WREN
If Chloe had been a mean girl—if she had been one of those sharp-edged, calculating Upper East Side socialites I grew up dodging at Constance Billard—this would have been infinitely easier. I could have hated her. I could have written her off as an obstacle, a villain in the narrative of my own miserable exile.
But Chloe wasn't a villain. She was a golden retriever in a cheerleading uniform.
She cornered me in the art room on Wednesday during free period. She didn't march in; she bounced. She was carrying two iced lattes from the good coffee shop three towns over, the one that actually used real espresso.
"Wren! Hi!" she beamed, setting one of the sweating plastic cups on the edge of my drafting table. "I hope you like oat milk. Poppy told me you're an oat milk girl."
I stared at the coffee, then up at her bright, hopeful face. My chest tightened with an immediate, suffocating wave of guilt.
"I am," I said, my voice cautious. "Thank you. What's... what's all this, Chloe?"
"Okay, so I have a massive favor to ask," she said, clasping her hands together in front of her chest. "The state championship is next Friday. The booster club bought this enormous, forty-foot breakaway paper banner for the team to run through before kickoff. I'm supposed to paint it, but my artistic ability begins and ends with bubble letters. I saw your sketches for the depot mural. You are, like, a literal genius."
I froze, the charcoal pencil slipping slightly in my grip.
"You want me to paint the football banner," I repeated, the words feeling heavy and dangerous on my tongue.
"Just the wolf logo in the center!" Chloe pleaded, her blue eyes wide and entirely innocent. "I'll do all the lettering. I'll buy all the supplies. I just... I really want it to be perfect. For the seniors. For Hayes."
There it was. The name dropped into the quiet space of the art room like a live grenade.
I looked at her. She was so incredibly sweet, so completely devoid of malice or suspicion. She didn't know that three weeks ago, the boy she was trying to impress had kissed me in a dark hallway like he was dying of thirst. She didn't know he sat in his truck in the freezing dark just to watch me paint.
She was just a girl who wanted to do something nice for her boyfriend.
If I said no, I would look petty. I would look like the bitter, stuck-up transfer student the rumors claimed I was. More importantly, I would break the heart of a girl who had literally bought me a fifteen-dollar coffee just to be kind.
"Okay," I heard myself say, the word a death sentence to my own peace of mind. "I'll paint the wolf."
"Oh my god, you are a lifesaver!" Chloe squealed, practically vibrating with excitement. "Can we start tomorrow after school? In the gym? I'll bring snacks!"
"The gym is fine," I said, already mentally fortifying the walls around my chest.
It was just paint. It was just paper. I could survive it.
I couldn't survive it.
By 4:00 PM on Thursday, the Millhaven High gymnasium smelled aggressively of floor wax, sweat, and acrylic paint. The massive roll of white paper was stretched across the hardwood floor. I was on my hands and knees in the center of it, meticulously blocking out the gray and black shadows of the Millhaven Wolf.
Chloe was sitting a few feet away, painstakingly tracing red bubble letters that read *HUNT THEM DOWN*. She was chattering happily about her college dream and her dog, a steady stream of benign noise that I only had to nod along to.
It was almost peaceful. Until the heavy double doors of the gym swung open.
The air in the massive room seemed to instantly vaporize.
I didn't need to look up. My body registered his presence on a cellular level. The hairs on my arms stood up. The back of my neck prickled. The chaotic, frantic rhythm of my heart kicked into overdrive, hammering against my ribs so hard it physically ached.
"Hey!" Chloe called out, her voice bright with affection.
I kept my eyes glued to the snout of the wolf, my grip on the paintbrush tightening until my knuckles turned white.
Heavy, measured footsteps echoed across the hardwood. Hayes stopped right at the edge of the paper. He was fresh out of practice, wearing gray sweatpants and a tight black compression shirt that clung to the broad, athletic lines of his chest and shoulders. He smelled like cold air, exertion, and the unmistakable, intoxicating scent of cedar.
"Coach let us out early," Hayes said. His voice was a low, smooth rumble that vibrated straight down my spine. "Banner looks good."
"Wren is doing the hard part," Chloe beamed, scrambling up from the floor to wrap her arms around his waist.
I risked a single, agonizing glance upward.
Hayes was looking down at Chloe, returning her hug with an easy, practiced grace. But his eyes—those pale, stormy blue eyes—were locked dead onto me over the top of her blonde head.
The impact of his stare was physical. It was a jolt of electricity straight to the nervous system.
