Hopeless (Hopeless #1)(13)

He hands me the bottle and I quickly down another drink. I hate Texas heat as it is, but coupled with Dean Holder, it feels like I’m standing in the pits of Hell.

“So…earlier? At the store?” he says with a nervous pause. “If I made you uneasy, I’m sorry.”

My lungs are begging me for air, but I somehow find a way to reply. “You didn’t make me uneasy.”

You sort of creeped me out.

Holder narrows his eyes at me for a few seconds, studying me. I’ve discovered today that I don’t like being studied…I like going unnoticed. “I wasn’t trying to hit on you, either,” he says. “I just thought you were someone else.”

“It’s fine.” I force a smile, but it’s not fine. Why am I suddenly consumed with disappointment that he wasn’t trying to hit on me? I should be happy.

“Not that I wouldn’t hit on you,” he adds with a grin. “I just wasn’t doing it at that particular moment.”

Oh, thank you, Jesus. His clarification makes me smile, despite all my efforts not to.

“Want me to run with you?” he asks, nudging his head toward the sidewalk behind me.

Yes, please.

“No, it’s fine.”

He nods. “Well, I was going that way anyway. I run twice a day and I’ve still got a couple…” He stops speaking mid sentence and takes a quick step toward me. He grabs my chin and tilts my head back. “Who did this to you?” The same hardness I saw in his eyes at the grocery store returns behind his scowl. “Your eye wasn’t like this earlier.”

I pull my chin away and laugh it off. “It was an accident. Never interrupt a teenage girl’s nap.”

He doesn’t smile. Instead, he takes a step closer and gives me a hard look, then brushes his thumb underneath my eye. “You would tell someone, right? If someone did this to you?”

I want to respond. Really, I do. I just can’t. He’s touching my face. His hand is on my cheek. I can’t think, I can’t speak, I can’t breathe. The intensity that exudes from his whole existence sucks the air out of my lungs and the strength out of my knees. I nod unconvincingly and he frowns, then pulls his hand away.

“I’m running with you,” he says, without question. He places his hands on my shoulders and turns me in the opposite direction, giving me a slight shove. He falls into stride next to me and we run in silence.

I want to talk to him. I want to ask him about his year in juvi, why he dropped out of school, why he has that tattoo…but I’m too scared to find out the answers. Not to mention I’m completely out of breath. So instead, we run in complete silence the entire way back to my house.

When we close in on my driveway, we both slow down to a walk. I have no idea how to end this. No one ever runs with me, so I’m not sure what the etiquette is when two runners part ways. I turn and give him a quick wave. “I guess I’ll see you later?”

“Absolutely,” he says, staring right at me.

I smile at him uncomfortably and turn away. Absolutely? I flip this word over in my mind as I head back up the driveway. What does he mean by that? He didn’t try to get my number, despite not knowing I don’t have one. He didn’t ask if I wanted to run with him again. But he said absolutely like he was certain; and I sort of hope he is.

“Sky, wait.” The way his voice wraps around my name makes me wish the only word in his entire vocabulary was Sky. I spin around and pray he’s about to come up with another cheesy pick-up line. I would totally fall for it now.

“Do me a favor?”

Anything. I’ll do anything you ask me to, so long as you’re shirtless.

“Yeah?”

He tosses me his bottle of water. I catch it and look down at the empty bottle, feeling guilty that I didn’t think to offer him a refill myself. I shake it in the air and nod, then jog up the steps and into the house. Karen is loading the dishwasher when I run into the kitchen. As soon as the front door closes behind me, I gasp for the air my lungs have been begging for.

“My God, Sky. You look like you’re about to pass out. Sit down.” She takes the bottle from my hands and forces me into a chair. I let her refill it while I breathe in through my nose and out my mouth. She turns around and hands it to me and I put the lid on it, then stand up and run it back outside to him.

“Thanks,” he says. I stand and watch as he presses those same full lips to the opening of the water bottle.

We’re practically kissing again.

I can’t distinguish between the affect my near five-mile run has had on me and the affect Holder is having on me. Both of them make me feel like I’m about to pass out from lack of oxygen. Holder closes the lid on his water bottle and his eyes roam over my body, pausing at my bare midriff for a beat too long before he reaches my eyes. “Do you run track?”

I cover my stomach with my left arm and clasp my hands at my waist. “No. I’m thinking about trying out, though.”

“You should. You’re barely out of breath and you just ran close to five miles,” he says. “Are you a senior?”

He has no idea how much effort it’s taking on my behalf not to fall onto the pavement and wheeze from lack of air. I’ve never ran this far in one shot before, and it’s taking everything I have to come across like it’s not a big deal. Apparently it’s working.