Locker Crisis, I Took the Debate Champ

Chapter 2

POV: Chloe Lopez

My heart forgot how to beat for a full second.

He took it seriously.

The corridor felt airless. I was aware of everything at once—the fluorescent hum overhead, the squeak of shoes somewhere behind me, the faint smell of cedar that clung to Liam's collar. He hadn't moved back. His eyes—without the glasses to soften them—were searching my face like he was reading something written there.

"You're joking," I managed.

"Do I look like I'm joking, Chloe?"

The way he said my name—not Lopez the way he'd just used with Zack, but Chloe, like he'd been saving it—made my pulse do something embarrassing.

The bell saved me.

"I have history." The words tumbled out. "There's a quiz—I have to—"

I turned and walked fast, then faster, until I was basically jogging down the hall.

That was not how that was supposed to go.

I spent the rest of the afternoon staring at my notebook while the teacher talked about the French Revolution. My pen moved in aimless loops. My brain kept replaying the moment Liam folded his glasses and looked at me like I was the only thing in the room worth looking at.

He barely knows you, Chloe. He was being nice.

Was he, though?

Stop it.

By the time the final bell rang I'd decided the mature, sensible thing was to act like none of it had happened. I waited until the halls thinned out before heading to my locker, hoping both Zack and the ghost of my terrible decision-making would be elsewhere.

They weren't.

Liam was leaning against the locker beside mine.

He'd put his glasses back on. The files were gone. In one hand he held a thick paperback—Ulysses, in English, which tracked—and he was reading with the same focused stillness he brought to everything. When he heard my footsteps he closed the book and looked up.

That small, precise smile.

"Waited for you."

Three words. Said like we did this every day.

I stopped two feet away from him. "Liam. About this morning—I'm grateful, I really am, but I think you misunderstood. That was damage control, not—"

"Zack didn't buy it."

I blinked. "What?"

He tucked the book under his arm and closed the distance to my locker, reaching out to take the heavy stack of binders I'd just pulled from the shelf. He did it without asking, as naturally as breathing. "I saw him outside after school. He's betting his teammates it was staged. He's planning to come back tomorrow and confirm."

The bottom dropped out of my stomach.

Of course he is.

Zack didn't lose gracefully. I'd watched him drag a grudge match into a third quarter just to prove a point. If he figured out I'd been faking, the fallout would be ten times worse than two weeks of locker-corridor ambushes.

"So." Liam adjusted the binders in his arms and looked at me over the rims of his glasses, and there it was again—that glint of something that didn't match the meticulously knotted tie and the debate trophies. "Our relationship needs to be convincing."

"Our relationship isn't—"

"I'll walk you home." The corner of his mouth curved. "Boyfriends do that."

I looked at his outstretched hand—my own books held in it like a peace offering—and felt the slow, unmistakable sensation of stepping onto ice and hearing it creak.

You walked right into this, Chloe Lopez.