She hesitated. “Maybe.” And maybe not . . .

“Why don’t you want to like me?”

She blinked. “What?”

“You heard me. I’m missing something, something big I think. No more playing, Willa; tell me. You gave up the right to keep it a secret after you kissed me.”

“You kissed me back,” she whispered.

“Yes, and I’m going to kiss you again soon as you finish talking.”

“No, actually, you’re not.” She drew in a shaky deep breath, held it for a minute, and then let it go in one long shudder. “Fine, I’ll tell you the truth,” she said, tired of holding it in anyway. “But just remember, you asked.”

He nodded.

“We went to high school together for a year.” Once that escaped, the rest came out really fast, as if that could help ease the reliving of the humiliating experience. “You were the popular jock and I was . . . a nobody. You stood me up for my first—and last—dance.” Just saying it out loud made her mad all over again. “And then to add insult to injury, you don’t even remember.”

He just stared at her. “Run that by me one more time. Slower. And in English.”

“No,” she said, turning to her front door. “I’m not going to say it again. It was hard enough to live with and even harder to say it the one time.”

He caught her and with gentle steel pulled her back around and pressed her up against the hallway wall. Hands still on her arms, he leaned in, holding her there. “Why don’t I remember you?”

“Because you’re an ass?” she asked sweetly, pushing ineffectively at his chest. “Back up.”

“In a minute.” He wasn’t going to be distracted. “You weren’t in any of my classes.”

“No. I was a freshman when you were a senior. There was a Sadie Hawkins dance and you were the only guy in the whole school I wanted to go with. I was new there so I didn’t have friends to talk any sense into me. I caught you coming out of one of your football practices and I thought . . . Well, never mind what I thought. You were in a hurry, which I didn’t realize until I stopped you.” She squeezed her eyes shut as remembered humiliation washed over her. “I spoke too fast then too. Way too fast. You had to ask me to repeat the question. Twice.”

He let out a breath, closed his eyes, and dropped his forehead to hers. “Tell me I was nice about it. Tell me I wasn’t a complete eighteen-year-old dick.”

“You don’t get to ask that of me,” she said and gave him another push. “Because I was so forgettable that you don’t even remember me.”

“Yeah, so I was a complete eighteen-year-old dick,” he muttered. “Shit.” He tightened his grip on her when she tried to break free. “Listen to me, Willa, because I want to make something perfectly clear here.” He opened his eyes and held hers prisoner. “You’re the most unforgettable person I’ve ever met.”

She let out a soft sigh of unintentional need because pathetic as it was, the words felt like a balm on her raw soul. “Don’t—”

“Tell me what I said to you that day.”

“You said ‘sounds cool.’ ” She dropped her forehead to his chest. “And I practically floated home. I didn’t have a dress. Or shoes. Or money to get into the dance. I had to beg, borrow, and steal, but I managed to do it, to get myself together enough that I’d be worthy of a date with Keane Winters.”

A rough sound of regret escaped him. “I had a real problem with girls back then,” he said. “I didn’t know how to say no.”

“Cue the violins.”

He grimaced. “I know. But there were these sports groupies and—”

“Oh my God.” She covered her ears. “Stop talking! I don’t want to know any of this.”

“I’m just saying that they used to hang around outside of practice and then jump us when we left the locker room. If you were there, I probably thought you were one of them.”

Willing to concede that this might actually be true, she lifted a shoulder but managed to hold on to most of her mad. “You should have known by taking one look at me that I wasn’t a damn groupie.”

“You’d think. But eighteen-year-old guys are assholes.” He looked genuinely regretful. “Tell me the rest.”

“Nothing more to tell. You didn’t show. And you never so much as looked at me again.”

“Willa—”

“End of story,” she said. “Both back then and now.” She ducked beneath his arms and fumbled for her keys, practically falling into her apartment. She shut the door harder than was strictly necessary and didn’t know if she was disappointed or relieved when he didn’t even attempt to follow her.

 

 

Chapter 7

 

#FallenAndCantGetUp

Keane woke up to a heavy pressure on his chest that felt like a heart attack—no doubt the result of wracking his brain all night long, trying to remember Willa from high school.

To his chagrin, he still couldn’t.

He’d been telling her the utter truth when he’d said that a lot of girls had waited on the players after practices. He’d ignored most of them and when they’d refused to be ignored, he’d flashed a smile and done his best to flirt his way to the parking lot rather than hurt anyone’s feelings.

So it killed him that he’d hurt Willa.

But the truth was, he hadn’t given a lot of thought to how any of those girls had taken his ridiculous and stupid comments designed to help him escape. It hadn’t been until he’d gotten to college that he’d lost some of his shyness around women.

Okay, all of it.

He’d met his first real girlfriend—Julie Carmen—his freshman year and they’d gotten serious fast, fueled by the sheer, mind-numbing hunger of eighteen-year-old lust.

By the end of that first year, he was no longer thinking with his head, at least not the one on top of his shoulders. For the first time in his life he had someone so into him that she wanted to spend every waking moment with him, and he’d gotten off on that. He’d wanted to marry her, ridiculous as that sounded now. He’d told himself to play it cool, to hold back, but he had no real experience with that and ended up blurting it out at a football game over hot dogs and beer.