frowned at me and I couldn’t hide a grin. “Would it really be so bad to have an escort?”
“An escort?” She shook her head. “Seriously, what decade do you guys live in?”
I did laugh this time because I’d been thinking the same thing. She made me want to do things like hold doors open for her and yes, carry her books. Don’t ask me why. Apparently some of that ‘how to be a gentleman’ stuff my grandpa used to teach me actually stuck.
Whatever. All I knew was, it seemed to come out in force around her.
You know what didn’t come out? Words.
She turned and continued walking and I continued at her side. But now…I had no idea what to say. She seemed fine with walking in silence—another way she was unlike anyone I’d ever met at this school.
“What are you into?” I asked. Not exactly my finest opening line, but it got her to look up at me. Warily, but I’d take what I could get.
Besides, something told me she valued directness over meaningless small talk.
“What do you mean ‘what am I into?’”
I bit back a grin. “It wasn’t a trick question, Harley.”
She looked away from me, staring straight ahead. “Everyone is looking at us.”
I looked around. “You’re right.” I hadn’t noticed, but then again, I was used to stares.
“Are they laughing at me? Is this your idea of a joke?”
The bitterness in her voice had me jerking back in shock so I could see her face. She was serious. “No. And…wow.” I shook my head. “Seriously, are you that jaded?”
She narrowed her eyes at me. Yes, that look said. She was that jaded.
I let out an amused exhale—something between a sigh of exasperation and a laugh. “Would it help if I gave you my word of honor that I am in no way mocking you right now, nor will I ever make you the butt of a joke?”
Dating the Quarterback (The Bet Duet Book 2) Page 2