Fake Dating the Captain's Step Brother

Episode 6

Chapter 6

Kayla pov

The hallway was already loud by the time we reached my locker, Priya talking fast enough that I only caught half of it, something about her and her boyfriend's six month anniversary, a reservation she'd been trying to get for weeks, whether she should wear the red dress or the green one.

"Red," I said, spinning my combination without really looking at it. "Obviously red."

"That's what I said, but he likes me in green, and I feel like that means something, right? Like maybe I should wear the color he likes instead of the color I—"

She stopped talking mid-sentence. I felt her hand close around my wrist before I understood why.

"Kayla." Her voice had dropped to a whisper, sharp with warning. "Twelve o'clock."

I didn't have to ask. I already knew, some instinct in my chest answering before my eyes even found him, that low hum under my ribs that only ever showed up for one person in this entire school.

Cole.

He was walking down the hallway toward us, textbook tucked under one arm, jaw set in that same unreadable line he always wore like armor.

I felt cold at first. Then, embarrassingly, scared, the kind of scared that made no sense standing in a hallway during passing periods, like my body still hadn't caught up to the fact that he couldn't actually hurt me here, not really, not with words this time. And underneath both of those, stupid and stubborn and impossible to kill no matter how many times he looked through me, something that felt disgustingly close to happy.

I hated that part the most.

I closed my locker slowly, giving myself something to do with my hands, watching him get closer out of the corner of my eye. Some small, foolish part of me braced for him to stop. To say something. Anything.

He walked straight past us without slowing down, without so much as a glance in my direction, close enough that I caught the fading edge of his cologne and nothing else at all.

The disappointment landed harder than it should have, considering I'd known exactly what to expect.

"Okay, forget him," Priya said the second he was out of earshot, looping her arm through mine and steering me back toward the lockers like she could physically walk me away from the feeling. "I mean it. Delete. Uninstall. He's not worth the whiplash, Kayla."

"I know."

"You don't act like you know."

I opened my mouth to argue, mostly out of principle, when a different kind of energy moved through the hallway, lighter, easier, students turning their heads for an entirely different reason this time.

Rhys.

His hair was doing that thing it always did after he'd clearly run a hand through it one too many times, dark and slightly wild, and he was smiling before he even reached us, the kind of smile that made whatever room he walked into feel less serious than it had a second ago.

"Priya," he said first, easy and warm, and she gave him a small wave, already smirking like she knew something I didn't.

Then his attention landed on me, and something in his expression shifted, softer, more deliberate.

"There you are." He reached out and caught my hand before I could fully process it, pulling me gently away from my locker. "Come on. We're going shopping."

"Shopping." I blinked at him. "Right now?"

"Right now." He was already walking, tugging me along with him like this had been decided hours ago and I'd simply forgotten to be informed. "Dresses. For the event. You can't show up in whatever's currently hanging in your closet, no offense."

"I have class in ten minutes."

"You have English. English can survive without you for one day."

"That's not how it works, Rhys." I dug my heels in slightly, or tried to, though it did very little against the steady pull of his hand around mine. "I just transferred here. I can't just skip class on my second week."

"You can if you're with me." He glanced back at me, that easy grin doing most of the arguing for him. "Trust me. Nobody's going to say anything."

"That's not the point."

"Then what's the point?"

I opened my mouth, fully prepared to list several excellent points, responsibility and first impressions and the simple fact that skipping class for a shopping trip felt like exactly the kind of thing that got you talked about in a school like this, when he simply kept walking, hand still wrapped around mine, pulling me along the hallway with a patience that assumed I'd stop resisting eventually.

Infuriatingly, he wasn't wrong.

"This is kidnapping," I said, even as my feet kept moving with his.

"This is fashion emergency intervention. Very different."

Behind us, I heard Priya laugh, already calling out that she'd cover for me if anyone asked, which was somehow both comforting and deeply unhelpful at the same time.

We pushed through the side doors and out into the parking lot, midmorning sun bright enough that I had to blink against it, and it wasn't until we were actually outside that I saw the motorcycle waiting near the curb, sleek and black and entirely too much like something out of a magazine.

"Absolutely not," I said.

"It's completely safe."

"That is not a helmet-required activity I agreed to."

"You're about to." He grabbed a spare helmet off the seat and held it out to me, entirely too pleased with himself. "Come on. Live a little. You transferred to a new school, fell in love with a boy who won't even look at you, and now you're going shopping on a motorcycle with his stepbrother. That's a great story. That's practically a movie."

"When you put it that way it sounds worse, not better."

"Depends on your perspective."

I stared at the helmet in his outstretched hand, weighing the very real consequences of skipping class against the equally real fact that some reckless, exhausted part of me genuinely wanted to just get on the bike and go, to be somewhere that wasn't this hallway, this school, this constant orbit around a boy who'd walked past me twice in one week like I was made of glass he'd decided not to look through.

"Fine," I said, taking the helmet from him. "But if I get expelled, I'm blaming you entirely."

"Deal." His grin widened as he swung a leg over the bike, settling into the seat like he'd done this a thousand times. "Climb on."

I pulled the helmet over my head, fingers fumbling slightly with the strap, and it was only as I looked up to steady myself before climbing on that I caught movement in the building behind us, up on the second floor, one of the classroom windows.

Cole.

He was standing at the glass, not moving, not pretending to be doing anything else, just watching, his face unreadable from this distance but his stillness saying more than his expression ever could. He didn't look away when I caught him looking. He didn't pretend he hadn't been.

He just stood there, watching me climb onto his stepbrother's bike, and made no move to come down.

My stomach twisted, equal parts triumph and ache, and I couldn't have said which one won.

"You good?" Rhys asked, glancing back at me.

I tore my eyes away from the window and swung my leg over the seat behind him, wrapping my arms around his waist the way he showed me, and told myself I wasn't going to look back up at that window again.

"Yeah," I said. "Let's go."

The engine roared to life beneath us, and somewhere above, I knew without checking that Cole was still watching us pull away.