Hold my Ground

Chapter 3: Games Under the Table

The rest of the agenda died in her throat.

Beneath the heavy cloth, his shoe kept climbing — an unbearably slow drag of friction that felt like a struck match against her skin. She kept her pen moving on pure muscle memory, the words on the page blurring into meaningless shapes.

Across the table, one of the sophomores was asking a question about the volunteer roster. She heard maybe every third word of it. Something about shift times. Something about whether seniors got priority for the shaded posts. She nodded at what felt like the right moments and prayed it landed as attentiveness rather than the complete internal chaos it actually was.

"President?" Naomi tilted her head, pen paused over her notebook. "Something wrong with the budget line?"

Seraphina's knuckles went white around her pen. She kept her eyes locked on the paper, refusing to so much as glance down the table.

"No," she said, a half-beat too tight. She cleared her throat and reached for her usual register. "As I was saying — the Regional Sports Tournament opens Monday. As the host school, we're the ones handling everything. Twenty visiting schools. Crowd control and scheduling need to run without a single mistake."

His shoe paused behind her knee and pressed, just once — enough to send a jolt straight up her spine. Her breath caught. Heat flooded her face, and she stared harder at the paperwork, fighting every instinct to shift away from him.

"Knight," she snapped, voice cutting clean through the room.

At the far end of the table, Julian leaned back, hands laced behind his head, the very picture of a boy with nothing to hide. "Yes, Prez?"

"The tournament falls under your batch's responsibility, same as everything else this year — you're the one who signs off on it. I want registration forms, medical clearances, and equipment requests on my desk by tomorrow morning. Can you manage that, or is paperwork beneath our star athlete?"

A few council members winced on his behalf. To them, it looked like a public dressing-down of the most popular boy in school. One of the sophomores actually mouthed something sympathetic in his direction, like he'd just watched a man get sentenced.

Julian didn't look bothered at all. Something dark and pleased flickered in his eyes as he drew his foot back down her calf, one last brush against her ankle, then withdrew it entirely, sitting back into perfect innocence.

"Consider it done, President." His voice dropped just enough for her alone to catch the edge in it. "Wouldn't want to disappoint you when you're counting on me so heavily."

"Good. Meeting adjourned." She shut her folder with a snap sharp enough to make two underclassmen jump.

The room emptied in minutes, chairs scraping, voices fading down the hall, until the heavy doors clicked shut behind the last committee member. The moment the latch caught, her professional mask came apart at the seams.

She slammed both palms onto the desk and rounded on the boy still lounging at the far end of the table, face burning.

"Are you out of your mind?! Naomi was sitting right next to me! If anyone had looked under that table, if anyone had so much as glanced down at the wrong moment—"

"They didn't," Julian said, unbothered, already rising to his feet.

"That is not the point, Julian! Do you understand what happens to me — to both of us — if anyone finds out? I am not just some girl you can corner in meetings. I have a reputation. I have a family that would—" She cut herself off, jaw tight, before that sentence could go somewhere she wasn't ready to take it.

He noticed the change instantly, something in his expression sharpening. "Your family would what?"

"Nothing." She straightened, pulling her composure back around herself like armor. "It doesn't matter."

"It clearly matters."

"Drop it, Julian."

For a second she thought he might actually push. Instead his shoulders eased, and he let it go — not because he'd forgotten, she could tell, but because he was choosing to, for now.

The lazy slouch dropped away in one motion. He crossed the room with none of his usual meandering — deliberate now, focused, his eyes locked on her flushed face — and rounded the desk before she could think to put distance between them, pinning her lightly against its edge.

"You could at least pretend to feel bad," she said, breath still uneven.

"I could." He didn't look sorry in the slightest. "You want me to?"

"You're impossible."

"You're impossible," he agreed cheerfully. "I just enjoy it more than you do."

"You're so aware of everything, Seraphina," he murmured, voice dropping into the low, private register that always undid her faster than she liked. His hands settled at her waist, pulling her tight against him. "Sits there running the whole school like clockwork, barking orders at me in front of everyone — and your pulse is going like a drum right now."

"Julian, stop." Her hands came up to press against his chest, more out of habit than actual resistance. She hated how fast she colored around him, hated how completely her body ignored every instruction her brain gave it. "You have a tournament to run. Every visiting school is going to be watching you next week."

"Let them watch." His lips grazed the shell of her ear, his grip tightening with quiet possessiveness. "Twenty schools' worth of people cheering for me, and the only audience I actually care about is you. If winning every match is what it takes to keep your eyes on me — I will."

"You already have my eyes." She said it before she could stop herself, and immediately regretted how much it gave away.

Something shifted in his expression — the teasing edge softening into something quieter, more honest. "Say that again."

"I'm not repeating myself."

"You will eventually." He pressed one last kiss to her temple before finally stepping back, giving her room to breathe. "I'm a patient man when it counts."

"You have never been patient a day in your life."

"For you," he said, already backing toward the door, grin returning full force, "I'm learning."

She watched him go, arms crossed, trying and failing to hold onto her irritation. It slipped through her fingers the same way it always did with him — quietly, completely, leaving something warmer in its place that she refused, on principle, to examine too closely.

She sat back down at her desk once the door clicked shut, staring at the closing folder in front of her without actually seeing it. Five months of this. Five months of losing whole arguments to a boy who'd never once had to try at anything in his life, including, apparently, dismantling every wall she'd spent years building.

Her phone buzzed once against the desk — a reminder for the volunteer roster, nothing important. She silenced it and sat there a moment longer, listening to the empty council room, to the particular quiet that only existed in the minutes after he left.

It doesn't mean anything, she told herself, the same lie she told herself most afternoons. It's just proximity. Just the tournament making everyone reckless.

She didn't believe it any more today than she had yesterday. But it was easier to keep saying it than to sit with what the alternative actually meant — that somewhere in the last five months, without her permission or her planning, Julian Knight had become something she genuinely couldn't imagine losing.

She gathered her things and left before that thought could go any further.