Conventionally Yours (True Colors 1)

“Holy hell. That was…” I scrubbed at my hair. “You were… Damn. Can’t talk.”

“If I robbed you of the power of speech, I suppose I’ll consider that a win.” His tone was light, but something about the way he said win reminded me of all my concerns before he’d stolen all my brain power.

“Not that I’m complaining—at all—but what got into you? That was…unexpected.”

“But good unexpected, right?” The uncertainty in his smile made my chest pinch.

“The best. Wasn’t it obvious?” Arm wrapping around his torso, I pulled him close to me. “But, seriously, Alden, what’s wrong?”

“We probably shouldn’t roll around on this carpet.” He gave me a hand up, but I wasn’t letting him escape, instead tumbling us both onto the closest bed and holding him tight.

“Tell me. Now.”

He took a deep breath and looked away, out at the glittering city beneath us. “I saw the brackets. For tomorrow. I wasn’t supposed to see them, but I did.”

“Oh.” My hand fell away from his stomach, my mouth going slack. “We both made the cut, right?”

“Yeah.” His voice was pained. “But we’re on the same side of the bracket. We’re on track to meet in the semifinals if either of us gets there. And if we do get there, only one of us can go to the finals. We’ll have to go through each other if we want in the championship round.”

“Fuck.” I knew he didn’t care for that word, but nothing else fit. Trying to settle us both down, I went for a pragmatic tone. “But it was inevitable, right? If we keep winning, it’s bound to happen sometime.”

“I wanted it to be the championship round,” he whispered, voice still tight. “If at all. I don’t want either of us to knock the other out.”

“You’d prefer a stranger dismembering me to having to do it yourself?” I sounded far lighter than I felt. Sacks of wet cement bore down on my chest, replacing all the earlier good feelings with nothing other than dread. “And hey, no guarantee either of us will make it to the semifinals. Maybe you’ll get your wish, and someone will take me out first.”

“You could have to face Bart in the quarterfinals.” Misery etched fine lines around his mouth. “And I want you to beat him. I don’t want you to lose. I don’t.”

I got it then, why he was so upset, so desperate. I tugged him back into my arms. “If it helps, I don’t want you to lose either.”

“But you need this. We both do.”

“Yup. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. Trust me, I’ve spent a lot of the last year trying to wish reality away.”

“Me too,” he sighed.

“So you get it. This is just what we have to deal with. No sense in wishing it away. It doesn’t have to change anything between us.”

“But it will.” His voice was small and faint, but it hit me like a slap. He wasn’t being cruel, just logical, as always. Because it would. We’d known all along that only one of us could win, but now that we were here, it felt almost insurmountable. Things were going to change. We were going to change. There was no denying it, and like I’d said, we couldn’t run from reality.

But I could kiss him, follow the same impulse he’d had earlier to drown myself in his body until we were both gasping for air.

“Promise me,” I panted, cupping his face, the one that had come to mean so much to me, with my hands. “Promise me, you won’t throw the match. No matter what.”

“I promise.” His eyes were wide, pupils large, and hair all messed up. He looked every bit as out of control as I felt. “But you have to promise too. No lying like in Utah.”

“I promise. We’ll let the universe decide. Like a slot machine. We each give it our best shot.”

“Okay.” He nodded solemnly. My heart desperately wanted to believe him, but my head wasn’t so sure. He was right. Everything was about to change, and there was nothing we could do to stop it. Nothing except kiss again and cling to each other, mouths and bodies saying what our voices couldn’t. As our lips met again and again, I tried to tell him that I wasn’t giving him up without a fight, that we’d have the return trip together no matter what…but I was having a hard time believing myself, or trusting that this special thing we’d found would survive the next day, let alone a return to Gracehaven.

* * *

In the morning, Alden and I were tense, back to too polite and formal, eating our oatmeal and drinking our coffee. One would never have guessed that we’d spent most of the night avoiding talking about the tournament, lost in each other’s bodies, barely even taking a break for dinner, falling asleep curled together. But when the alarm went off, it was back to the real world—no more magical place we made together, no more avoiding reality.