He reached his hand out and I couldn't help but smile at him in return as I shook his hand. “You really punched him in the throat?” he asked with amusement written all over his tone.
My face got a little red. “Yeah.”
Something cold pressed against the back of my neck and I yelped. Sacha held a bottle out, a furrow to his eyebrows as he looked down at me. "I brought you some water."
"Thank you, Sassy," I told him, taking the bottle. He had another one in his hand and a small-sized popcorn tucked under his arm.
Julian let go of my hand before he spoke. "You didn't bring me one?"
Sacha snorted as he took his seat. "Fuck, no."
My gray-eyed friend settled the container of popcorn right smack in the middle of his lap. I didn't even think twice before dipping my hand into the bucket and grabbing as much as I could. Sacha smirked at me before taking his own handful and cramming all of it into his mouth.
"Are you having fun?" he asked.
I nodded. "I sure am. Are you?"
"Yeah." He smiled. "I am."
The game started up again and things got intense. It was one close goal after another, run, run, run, and a mess of screaming insanity. During a lull in the game, the two huge screens on opposite ends of the stadium lit up with footage on the field before the camera panned out and KISS CAM came up in huge pink, glittery letters on the screen. I smiled to myself when I saw it because I'd always gotten a kick out of the Kiss Cam at any sporting event I went to. The older couples were my favorites.
But when the screen zoomed in and focused on two people in the audience, it wasn't an old couple.
It was Julian and me.
My face flamed up like the guy inFantastic Fourhad gotten ahold of it. I looked in the direction where I figured the camera was and started laughing, shaking my hands and head in denial. The camera moved up and down in refusal of my gestures.
Yeah, my face turned even redder.
"Ah shit," Julian laughed right next to me.
I turned to look at him out of the corner of my eye and groaned when I saw the angle on the screen move up and down again while people in the crowd cheered us on. We looked at each other with dumb expressions on our faces, and I let the burn of embarrassment filter down to my chest.
“Gaby,” I heard Sacha behind me, but I couldn’t turn around. The camera was still on me. On Julian and I. I was frozen in place.
The crowd roared as the camera zoomed in again, a pink heart circling Julian’s face and mine.
The guitar player in the shot next to me shrugged those big shoulders with a wide, careless grin on his face. “Fuck it?”
“Gaby,” Sacha repeated my name, but I continued fighting the urge to turn around, I really did. The last thing I needed was to turn in his direction and make the camera focus on him and I for us to kiss. That kind of humiliation wasn’t something I wanted to sign up for.
“Fuck it,” I said to Julian with a rough, embarrassed laugh as my face got unbelievably hot.
He smiled and I smiled back at him nervously. Julian grabbed me by both ears, tugged my face closer to his and kissed both my cheeks twice as I burst out in what could only be described as giggles. The laughter in the stands was undeniable.
I choked a little and forced a cheesy grin onto my face as my heart kicked into a quick gallop at the unexpected and unwanted attention. It could have been a lot worse, right? They could have zoomed in on the object of my unrequited attraction to the left. I was still grinning as I patted Julian’s shoulder for being a good sport, but I wasn’t smiling for long.
When I turned to face Sacha immediately afterward…
He wasn’t smiling. He wasn’t smiling at all.
Chapter Fourteen
"Sitnext to me on the plane."
I was in the middle of toeing off my shoes to place them on the plastic trays at the security checkpoint when Sacha nudged me with his elbow. All of the rest of my stuff was already on the long metal table heading to the x-ray. A few feet ahead, Gordo was getting screened. One side of my cheek came up when I caught Sassy’s gray eyes. He’d been acting so weird since the day before at the soccer game, I wasn’t sure what was going on with him.
But, I’d take him the way he was being right then, normal and playful.
