Faking It with My Hockey Enemy

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Chapter 4 Family Dinner From Hell

I changed my sweater twice. The first one was too formal. The second one was too casual. I put the first one back on and told myself it did not matter, this was just dinner, I had sat at this table three hundred times, the only difference was that Knox Ryder was about to walk through the front door and call me princess in front of my mother.

The doorbell rang at exactly seven.

Mom beat me to the door. She always beat everyone to the door.

"Knox!" She said it like he was a pleasant surprise, which, to be fair, he was. To her. "Come in, come in, we have plenty."

He stepped inside with a small white box from the bakery two streets over and his hair still damp from practice, and he looked exactly the way Knox Ryder always looked like he had decided to occupy a space and the space had simply agreed. He found me across the entryway before he found anyone else. That half-smile appeared. The one that said I see exactly what you're thinking and I find it interesting.

"Hey," he said. Not princess. Just hey warm and specific and aimed only at me.

Something in my chest did something I was not going to acknowledge right now.

He handed Mom the box. "Thought dessert might help."

"What a sweetheart," she said, already heading for the kitchen with it. "Richard, come see."

Dad emerged, assessed Knox in the way fathers assess boys at the door, and then clapped him on the back. "Good to have you. Mason and Sienna are in the living room."

Knox's hand found my lower back as we turned the corner warm, light, entirely natural-looking, and deeply distracting. I kept my face still.

The living room. Mason was standing near the couch in his practice shirt with his arms loosely crossed, the posture of someone trying to look relaxed and not quite getting there. Sienna was beside him, legs crossed, expression arranged into something pleasant. Her eyes went to Knox's hand on my back the moment we appeared.

"So," Mason said. "This is actually happening."

"For a while now," Knox said, easy and unhurried. "We didn't want to make it a whole thing until we knew what it was."

Mason looked at me. There was something in his eyes I had not seen before not anger, something more unsettled. "You could have told me."

"I know," I said. "I'm sorry."

It was true in more ways than he knew.

Sienna smiled brightly. "It's just funny timing, isn't it? Right after everything with the writing." She looked at Knox. "I'm surprised she told you about that. It's so personal."

"She didn't have to tell me," Knox said. "You broadcast it to a hallway. I was there."

The smile did not waver, but something behind it did. "I was just surprised by what I read. I didn't mean for it to—"

"You opened her laptop and took it off campus and read it aloud in front of fifty people," Knox said, in exactly the same tone he might use to describe the weather. "We can call it whatever you want. I just want to make sure we're all working from the same version of events."

Mom appeared in the doorway with her oven mitts on, oblivious and cheerful. "Five minutes, everyone."

Dinner was a performance I had not rehearsed enough for.

We sat across from Mason and Sienna. Knox kept one hand on my thigh under the table the whole time, his thumb tracing a slow circle that I was supposed to be ignoring. He was better at this than me — relaxed, attentive, saying all the right things to my parents, redirecting every one of Sienna's careful little provocations with a response that made her sound petty without ever being openly unkind.

"Lila used to follow Mason everywhere in high school," Sienna said pleasantly while the pasta was being passed. "It was actually pretty adorable."

Knox tilted his head. "Did she? I don't know, I've never been able to get her to follow me anywhere. She makes me work for it." He looked at me with a warmth that was either very convincing or something I did not have a word for. "Which I like, for the record."

My mother made a small delighted sound. Even Dad looked approving.

Mason said nothing. He was watching Knox the way you watch something you are not sure you have correctly identified.

After the main course I offered to clear the table. I needed sixty seconds where no one was watching my face.

The kitchen was quiet except for the refrigerator. I stood at the sink and stacked plates and breathed. Through the doorway I could hear my dad telling a story and my mom laughing and the ordinary sounds of a dinner table that had no idea what was sitting underneath it.

Knox appeared behind me. I had heard him excuse himself had been aware of him moving, the way you become aware of the position of a thing that takes up a lot of space.

His hands settled at my waist, turning me gently until my back was against the counter. The kitchen light did something particular to the shadows on his face. He was close. Not uncomfortably just occupying the same air.

"You're good," he said quietly. "Better than you think you are."

"Mason keeps looking at me like I've done something wrong."

"He's adjusting." Knox's thumb moved against my hip, slow and absent, like he was doing it without thinking. "Give him time."

"And Sienna?"

"She's building to something," he said. "I can feel it. We stay steady and let her build."

His hand moved up to the side of my face, and his thumb brushed my cheek, deliberate this time, and I felt it in the place behind my sternum where I kept the things I was not supposed to feel. My eyes came up to his.

"Knox—"

"I'm not going to let her win," he said. His voice had dropped to something I had not heard from him before. Not the smirk, not the cool certainty something more careful. More real. "I need you to know that."

His mouth was close. Not there but near. Near enough that the next thing would be a decision and not an accident.

I did not move away.

From the dining room doorway: "Mason. Come here. Now."

We pulled apart.

Sienna stood in the doorway with her phone extended toward Mason, who had followed her without fully understanding why. Her expression was the particular kind of still that comes right before something breaks.

"I sent it to the family group chat," she said. Her voice was composed. Pleased with itself. "The whole story. All of it. I thought everyone should have the chance to read what Lila's actually been writing."

Mason looked at his phone.

The silence after was not loud. It was the other kind the kind that fills a room completely and leaves no air.

Mom's chair scraped back in the dining room.

Sienna looked at me with the eyes of someone who has been waiting a long time to get to this exact moment.

"Now everyone knows," she said. "Doesn't that feel better?"

Knox's hand found mine at my side. He did not squeeze it. He just held it steady and warm and completely still.

It was the realest thing that had happened all evening.

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