her naked body, her cheeks flushing again as she stands and makes her way to her dresser where she plucks a pair of underwear out of a drawer and bends to slide them on.
Fuck me.
“Olivia?” Rose yells again.
“Coming!” Liv yells, struggling to get her bra clasped.
I move behind her, taking the two ends, and she jumps, her body growing rigid as I fasten it. “It’s okay,” I tell her, sliding my palms over her arms. Her shoulders relax, but just barely.
“I haven’t finished packing. I need to shower and pack and call a cab.”
“Take a shower, get packed. I’ll make coffee and bring you to the airport.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“Liv, you’re leaving for ten days. Trust me. I want to take you. I want these last few hours with you.”
Her eyes soften. “I think I like you, Arlo Kostas.”
I grin, preparing to say something sarcastic before Rose yells for us again.
Liv slips on a pair of pajama pants and a tee and starts to fix her ponytail as I reach for my sweatshirt from yesterday and free my T-shirt.
“Sorry,” she whispers. “What are we going to tell her?”
“Pretty sure she’s not going to need to ask.”
She closes her eyes, running her nails over the top of her hair.
I catch her elbow. “Liv, it’s okay. She’s not going to judge us.”
Disbelief reflects back at me before Rose yells for us again, and Liv takes a deep breath and moves to open the door.
I follow her, trying to recover from the whiplash of the situation.
Rose is in the kitchen, folding her jacket over a chair. She stops when she sees us. “What in the hell happened yesterday? You’re all over social media.”
“What?” Liv asks.
Rose nods, turning her phone for us to see. “Look.” It’s a video of me that starts with me punching one of the dickheads on the sidewalk, cut so that it replays again and again and then turns to slow motion. I take her phone as Rose moves to the TV, flipping it on and changing to the news as if expecting me to be there as well. Thankfully, politics fill the headlines.
“You’re everywhere,” Rose says, shaking her head. “I’ve seen this video like a thousand times in the past hour. You’re getting tagged and made into memes. I saved a couple because they were so great. Someone compared you to Thor, which is going to have every fucking girl in Seattle and the surrounding area lining up and slipping you their phone numbers.”
Liv doesn’t look at me, but I can read her discomfort or possibly disappointment as her shoulders slump.
“Where was everyone else when this happened? Weren’t you downtown? And why’s your shirt so wrinkled? Did you sleep in it?” Rose seems to look at us for the first time, her gaze passing over my disheveled clothes and Liv’s pajamas, and her jaw falls open, and her eyes round. “Oh. Ohhhh.”
Before she can continue, my phone rattles across the kitchen counter, where I’d left it the night before. I should ignore it—my gut tells me to, but I’m worried this video might have been seen by my mom or someone else who’s going to be calling to see if I’m okay.
Coach Harris.
Shit.
“Hello?”
“Arlo, we need to talk. Can you come in this afternoon?”
“Yeah. I can be there around two,” I tell him.
“You know what we have to talk about, right?”
“I’m guessing it’s not how good I look as Thor?”
“No, but the same situation.”
“I understand. I think there was a big misunderstanding. Some of these look bad, but I swear, Coach, I didn’t initiate the fight. I wouldn’t.”
“We’ll talk about it this afternoon.”
He hangs up.
Liv shakes her head. “We should go now, so I can go with you.”
“You still have to shower and finish packing. Your flight leaves soon.”
Rose’s gaze turns like she’s watching a tennis match.
“But this is my dad. I know him. It’s like me when I’m almost late, and he still counts it as late because I’m not early.” She raises her fingers to quote him.
I smirk. There’s something about her offering to talk to him, though she’s avoided him for a week that makes me want to ask Rose to leave so I can strip Liv of her clothes and make her come for me again. “I appreciate it, but I don’t think you being there will help the situation. It’s like the fight that had happened at Ian’s party. Lincoln didn’t show up when it started breaking out because his priority was getting