“For my sake,” he repeats slowly, the words dripping with disbelief. “What else is your delicate artistic nature willing to do for me, Patton?”
“Wh-what?” I ask, a tremor of fear running through me. His tone is soft, but there’s a dangerous undercurrent to it.
I back away as he takes a slow step toward me. Then another.
“You haven’t been to the beginner skating sessions anymore,” he says, his voice a low murmur. “What’s the problem?”
“I’ve been quite busy,” I say automatically, my back bumping into my drafting table. “How do you know that, I should ask?”
“I looked at the attendance list. One of the team’s assistant coaches is running it now.” He takes another step, closing the distance between us. “Or did you really think I was going to come to every single practice just on the off-chance I could watch you fail to bend your knees properly?”
The implication hangs heavy in the air. Hewascoming to watch me. “No,” I say quietly. “I don’t think that.”
“And I don’t think you were that busy,” he counters, his voice dropping even lower, becoming a rough, intimate whisper. “You’re just avoiding me like the plague after you came in my hands without me even touching your cock.”
Heat explodes across my face, a blush so hot it feels like my skin is burning. He says it so bluntly, so crudely, reducing that overwhelming, terrifying moment toa fact.
I lash out, desperate to deflect. “Well, you never came back to the party prep, so you’re in no position to talk about avoidance.”
“I have been trying to have one single, real conversation with you every bloody week for six months,” he snarls, and the sudden raw emotion in his voice makes my head snap up. The sheer frustration in his tone, is staggering. “I wouldn’t advise you to provoke me with accusations that I’m not chasing you enough.”
I stare at him, shocked into silence. My mind scrambles to process his words. Chasing me?Chasingme? This whole time—the shoulder checks, the mocking comments, the constant, unnerving presence—that was him… chasing me?
“Chasing… me?” I echo, my voice barely a whisper. “What are you talking about? That’s… not true.”
“Oh, yeah?” He lets out a harsh, bitter laugh. “Right. I should have just walked up to the new shy sheltered art student sketching in the corner and asked you out on a date. That would have worked out great. You didn’t exactly seem interested in guys, so I figured I did everything right to at least get your attention.”
A tidal wave of conflicting emotions crashes over me. He’s saying… he wanted to ask me out. The insults, thealmostmocking… that was his twisted, idiotic version of flirting? Of trying to win me over?
“I… am actually interested in guys,” I say, the words feeling weak.
“Like hell you are,” he spits, his frustration boiling over. He gestures around my room, at me. “You mean you’re really gay?”
The way he says it isn’t even a question. And a knot of anger and panic tightens in my chest because he’s right. Not aboutme not being gay, but about my own denial. I’ve never felt an attraction this powerful, this physical, before him. Before he touched me in that locker room. No. That’s a lie too. I’ve felt it all along, from the first time his blue eyes pinned me in the cafeteria. I just refused to acknowledge it.
“I’m gay,” I say, forcing my voice to be firm, meeting his blazing gaze. “And I still don’t understand your behavior. So just don’t pretend you weren’t messing with me.”
“Oh yes, I was,” he says, his voice turning into an aggressive whisper. “Just don’t you pretend you didn’t notice I couldn’t stop looking at you from the first day you walked into this damn school.”
“Are you gay yourself, Blackwell?” I fire back.
“Yeah,” he says without a second of hesitation. The certainty in his voice rocks me. “One hundred percent. Never been hard for a girl, never wanted to be. Always guys.”
My heart stutters. Then it starts to beat a frantic, hopeful rhythm.
“Then nothing was stopping you from just asking me on a date,” I say, clinging to the last shreds of my righteous anger.
“Nothing?” He laughs again, that same harsh, humorless sound. “What about your reactionright now? The way you look at me like I’m a grenade that’s about to go off? Or how you ran out of that locker room like your ass was on fire? Or how you just dragged me in here and hid me because your friends might see us together? Yeah, I fucking noticed them. You don’t have a clue what you want, Artie.”
His words, and the terrible truth in them, gut me. I do run. I do hide. I am terrified. But he’s wrong about one thing.
“I k-know what I want,” I stammer, a storm of emotions making my body tremble. In a jerky, unthinking motion, I pull my jumper up and off over my head, needing to get it off, needing to dosomething. “I’m gay.”
“You don’t have to lie, and you don’t have to—”
“I’m not lying!”
A surge of adrenaline, of panicked desperation to prove him wrong, to provemyselfright, floods through me.
