Free Running Back To Him by Evelyn Rosado Page B

it?”
    He wipes the sweat off his brow. “You’re free to do what you want I guess.” He turns towards Kellen. “But you…I thought you knew better. You know we got rules right?”
    “Rules are made to be broken,” Kellen says.
    “The day before the game? Really?” Lucas’s voice cracks. “I see where your loyalty lies Murdock. I guess that big game we got tomorrow doesn’t mean shit to you.”
    “Don’t question my dedication.”
    Lucas squares up with Kellen and closes the space between them, standing chest to chest. Kellen’s hand slips away from mine. The tension mounts. A small crowd forms around the three of us. This could get messy. And not even seconds into our fake relationship.
    “Since you’ve been having a bit of a problem with hanging onto the ball lately and nearly costing us the season, I just want to make sure your focus is on the field…instead of my leftovers.” A gasp falls over the growing crowd surrounding us.
    Kellen inches closer, only a few centimeters separate the two of them. His eyes harden.
    “See that’s your problem Lucas,” he pokes his index finger into his chest. “You need to show some respect to the ladies.”
    “What about bros before—”
    “You finish that sentence and we’re going to have a problem.” Lucas pauses, backs away and chuckles.
    Lucas bites his lip and narrows his eyes. “I’ll see you at practice, Kellen.”
    Lucas’s eyes fall onto me, then to Kellen, and then back to me, down to my legs.
    “Nice leggings,” he says with a hint of assholeness. At least somebody recognizes. But that’s beside the point. “But they make your hips look wide.”
    What an asshole. I scowl at him and I nearly pull a muscle in my forehead.
    Lucas turns his back to us and stomps back into his dungeon called the weight room.
    “Well… that happened,” I say with a breathy, nervous tone.
    The onlookers surround us, waiting for Kellen and I to react, lock lips, or run in behind Lucas and smack him with a forty-five pound dumbbell. But there’ll be none of that nonsense. This isn’t my or Kellen’s first rodeo of school politics. In the grand scheme of things, Lucas is small potatoes. If it makes him jealous—great. It’ll be just collateral damage. I have a war to win.
    “Okay, okay, nothing to see here. Move along,” I say to the circle of vultures wrapped around us with their phones on record. I wave my hand shooing them away. I’m not in the mood to field questions like a press conference for a political scandal.
    The flash from their cameras are blinding, causing me to blink away the white spots I see before my eyes. Eight o’clock in the morning is far too early for retina damage.
    Kellen, with a scrunched up face, gentlemanly extends his angled hand for me to lock mine into. Always ice under fire. We walk away from the fray.
    “That was kind of intense,” he says. “You sure you want to go through with this?”
    I plant my hand on my hips. “We’re already knee deep into it. Can’t turn our backs now.” The bell rings.
    “I hate to say it, but Lucas might be right.” He pulls his keys out of his pocket and fiddles with it, spinning it round his index finger.
    “About what?”
    I look up into his eyes and see his uncertainty.
    For a moment, I become lost the trance that his blue eyes have entangled me in. I rub my thumb over the smoothness of skin below his knuckles. It’s the perfect blend of the tenderness of my hands and the ruggedness of his. I feel aflutter. The butterflies in my stomach can’t differentiate between a pretend relationship and a real one. And at this point, I’m tempted to say I don’t care. This scene has played out inside my head since I was a little girl. Lying in bed with thoughts of holding Kellen’s hands, us cuddling and us kissing.
    But it was a far cry from reality, so I tucked that fantasy away with being an astronaut or the first female president, or a Hollywood actress playing Wonder Woman in a feature