Dark Heart (Dark Heart 1)

“Ooh, look, he’s on the sidelines warming up now,” she says, leaning forward with her palms on her blanket-covered knees.

I squeeze my eyes shut. Suck air in through my nose.

“Goldie is losing it,” Dani says—and she sounds amused.

I blow air out my mouth and glare at both of them. “Can we please just pretend we’re here to watch the whole damn team?”

A man in front of us aims a glance over his shoulder at me, and I want to die. I want to explain to my girls again that it’s not like Luca Galante is my boyfriend. We had some random encounters, and then yesterday on the track.

Yes, I went home and hugged a pillow thinking of him last night. And this morning I told my driver, Mercer, that I didn’t need a ride and walked to school so I might bump into him earlier along his trek toward the building. But I didn’t. I didn’t see him at all before homeroom, which was highly disappointing. I couldn’t find him in the cafeteria at lunch time, and he wasn’t at the track, either—at least not at first.

I decided to run—since I had skipped my normal Thursday lunchtime run to talk to him. I was maybe halfway done when I heard someone on the track behind me. I didn’t turn around—in case it was him. And then he was there beside me, jogging in his work-out gear and sneakers, his dark hair damp, so I figured he’d come from the football practice field.

He laughed and I laughed, and for a while we ran side-by-side, stealing glances at each other. Then the bell rang, and his gaze pinned mine down as we slowed our pace. “Football game tonight? Six o’clock?”

I laughed again. “You’re saying you want me to go?”

His blue eyes widened. “If you want to.”

“Do I?”

He gave a raspy laugh. “I don’t know, do you?”

“I’ll go.”

His mouth curved in a small but satisfied smile. “Try to sit in the student section—so I can find you.”

Then he turned around and jogged back toward the practice fields.

I told my parents Dani and I were going to hear a youth choir perform before spending the night at her house. And…here I am. At Luca Galante’s game. To watch him play football. I’m sitting in the student section so he can “find me.” After the game? I’m not even sure what he meant; that’s how lame I am.

I chew the inside of my cheek and look down at the funnel cake. Finally, I get the nerve to look back up and find him as he stretches behind the player bleachers at the side of the field.

Luca. Even in the privacy of my mind, saying it feels like stepping out of the house naked. Luca.

Why do I react this way to him? Is it the way he looks? He’s definitely gorgeous.

But now I’ve experienced him up close. The way he smiles. His voice. His hand rubbing my back when I was losing it in the bathroom.

It’s the way he ran over to me on the track today and just jogged with me for a while in silence. The way his eyes widened slightly when I asked if he was inviting me to the game. How he swept Pandy away and cleaned him up for no good reason. That surprising hug the other day on the track.

He makes me feel like…like some part of me is falling open, and I can’t even help it. It’s a heavy, secret feeling—an unfurling. So it’s terrible to watch him right now while my best friends tease me.

Every time he’s on the field, I feel like I can’t breathe. Near the end of the game, one of the opposing players slams into him, and he crumples to the grass and stays there for a second. My heart nose-dives. Then he gets up, moving stiffly. A minute later, the set of plays they’re doing wraps up, and he walks off the field and jerks his helmet off.

I hold my breath as someone in a purple Polo shirt sits beside him on the metal bleachers, offering him a water bottle and draping a white towel over his nape.

“Did he get hurt?”

“I don’t think so.” Dani shakes her head and squints down at the field. “I think it’s a dramatic sport. And for real like tiring. After all these games, Teddy—” the team’s quarterback, whom Dani dated briefly last year— “told me that he just goes home and crashes. He says it’s exhausting and it makes him so sore he can barely move.”

I watch Luca as he rubs the towel over his face and drapes it over his head. Then he’s up again, standing with the rest of the team.

Not yours, I remind myself. Might not even find you after the game.

I get teased again about the funnel cake and force myself to eat more, so by the time the game is over—with a winning score for our team—I’m feeling buzzy from the loudness of the crowd combined with the fierce sugar rush.