"Yeah," Hayes murmured, not breaking eye contact with me. "She's good at the hard parts."
I immediately looked back down at the paper, my cheeks burning with a sudden, betraying heat.
"Do you want to help?" Chloe asked, completely oblivious to the silent, violent collision happening three feet away from her. "You can fill in the red letters!"
"Sure," Hayes said.
My head snapped up. *No.* He was supposed to say no. He was supposed to make an excuse about film review or weight training and leave. That was the rule. We stayed away from each other.
Instead, Hayes dropped his gym bag onto the bleachers, kicked off his slides, and walked in his socks right onto the paper.
He didn't sit next to Chloe. He sat down cross-legged exactly two feet across from me, right at the top of the wolf's head.
"Pass the red," he said to Chloe, but he was looking at me.
For the next twenty minutes, it was absolute, unadulterated torture.
Chloe moved to the far end of the banner to start outlining the second word. Hayes and I were left kneeling in the center, separated only by a few feet of white paper and a puddle of wet acrylic.
He was so close. The heat radiating off his body was a tangible thing. Every time he reached for the water cup to rinse his brush, his forearm brushed against mine. A casual, accidental friction that sent a violent shockwave through my bloodstream.
I was suffocating. I was trying so hard not to look at the line of his jaw, at the way the muscles in his back shifted under the compression shirt when he leaned forward.
"Oh, shoot," Chloe said suddenly from the far end of the gym. "I left the silver metallic paint in the art room. I need it for the trim. I'll be right back!"
"Take your time," Hayes called back to her, his voice entirely too calm.
The heavy gym doors clicked shut.
The silence that fell over the massive room was deafening. The golden retriever was gone, leaving me entirely alone in the cage with the predator.
I didn't look up. I aggressively dragged a line of black paint across the wolf's ear, my hand trembling so badly the line went jagged.
"You're messing it up," Hayes observed quietly.
"I'm fine," I snapped, my voice sounding thin and desperate. I reached for a rag to wipe away the mistake, but my hand knocked against the plastic water cup.
It tipped over. The dirty, black-tinged water spilled across the white paper, rushing straight toward the edge of my jeans.
Before I could move, Hayes's hand shot out. He grabbed the rag and slammed it down over the spill, catching the water an inch from my knee.
His large, calloused hand was pressing the rag against the paper, right next to my thigh. He didn't pull away.
I froze. My breath hitched, trapped in my lungs.
Slowly, I lifted my eyes.
The polite, flat facade he had been wearing around Chloe was completely gone. He was leaning forward, his face inches from mine. The look in his eyes was dark, possessive, and painfully, terrifyingly raw.
"You don't have to do this," I whispered, the words barely making it past my lips.
"Do what?" His gaze dropped to my mouth, a slow, deliberate movement that made my stomach bottom out.
"Make this harder. Torture me."
"I'm not torturing you, Wren," he murmured, his voice dropping into a harsh, ragged register. "I'm just painting a banner with my girlfriend. You're the one who told me to move on. You're the one who said we were a liability."
"And we are," I choked out, a traitorous tear burning the corner of my eye. "You know we are."
"Then why are your hands shaking?"
He shifted his weight, his fingers sliding off the rag to lightly brush against my knuckles. It was a ghost of a touch, skin on skin, but it felt like a branding iron.
I squeezed my eyes shut, a soft, helpless sound escaping my throat. I was losing the battle. I was trying so hard to build a wall, but every time he looked at me, every time he breathed near me, he dismantled it brick by brick.
"Stop," I begged, pulling my hand away and pressing it against my own chest, trying to hold my fracturing heart together. "Please, Hayes. She's going to come back."
Hayes stared at me for a long, agonizing second. The anger, the hurt, the desperate longing—it all warred across his face.
He let out a sharp, frustrated breath and sat back on his heels, pulling the space between us wide open again just as the gym doors banged open.
"Got it!" Chloe sang, jogging back into the room waving a silver paint tube. "Did I miss anything?"
"Not a thing," Hayes said, his voice instantly returning to the smooth, polite baritone. He didn't look at me as he picked up his brush again. "Just a spilled water cup."
I stared down at the ruined, jagged line of black paint on the paper.
He was right. He wasn't the one torturing me. I was doing it to myself.
And as I sat there, breathing in the scent of acrylic paint and cedar, the terrifying truth finally crystallized in my mind.
I couldn't stay away from him. No matter how much it cost me, the gravity was simply too strong.