“Stop looking. Marry me.”
chapter five
Emme
Today’s Learning Objective:
Students will explore new and exciting opportunities.
I couldn’t stop laughing.Tears filled my eyes and my ribs ached. My face was burning hot again but I couldn’t help it.
“Oh, you’re precious,” I said, patting his rock-solid biceps. “Oh my god. I haven’t laughed like that in ages.”
I mopped my face with a napkin. Half my makeup came away in the process. When I looked up, I found Ryan staring at me, no hint of humor in his expression. If anything, the crinkle of his eyes looked…pained.
I shifted in the booth to face him and folded my legs in front of me. Places like this probably frowned on criss-cross applesauce, but I was taking all the liberties that having the city’s golden boy of football beside me afforded. “The next time I’m in my feelings, I’m going to call you and you’re going to say something unhinged like you want me to carry your big-headed babies.”
His brow quirked up. “I don’t have a big head.”
I wagged a finger at his long, rangy limbs and shoulders that barely fit through standard doorways. “Just look at yourself. They’d be huge, beastly children.”
He stared at me then, that distress still pulling at his features. He started to say something, but the server arrived with our meals and that interruption seemed to shelve the big beastly babies.
But Ryan didn’t move when the server left, didn’t touch his food. His gaze seemed unfocused and far away, and I only managed a few bites before asking, “Do you want to swap?”
We always ended up trading plates. Even when he ordered something far outside my taste, I ended up eating half of it. Or pushing our dishes together and sharing.
I slid my plate toward him but he held up a hand. “Do you remember how we promised to marry each other if we weren’t married by thirty?”
“I—” I gulped my water before saying something I’d regret because yes,of courseI remembered. But I remembered it the same way I remembered the pepper spray I kept in my bag: It was nice knowing it was there but I didn’t think I’d ever need it, and even if I did, the odds were high that I’d fuck it up and injure myself in the process. “What made you think of that?”
He crossed his arms over his chest again. It was his default position. He’d always drawn some joy in coming across as foreboding. He strived to be unapproachable. The truth was, he just didn’t want anyone getting close enough to poke at his secrets and sore spots because they were right there at the surface, lurking just behind the cool glares and intimidating postures. And the big head, obviously.
“I think we could help each other,” he said.
“By…getting…married?” I drained the rest of my cocktail.
Fuck it, drunk wasn’t the worst thing to be tonight.
“Yeah,” he said with a defiant chin lift that had me choking out a manic laugh. “You said you needed a revenge date. How about a revenge husband?”
This time, I was too stunned to laugh. All I could do was stare at him, my mouth hanging open and my fingers clutching at pearls I wasn’t wearing. Small pulses of electricity lit up my body like someone was dragging their nails over my skin. We stared at each other for the longest moment. I wasn’t sure I was breathing.
He looked so serious, and with more than his usual grim intensity. This left me no other choice than to drop a hand to his head and give it a rattle. “How many concussions did you get last season?”
“Just one.”
I pulled away from him before I did something truly mortifying like running my fingers through his hair. This conversation was a damn minefield. One wrong move and fifteen years of friendship would blow up in my face.
“One too many,” I said. “I’m worried about you, Wildcat. You’re not making sense.”
“What if I am?”
What? What does that even mean? What is this about?
I motioned to his plate. “Don’t you need to eat like every forty-five minutes to maintain the whole two hundred and thirty pounds of hurricane-force muscle thing?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Two twenty-five.”
