She pushed back against the bed and scrambled into a sitting position.
“Nora…what?”
“Wesley? You’re still a virgin?”
NORTH
The Past
Maine. Kingsley hated Maine. The weather, the people, the absolute lack of…anything. Anything at all worth living for. Hated it. Loathed it. Could find nothing redeeming about the place at all.
So why could he not stop smiling lately?
Spring came early that year. The snow began to melt and the browns and greens of the forest floor proved their resilience again. After one week of not winter, spring fever hit the school and the entire student body—all forty-seven of them—poured onto the one flat patch of ground, bringing with them baseballs and footballs.
Footballs? Kingsley rolled his eyes. He would show these stupid American boys real football. From under his dorm bed, he pulled out his soccer ball and took it to the lawn. With the other boys tossing Frisbees and American footballs back and forth to each other, Kingsley stood alone off to the side and started juggling the ball with his knees. For fun he’d switch legs, switch from knee to ankle, left to right, and then back again. When a few minutes passed and the ball hadn’t stopped, hadn’t fallen to the ground, he began to acquire an audience. The audience of fellow students started to tease him, chide him, as they tried to break his concentration. But Kingsley could do this, had done this trick for over an hour once. For some reason he thought better when juggling the soccer ball. His mind cleared and everything he worried about disappeared—his parents now gone, his grandparents elderly and worried about him, his sister, Marie-Laure, a struggling ballerina in Paris. She wrote him letters constantly, tearstained letters he could hardly bear to read. Her grief, her desperation…she swore she’d go mad if she couldn’t see him again soon. He almost believed her.
But when alone with the soccer ball, she and everyone else disappeared.
Almost everyone else.
One face refused to dissipate from Kingsley’s mind. One infuriatingly handsome face that he noticed out of the corner of his eye, watching him along with every other boy at the school. Unlike the others, Stearns didn’t catcall him or do anything to break his focus. But the eyes alone, that simple stare of his, nearly caused Kingsley to drop the ball.
Left knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left knee.
Kingsley kept bouncing, kept breathing.
Just to elicit an “ohhh” from the audience and maybe to impress Stearns a little, Kingsley popped the ball into the air and bounced it off the top of his head and back to his knee. He popped it up again and let it rest a second on the back of his neck before sending it up again and back to his knee.
Right knee. Right knee. Left knee. Left ankle. Right knee.
“So can you actually play soccer, King?” Christian asked. “Or do you just play with your balls all day.”
“I can play,” Kingsley said without elaborating. He could do more than play. Back in Paris, he’d been the best in the school. He’d already been scouted by the Paris Saint-Germain Football Club and had every intention of joining them as soon as he came of age. But that was before the accident, before Maine. “The problem is, no one else here can play against me.”
“Sorry. We’re all Americans,” Christian teased. “We play real football.”
Kingsley laughed. Left ankle. Right ankle. “You should be sorry. I had an entire team on me once trying to keep me from the goal. Still made it.”
“Really?” Derek demanded. “A whole team?”
“Felt like it,” Kingsley said, grinning. “But what does it matter? None of you know how to play. So I’ll just play with myself.” He winked at Christian and for a few minutes the conversation was peppered with nothing but mast***ation jokes.
Right knee. Right knee. Right knee. Left.
Oohs. Ahhs. Teasing. Laughter.
“I know how to play.”
In the shock of the silence that followed, Kingsley dropped the ball.
The twenty assembled students collectively turned their heads toward Stearns.
“You can play soccer?” Kingsley picked the soccer ball up off the ground. Stearns’s words had stunned everyone so thoroughly that not a single person teased Kingsley about dropping the ball after nearly ten minutes of juggling.
“I went to school in England.” Stearns slipped off his jacket and started to roll up his sleeves.
Kingsley could only stare at him, at his forearms he slowly unveiled with each turn of his cuff.
“But…you play piano.” Kingsley had no idea what that meant, only that he’d assumed a musician could not also be an athlete.
Stearns didn’t answer. He crossed his arms over his chest and waited. Everyone remained silent. Kingsley could feel the tension, the waiting expectation in the air. He didn’t know what to say, what to do. Stearns raised an eyebrow, and in his steel-gray eyes, Kingsley noted something he hadn’t seen before—amusement. Not only did Stearns clearly know how uncomfortable he made Kingsley, but he enjoyed it, too. The amusement annoyed Kingsley. Beyond annoyed him, it pissed him the hell off. Who was this guy who delighted in making people uncomfortable? What kind of sadist was he?
Stearns raised his blond eyebrow a millimeter higher. A smile played upon the corner of his perfect lips.
“School in England, oui?” Kingsley asked.
“Oui,” Stearns said. The eyebrow inched even higher. The smile spread over his entire mouth.
“That would explain your pretentious accent.”