Complete Nothing (True Love #2)(52)

True


I waited for Hephaestus as the lift outside his van lowered his chair to the asphalt parking lot, silently watching the football players and their families stream into and around the school, headed for the locker room or the field behind the building. Once the lift had replaced itself inside the van, I slammed the door, and we were off. Hephaestus’s wheels crunched over the first fallen leaves of autumn as I toyed with the arrow pendant around my neck.

The silence between us was deafening.

“So. Are you psyched for your first football game?” Hephaestus asked.

“Very,” I replied, relieved that he was the first to speak. “There’s something so primal about the whole battle-for-territory theme. I quite like it.”

“Oh, so you are talking to me,” he chided.

“I thought you weren’t talking to me!”

We looked at each other, and we both laughed. For the moment, the tension between us lifted. But there were still so many unanswered questions, and I was still angry at him for putting up a wall between me and Harmonia. As sound as their logic for the secrecy might be, I still longed to talk to my sister, with a borderline pathological vengeance.

“True!” The sound of my name shouted in Orion’s voice made my heart leap like a gazelle. I turned around to scan the crowded parking lot. “True! Wait up!”

He broke free of a klatch of people and jogged over to me, wearing his tight white football pants and his jersey, carrying a packed duffel with his shoulder pads slung over it. The smile on his face sent my spirits and hopes soaring. It was familiar, confident, overjoyed. He had remembered me. He had remembered us. I could feel it.

“Orion!” I shouted back, ready to throw myself into his arms.

“Down, girl,” Hephaestus said under his breath.

It was only at his words that I realized Orion was not reaching for me. Instead he was stopping a few feet in front of us, his hands on his hips. I cleared my throat and looked at my feet. That was almost seriously embarrassing. Once again, Hephaestus had saved me.

“I’m glad I caught you!” Orion said, still smiling. “Thanks for the spirit basket. It was out of control.”

Oh. That was what this was about. “Please. It was nothing,” I said modestly.

“Are you kidding me?” He started to walk toward the school, so Hephaestus and I fell in next to him. “Did you really bake that stuff from scratch?”

“She did,” Hephaestus said. “And she didn’t let anyone else in the house sample any of it. I have the slap marks to prove it,” he added, holding up one hand. There was a tiny black-and-blue mark on his middle knuckle, but I couldn’t imagine that I had actually been responsible for it.

“Well, thank you. Really,” Orion said. “Because of you, I’m one hundred percent ready for this game.”

We had reached the front door and he paused, looking me in the eye. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. I was surprised my body didn’t totally give out from the anticipation. Then Orion opened one arm, clinging to his bag with the other, and reached for me, pulling me into a hug. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged him back, my face pressing into his shoulder. Our bodies fit together so perfectly, it was as if we’d been made for each other. When he pulled away, tears of regret sprang to my eyes. I could have stayed in the crook of his arm forever.

For a blissful moment, Orion hesitated. He searched my face. His fingers trailed down my arm and squeezed my hand. I thought I might actually faint.

Kiss me, I thought. Kiss me. Kiss me. Kiss me. They were the only two words left in the world. There was no other thought in my head.

“See you after?” he said.

I pressed my lips together to stop their insane tingling. “Sure,” I breathed.

He smiled, turned, and disappeared inside the school. A cool breeze lifted the hair off the back of my neck, and I reached for Hephaestus’s shoulder to keep myself from buckling to the ground.

“That was intense,” Hephaestus said.

“So I didn’t just imagine it?”

“Nope. If I were a betting man, which I’m not, I’d put my money on him asking you out by day’s end,” Hephaestus told me. “He’s obviously attracted to you.”

“I knew it!” I cried happily, watching the door as if Orion would return any moment and claim me as his own. “I knew we were meant to be!”

“What about Zeus?” Hephaestus asked, lowering his voice as a crowd of guys in the St. Joe’s green and yellow walked by.

“What about him?”

“Aren’t you worried he’ll be displeased by this development?” Hephaestus asked. “He sent you here, at least partially, to split up you and Orion.”

I laughed sarcastically. “And then he sent Orion to my side. He can’t blame me if the boy falls in love with me again. It’s not my fault I’m so irresistible.”

Hephaestus smirked. “Just tread lightly, True,” he said, starting around the side of the school with the rest of the burgeoning crowd. “I speak from experience. When it comes to Zeus, you never know what’s going to happen next.”





CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE


Peter


“You guys are ready for this,” Coach said, stepping away from the whiteboard in the locker room after his last-minute strategy session. It was covered in Xs and Os, arrows and numbers. “Now let’s get out there and beat these bastards!”