Dare You to Chase the Soccer Player (Rock Valley High 5)

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I was tempted to ignore it, but then it went off again. I took it out to look at the screen. Charlotte and Beth’s names popped up. It was a group message.

Beth: Hey, Lex, how’s it going?

Not thinking about Zane are you?

Need me to babysit you on set today?

Charlotte: She’s not thinking about him.

She’s not going to risk her career for anyone.

Not even him.

I couldn’t help the stabbing sense of guilt throbbing beneath my shoulder blade. My friends were just trying to help, but they weren’t making this any easier. Being around Zane shouldn’t have been this hard. His dad, my boss, and my friends were all laying it on thick. I didn’t want to think about them.

With a sigh, I tucked my phone back into my pocket and smiled up at Zane as he handed me another gummy.

“So, what are you studying?” he asked, grabbing the top book off of my stack. It was Hamlet: the bane of my existence.

“The world’s most boring play.” I took it out of his hands and threw it back on the pile with a look of disgust. “I really don’t understand it. Nothing Shakespeare wrote makes much sense to me, but I have a pop quiz I have to pass this week, or Mr. Garret says he’s going to fail me.”

“To be, or not to be,” Zane growled in a deep voice. I threw him a confused look, that only made him laugh. “It’s a line from the play.”

“Oh, I knew that.” It had sounded familiar. “Do you know it?”

“It was one of the first stage plays I got to see as a kid.” He grabbed another gummy out of the bag and smiled as he chewed it slowly. “Mom took me. It was in London, at the actual Shakespeare theater. I’d never seen anything so amazing. It was right then and there that I knew I wanted to be an actor.”

“You understood all of that as a kid?” Now, I was feeling really stupid. If even a kid could understand it, then I was hopeless.

“No, not a word.” He laughed at the doubtful expression on my face. “Seriously. But I could understand the emotion. The actors were so powerful. I wanted some of that. I wanted to be able to move an audience. To hold it captive in the palm of my hand. To make them cry when I wanted and laugh when I told them to. Mom knew I was sunk. She enrolled me in theater the next day.”

I stared in awe at him. He seriously was the strangest boy I’d ever met. He’d been working toward a dream since he was a tiny kid. Most of the guys I knew barely had an idea of what they were going to do next week, let alone the next five or ten years. And I never shared my own dreams with them because I always thought it made me seem like a freak to be so determined. But with Zane, there was none of that pressure because he felt it too. A drive to go after his goals. It was exhilarating to be around someone like that.

“Tell me about your makeup,” he said, reaching over to lightly run a finger down my jawline. It was a light touch that had me internally begging for more, no matter how much I tried to shake it off. “What got you into it in the first place?”

“Necessity.” I smiled sadly at him, then reached for another gummy. This wasn’t a story I was used to spilling. It was one of the few secrets I actually kept hold of tightly. Letting go wasn’t going to be easy. “I had really bad breakouts for a few years. It started with learning how to cover them up and then I started to expand into everything else. I fell in love with it and the community. I spent so much time online watching tutorials. It’s an art. An art that allowed me to hide my flaws.”

His lips puckered slightly as he studied my face. I could tell he was studying it, looking for hints of the scars that I so desperately covered every morning. He wouldn’t find them. I was that good. But still, it was always nerve-wracking to be put on display.

“You feel like you have to hide?” he asked softly. “Even now?”

“Well, I went on some pretty powerful meds that helped clear up my skin a year ago,” I said with a shrug. “But the acne had done its damage. I’ll never have clear skin again. Not unless I do some expensive laser treatment. I would spend every last dime on a treatment like that.”

His jaw worked as he stared at me. “You have scars under there?”

Here it was. The moment I’d been dreading for so long. That was why I usually kept those kinds of personal details out of my dating life. Guys didn’t care about acne scars or blemishes, as long as I kept them well-hidden. Of that, I was sure. But Zane and I weren’t dating, right? We were just friends. And I knew deep down that Zane could be trusted.

“Don’t worry. You’ll never see them. I’m good at keeping them covered up. That’s why I don’t swim.”

He reached over and grabbed my hand, lacing his fingers through mine. His palm was warm against my skin. With a slight squeeze, he leaned toward me, plucked the phone from my hand and opened the camera.

“Let’s take a picture,” he said, putting it into selfie mode.

Holding it up so that our faces appeared on the screen, he turned to place a light kiss on my cheek and clicked the photo. I was pretty sure my whole body flushed from the sensation. It wasn’t anything sensual. And really, it could’ve been a kiss between friends, but the way my body reacted to it was so not kosher.

Looking approvingly down at the photo, Zane handed my phone back to me. “There. Proof that I don’t care about all of that. You could swim around me. Heck, you could go without makeup, if that’s what you wanted. I don’t care about any of that.”

“Actually...I think I already knew that.” I leaned back in my chair until we were on eye level. Thank goodness for cameras, because I was going to want to stare at that face for years to come, he was so dang gorgeous. “You’re different, you realize that? You’re not like other guys around here.”