~~~~~ Emery’s Pov ~~~~~
Calloway drove me home instead of letting me take the bus, which she’d insisted on the second we left the restaurant, brushing off my protest with a look that made it clear this particular argument wasn’t one I was going to win.
Her car smelled like her.
That same faint rink chill underneath something warmer, cedar and clean laundry.
The radio stayed low the entire drive, some acoustic playlist neither of us commented on, filling the silence just enough that it didn’t feel heavy.
The heater hummed steadily against the cold outside, and every few blocks the passing streetlights swept gold across the dashboard, across her hands on the wheel, across the small, private smile she kept fighting and losing to every time I caught her glancing over at me at a red light.
Neither of us talked much.
We didn’t actually need to.
The quiet felt different than it had three weeks ago, back when silence between us meant careful calculation, both of us working out what was safe to say.
This kind felt easy, her hand resting on the gearshift close enough to mine that our fingers brushed every time she shifted, without either of us pulling away.
She pulled up in front of my building and put the car in park, but she didn’t turn off the engine, didn’t move to unlock the doors.
She just sat there for a moment with her hands still on the wheel, looking at me in a way that made my pulse pick up all over again.
“Home safe,” she said, though it came out more like a question than a statement, like she wasn’t quite ready for the night to be over any more than I was.
“Home safe,” I confirmed, and reached for my seatbelt, fingers fumbling slightly with the buckle in a way that had nothing to do with the mechanism itself and everything to do with the fact that she was still watching me, like she had nowhere else in the world she needed to be.
“Here.” She leaned across the console before I’d even fully registered her moving, her hand finding the buckle release near my hip, and suddenly she was close.
Close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off her, close enough that her face was inches from mine, closer than it had been even on the sidewalk outside the restaurant.
The streetlight through the windshield caught the side of her face, softening everything, and for a moment neither of us moved.
Even the seatbelt was forgotten entirely, both of us just looking at each other in the quiet, engine still humming low beneath us.
Her eyes moved briefly to my mouth and back up, and something in my chest did a slow, dangerous flip.
“You could’ve just told me it was stuck,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper, not moving away.
“It wasn’t stuck.”
“I know.”
Neither of us laughed.
Neither of us moved.
The moment stretched out, charged and unbearably slow, her hand still resting near the buckle, my breath caught somewhere in my throat, and I was fairly certain, in that particular second, that the entire rest of the world had simply stopped existing outside the small, warm space of her car.
Then someone knocked on the window.
We broke apart so fast I nearly hit my head on the door frame, and through the fogged glass I could make out two very familiar, very delighted faces pressed close to the window.
Priya was grinning like she’d just won the lottery, and Jordan beside her, phone already raised and recording.
“Jordan, get this, get all of this—”
I looked down at my seatbelt, suddenly remembering it existed, and fumbled it open with hands that weren’t cooperating at all, my face burning hot despite the cold outside.
Calloway had leaned back into her own seat, sitting up straight with the kind of forced composure that fooled absolutely nobody, a flush creeping up her own neck that I had never seen on her before.
“Your friends,” she said, like it explained everything.
“My friends,” I confirmed, mortified, and shoved the car door open, nearly tripping over my own feet in my rush to get out and put some distance between myself and the scene that had almost, definitely, very nearly happened in that front seat.
“Well, well, well.” Priya crossed her arms, delighted in a way that made me want to disappear into the sidewalk.
“We’ve been sitting on your porch for forty minutes, Emery Hale, waiting to hear about the scary dad dinner, and instead we get *this.*”
“There’s no ‘this.’ Nothing happened.”
“Nothing happened,” Jordan repeated, lowering her phone just enough to give me a deeply unconvinced look.
“Emery.
We watched you two stare at each other for a full thirty seconds through a windshield.
I counted.
I have it on video, actually, if you want to relive it.”
“Delete that.”
“Absolutely not.”
Calloway had gotten out of the car too by then, rounding the hood with the particular calm of someone determined not to look as flustered as she clearly was, though the color hadn’t fully left her face.
“Hi,” she said to Priya and Jordan, with a politeness that felt almost funny given the circumstances.
“I’m Calloway.”
“We know who you are,” Priya said, entirely too pleased with herself.
“Everyone knows who you are.
What we don’t know is what exactly we just interrupted, because from where we were standing, it looked like—”
“Nothing,” I said again, too quickly, which only made both of them grin wider.
“Right.
Nothing.” Jordan pocketed her phone at last, mercy arriving in the smallest possible dose.
“Well, since apparently nothing happened, you can come inside and tell us about the actually terrifying part of your night.
We’ve been dying out here.”
Calloway glanced at me, something soft and amused behind her eyes despite the audience, despite the interruption, despite the whole ridiculous scene playing out on my front lawn.
“I should probably let you go deal with them,” she said, with a smile.
“Probably,” I agreed, though I didn’t move right away, and neither did she. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“Text me when you’re actually inside,” she said, echoing the same words from before, except now they landed even softer than they had on the sidewalk, quiet enough that Priya and Jordan, mercifully, didn’t seem to catch them.
“I will.”
She held my gaze a moment longer, and then she was walking back around to the driver’s side, throwing one last glance over her shoulder before climbing in.
I watched her pull away from the curb, taillights fading down the block, before Priya’s hand landed on my shoulder, spinning me around with entirely too much enthusiasm.
“Okay,” she said, already steering me toward the front door.
“Start from the beginning.
And don’t you dare skip the part where we just caught you about to kiss Calloway Marchetti in a parked car outside your own house.”
“Nothing was about to happen,” I said immediately, looking away.
“Emery.” Jordan fell into step on my other side, grinning.
“Your face is still red.
It has been red since you got out of that car.
You cannot lie to two people who have known you since freshman orientation.”
I gave up arguing somewhere around my own front porch.
My cheeks were still burning, my heart was still doing something complicated and warm that had nothing to do with the cold.
I let them pull me inside to demand every single detail of a night that had gone nothing like any of us had expected — least of all me.
Inside, Priya had already put the kettle on before I’d even gotten my coat off, and Jordan had claimed the good spot on the couch, phone propped against a pillow like she was settling in for the long haul.
I told them about the game, about Richard’s careful, clipped questions, about the bathroom and the four-count breathing and the way the whole dinner had felt like walking across ice that might crack under my weight at any second.
I left out the part in the car, mostly, though judging by the look Priya kept giving me over her mug of tea, she wasn’t buying my restraint on that front for a second.
“You’re glowing,” she said finally, setting her mug down with a decisive clink.
“I’ve known you three years, Emery Hale, and I have never once seen you glow.
Not after finals, not after that internship offer, never.
Explain the glowing.”
“I’m not glowing.
I’m probably just still cold from standing outside.”
“Uh-huh.” Jordan didn’t even bother looking up from her phone, still smug.
“Sure.
The cold.
That’s definitely it.”
I pulled a pillow over my face and groaned into it, equal parts embarrassed and, underneath all of it, unbearably, inconveniently happy in a way I didn’t have the energy left to keep pretending I wasn’t.