reason why I’d gotten by without detection for so long was the locker’s convenient location, right at the foot of a dead-end, L-shaped hallway. There’d been close calls in the past, but the sound of the heavy entry doors swinging closed had always given me plenty of notice to hide the evidence. The only way someone would be able to sneak up on me was if they’d come out of the fire escape door leading from the pool—and no one used the pool this late in the day.
From the looks of the very wet guy standing behind me, though, I’d made a fatal miscalculation. Apparently, someone did use the pool this late in the day.
Well, fuck.
I knew him. Or, at least, I knew of him. His name was Alexander Brougham, although I was pretty sure he usually went by Brougham. He was a senior, and good friends with Finn Park, and, by all accounts, one of the hottest seniors at St. Deodetus’s.
Up close, it was clear to me said accounts were categorically false.
Brougham’s nose looked like it’d been badly broken once, and his navy-blue eyes were opened almost as wide as his mouth, which was an interesting look, because his eyes were kind of bulgy to begin with. Not goldfish-level, but more like a “my eyelids are doing their best to swallow my eyeballs whole” type of bulgy. And, as aforementioned, he was wet enough that his already dark hair looked black, and his T-shirt stuck to his chest in damp, see-through patches.
“Why are you soaking?” I asked, folding my arms behind my back to hide the letters and leaning against locker eighty-nine so it closed behind me. “You look like you fell in the pool.”
This was probably one of the few situations where a sopping wet, fully clothed teenager standing in the school hallway an hour after dismissal wasn’t the elephant in the room.
He looked at me like I’d said the stupidest thing in the world. Which seemed unfair, given I wasn’t the one who was wandering around the school halls literally dripping.
“I didn’t ‘fall in the pool.’ I was swimming laps.”
“With your clothes on?” I tried to shove the letters down the back of my skirt without moving my hands, but that was a more complex task than I’d anticipated.
Brougham surveyed his jeans. I used the brief distraction to ram the letters inside the band of my tights. In hindsight, this was probably never going to go far in convincing him he hadn’t just seen me digging through locker eighty-nine, but until I had a better excuse, denial was all I had.
“I’m not that wet,” he said.
Today was apparently the first time I’d heard Alexander Brougham speak, because until just now I’d had no idea he had a British accent. I understood his wide appeal now: Oriella, my favorite relationship YouTuber, once dedicated a whole video to the topic. People with perfectly good taste in partners historically had their senses addled in the presence of an accent. Setting aside the messiness of which accents were considered sexy in which cultures and why, accents in general were nature’s way of saying, “Procreate with that one, their gene code must be varied as fuck.” Few things, it seemed, could turn a person on as quickly as the subconscious realization they almost certainly weren’t flirting with a blood relative.
Thankfully, Brougham broke the silence when I didn’t reply. “I didn’t get time to dry off properly. I’d just finished up when I heard you out here. I thought I might catch the person who runs locker eighty-nine if I snuck through the fire escape. And I did.”
He looked triumphant. Like he’d won a contest I was only now realizing I’d been participating in.
That was, incidentally, my least favorite facial expression. As of right this moment.
I forced a nervous laugh. “I didn’t open it. I was putting a letter in.”
“I just saw you close it.”
“I didn’t close it. I just banged it a little when I was sliding the, uh … the letter inside.”
Cool, Darcy, way to gaslight the poor British student.
“Yeah, you did. Also, you took a pile of letters out of it.”
Well, I’d committed to this enough to shove them down my tights so I might as well follow this through to the end, right? I held my empty hands out, palms up. “I don’t have any letters.”
He actually looked a little thrown. “Where did you … I saw them, though.”