Brie Sheridan has had her heart broken way too many times. Rhett Price is usually the culprit, but, this time, he might be the solution.
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Brooke 'Brie' Sheridan wouldn't necessa...
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RHETT
I have to do a double take as I stare down at my phone, still finding it hard to believe what I'm reading.
There are many things I appreciate about Brie, but one of them is how straight to the point she is; even if she's able to keep a conversation going for hours on end, which is an amazing feat by itself, she doesn't beat around the bush in the situations that matter. The fact that she's plain and simply agreeing to our deal when it hasn't even been twenty-four hours since the charity gala throws my world off its axis so easily it feels like it's never been well grounded in the first place.
I don't know how she does it, especially without trying. Even though I've been praying to every God and saint I can think of for her to say yes, part of me still felt like it was an even bigger shot in the dark than I initially thought, and I'd gotten in way over my head.
The walls separating us are still stronger than steel, fortified just enough so I can't break through them, not even through some sort of loophole, and she still found a way to surprise me by letting me in through the front door. It's a level of trust I'm not certain I deserve—all evidence points to the exact opposite, in fact—and, by bracing myself for a refusal, I've failed to account for the possibility of that refusal never happening.
Something between us shifts, or maybe it's just my wishful thinking leading me down a path of heartbreaking delusion.
I don't want to be the type of arrogant, entitled guy who assumes what a girl is trying to convey without actually verbalizing it, but something changed in the way she was looking at me last night. I don't mean it in a 'wow, she's suddenly glancing at my lips quite often, I wonder what that could possibly mean' kind of way, even though I did catch her staring at my mouth, but the hostility I grew used to seeing splashed all over her face was barely there the longer we spent in that conversation, oblivious to the presence of all those other people in the ballroom.
Even if I imagined the whole thing, even if she was still shooting daggers at me with her stupidly beautiful eyes, it has to mean something that my mind was fully willing to block that out and fool me into thinking I was the only person in that entire manor that mattered to her.
She could have been speaking to anyone else she wanted to talk to, drained social battery or not (or was it Nancy Huang, her roommate? I can't remember), and she still stayed to talk to me—not out of politeness, no. She's graceful and she's nice, but she won't pretend to like me or to enjoy sharing a pleasant moment with me if she doesn't want to. It had to have meant something to her too, right? Or am I just trying to convince myself of it?
My fingers hover above my phone, drawing circles in the air while I struggle to come up with both oxygen to keep my organs functioning—my brain has fully turned into mush while trying to understand what's going on in Brie's head—and with the right words to say. Now more than ever, I need to be careful with what I say and how I say it; I can't run the risk of antagonizing her, as it would ruin everything, including the microscopic level of trust in me she has managed to rebuild.
