Page 23 of Enchanted to Meet You

I grabbed him by the sleeve and hauled him sideways into the nearest door before he could get another syllable out, shoving it open with my shoulder and yanking him through by the front of his blazer with a strength I didn’t know I had.

“We have to stop meeting like this,” he teased, his voice all amusement and humor and absolutely grating to my nerves. “Do you think there will ever be a time we meet and don’t end up locked in a small room together?”

“Shut up,” I hissed back.

The door swung shut behind us, and it took a solid two seconds for me to register the pink stalls, the mirrors, the little basket of complimentary tampons someone’s mum had donated to the PTA fund, before the reality of where I’d just dragged him fully landed.

Rhys looked around, unhurried, hands still in his pockets, taking in the sinks and the stalls and the giant poster about proper hand-washing technique with the calm interest of someone touring a museum exhibit.

“So,” he said. “This is a girls’ bathroom, huh?”

“What are you doing here?” It came out sharper than I meant it to, mostly because my heart was still going twice as fast as it needed to be and I was blaming all of that on adrenaline and none of it on anything else.

“Here?” he asked, his voice all too nonchalant.

“At my school. In my hallway.” My hands were flailing about, my bracelets clanking together loudly. “Existing where people can see you.”

“Technically you’re the one who dragged me into a bathroom, so if anyone’s existing somewhere they shouldn’t be, it’s currently both of us.” He leaned back against the counter between two sinks like he’d done this exact thing a hundred times before, completely unbothered by the pink walls or the fact that we were, in fact, standing in a girls’ bathroom in the middle of a school day. He glanced around casually. “Nice acoustics in here, by the way. Very echo-y.”

I crossed my arms. “Rhys.”

He raised a brow in response. “Ainsley.”

This boy was going to be the death of me.

“You cannot just show up at my school,” I hissed.

“I think it would be more suspicious for me to bail on something that got scheduled three weeks ago,” he said lightly. He wasn’t even looking at me, too busy examining a poster about the dangers of vaping with mild interest, like this conversation was only about seventy percent as urgent as I currently believed it to be. “I don’t control the school board’s calendar. If I did, believe me, I would’ve scheduled this somewhere less likely to end with me getting kidnapped into a bathroom.”

I deflated a little. I guess that was true. But I was still angry and I couldn’t just let this go completely. “Well, you could have told me.”

“Told you what, exactly? ‘Hey, quick heads up, on Monday I’ll be at your school for forty-five minutes doing something that has nothing to do with you’? Forgive me for not treating my entire schedule as information you’re entitled to.”

“You had to know I would freak out.”

He finally glanced at me. “Actually, I assumed you’d react like a normal person, but I guess that was too optimistic of me. I probably should have guessed that much from the girl who nearly punched me three days ago.”

I glared at him. “You called me your girlfriend just now. In public.”

“Kind of the point of a fake relationship.”

“Not around people at my school! If Sebastian heard you⁠—”

“He didn’t.” His mouth quirked up and he pushed off the counter to close the distance between us before I’d fully processed he’d moved. He came close enough that I had to tip my head back to keep looking at him, close enough that I could smell the same laundry-detergent-and-grass smell from the closet two nights ago.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

He lifted a hand and, before I could pull back, ran his thumb slowly across the space between my eyebrows, unhurried, like he had every right in the world to be touching my face in a school bathroom. “Did you know you get these little lines here whenever you’re stressed?”

I scoffed. “I do not get lines.”

“Yes you do.” His thumb was still there, tracing the spot like it was the most natural thing in the world, and I hated myself for not being able to step away. “You should relax.”

“I can’t relax when you’re not taking this seriously.” I had a whole argument prepared, something about Clementine realizing we knew each other and how if she picked up on it then other people were bound to as well, but it was extremely difficult to hold onto a coherent thought with him standing this close, one hand still ghosting near my face like he didn’t even notice he hadn’t moved it. My voice came out meek as I said, “People saw you looking at me.”

“Like I said⁠—”

Behind me, the bathroom door swung open. I jumped away from Rhys like I was on fire, then without thinking about any potential consequences, I turned toward the door and screamed—a full, ear-splitting, completely undignified shriek that bounced off the tile and the mirrors and probably reached the front office—loud enough that whoever had started to push through the door immediately yanked it shut again with a strangled “oh my gosh, sorry, SORRY,” followed by the unmistakable sound of trainers sprinting away down the hallway.