Page 10 of Hide And Seek

A beat of quiet fell over our little group, the loud crackling of the fire filling the gap.

“He's a dick,” Jasmine finally said. “Full stop.”

Tamsin let out a weak laugh. “Yeah, well... it is what it is. Ancient history now, I guess.”

Jasmine reached over and squeezed her arm, and Tamsin gave her a grateful half-smile before staring back into the fire. I stared into it too, feeling a sharp pang of sympathy biting at my gut.

The humiliation of being reduced to nothing by someone who had been something to you was an awful feeling, even if your only experience with them was a fleeting moment in a converted outhouse. The experience itself wasn’t the embarrassing part. Being treated likeyouwere the embarrassment in the equation was the part that stung.

I knew that flavor of awful intimately, because I'd had my own version of it once. A guy at NYU in my freshman year who’d looked at me like I was the most interesting person he’d ever met, right up until the moment it was convenient for him to stop. He had a real gift for making me feel chosen and then, without any discernible transition, making me feel like I'd made the whole thing up in my head.

I picked at the label on my beer and tried to ignore Rhys’s gaze from across the fire. Before, it had barely registered, but now that the others had pointed it out, I could feel it every time I looked up. Given what they'd said about him, I suspected he was probably just as bad as Jensen beneath the charm. So no matter how hot he was, or how much some reckless part of me wanted to find out what he was really like… that was a temptation I needed to resist.

“Ah, shit.” Jesse was looking at his watch. “Tam, it’s our turn for cabin checks. We should head off.”

“I’ll come with you,” Wren said, rising to her feet. “I need to pee.”

“Me too,” Jasmine said. She looked at me. “Do you need to go too?”

I smiled and shook my head. “I’m okay. I’ll stay back and make more s’mores for everyone.”

Jasmine whooped. “Hear that, guys? We’ve got our very own s’mores servant!” she said. She theatrically winked at me. “A sexy one, too.”

I laughed and watched as the four of them headed back to the campgrounds. The sounds of their voices and footsteps faded down the path until the forest swallowed them entirely, and then it was just me and the low murmur of the other groups around the fire.

I reached for the bag of marshmallows and loaded up my stick, settling forward on the log with my elbows on my knees. Then I rotated the stick slowly and tried to look like I was thinking about nothing in particular.

That was made somewhat difficult by the fact that I was still acutely aware of who was sitting on the other side of the fire and whether or not he was still looking at me. Before the others left, it hadn't mattered as much, because there were enough of us that I could distribute my attention and pretend the prickling awareness on my skin was just the night air. Now, alone, I had no such cover.

Don't look up,I willed myself.

But, of course, I looked up.

Rhys had just dragged his gaze away from me, and he was saying something to the guy beside him—Zach, if I recalled correctly—and leaning forward with his forearms on his knees. The firelight moved across the planes of his face, and he laughed at something, low and brief.

I looked back at my marshmallows and focused very intently on the task at hand, decidedlynotthinking about dark hairpushed back from a strong jaw, or gray eyes catching the firelight, or—

I suddenly heard the sound of boots on packed earth, and before I registered exactly what it meant, Rhys was lowering himself onto the log beside me, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating from him above the warmth of the fire.

“Hey.” He smiled at me and shuffled even closer. “Just thought I’d come over and ask how your first day treated you.”

I swallowed my nerves and returned his smile. “It was pretty good. Although I guess tomorrow is the real first day, right?”

“Yeah, today was more about settling in,” he replied. “Tomorrow will be about ten times more hectic. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to handle it.”

Despite the warnings from the others, I thought Rhys actually seemed pretty nice. But at the same time, there was something strangely unsettling about his presence that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

It wasn't anything he'd said or done. He was being perfectly pleasant, sitting beside me with his beer and his easy conversational opener like any decent person making an effort with the new girl. But there was something beneath that pleasantness that I couldn't quite put my finger on. Something about the way he held himself, maybe, or something in his eyes.

I rotated my marshmallows again, wondering if what I was sensing was the thing the others had warned me about. But their assessment of him had seemed more like ‘snobby elitist prick’, and that wasn’t what I was picking up on right now. No, my spidey-senses were flagging something else entirely. Something that felt less like arrogance and more like an element of danger.

Well, maybe ‘danger’ was too dramatic a word for it. But whatever it was, my nervous system had noted it, and my intuition regarding people’s underlying natures had proved to be pretty accurate in the past.

I pulled my stick back from the fire and examined it. “Ten times more hectic, huh?” I said, mostly to fill the silence that I'd awkwardly let stretch a few seconds too long. “Now I understand why you guys all spend the first night drinking.”

Rhys smiled again, and I felt it in my chest like a struck chord.

Oh, god,I thought.This is going to be a problem.