Crush

by Tracy Wolff

  “And everyone else in the arena,” Xavier adds.

  “True dat,” Flint agrees with the biggest grin I’ve ever seen from him, and that’s saying something.

  “So, just to be clear, there’re a bunch of portals you can wander into all over the stadium.”

  “Yeah.” Flint grins. “I mean, not now. They set them up the day of the event, but yeah. It’s super fun.”

  I nod. “And even if you’re almost at the goal line, if you fall through a surprise portal the last couple of seconds, then you could be totally screwed.” I shake my head. “That’s diabolical.”

  “It is, absolutely,” Jaxon agrees.

  “It’s also the most fun you can have with a hot ball ever,” Xavier says.

  “I don’t even want to know what that means,” I tease.

  Xavier just winks at me in response, which makes me laugh and roll my eyes at the same time. The wink doesn’t affect me at all—I’ve got Jaxon—but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t notice how attractive the look is on him. No wonder Macy keeps glancing his way. It’s ridiculous how even the goofy boys at this school have game.

  “Are there any other rules I should know about?” I ask, just as Mekhi walks up to join us. He grins at me, and I wave back, excited to see him. Things have been so busy since I got back that we haven’t had much of a chance to talk.

  “The ball has to keep moving the entire time. If you have the ball and pause for longer than five seconds—even if you’ve just come out of a portal and have no idea where you are—then it’s an automatic turnover,” Xavier tells me.

  “And every player has to have the ball at least once,” Eden adds. “If not—”

  “The other team wins. Apparently, if you breathe the wrong way, the other team wins,” I say, totally disgusted.

  “Yeah, but look at it this way,” Mekhi tells me as he starts to stretch. “The other team’s playing by the exact same rules.”

  I nod. “Fair enough.”

  “All right, enough talking!” Flint claps his hands to get everyone’s attention. “We’re dividing into teams, so for now, it’ll be Jaxon, Grace, and me against the rest of you. When Gwen shows up, she can join our team.”

  He turns and wiggles his brows at me. “Ready to fly, Grace?”

  “Not even a little bit.” Still, I reach for that platinum thread, and seconds later I’m a gargoyle again, complete with kick-ass wings.

  Which they all spend the next five minutes gawking over. As they should. They’re totally awesome. Xavier asked how concrete wings fly and Flint smacked him. “Obviously magic.”

  My grin widens. I’ve got magical wings.

  “We call the ball first,” Eden says.

  “Why should you get the ball first?” Flint asks indignantly. “There are only three of us!”

  “Yeah, and one of you is Jaxon Vega while the other is a gargoyle made out of stone—which, you know, is impervious to heat. Pretty sure you’ve got a couple of big advantages over there already.”

  “But you said it vibrates,” I tell them. “I’m not immune to that.”

  Everyone cracks up, even Jaxon. It takes me a second to realize what they’re laughing at, and then I blush nonstop.

  “So what am I, chopped liver?” Flint jumps in to save me, making a show of going from indignant to really indignant in the space of three seconds flat.

  Eden looks him over with a huge smirk on her face. “You said it, not me.”

  “Oh, that’s it. Fine, take the ball.” He grabs it from Macy and fires it. “I’m going to be feeding it to you in five minutes flat.”

  “Oh yeah? Try it.” She opens her mouth and shoots a giant stream of lightning straight at him. It doesn’t hit him, but it does burn off the bottom half of his workout shirt.

  Flint yelps and jumps, while the rest of us burst out laughing. Though the female contingent of the group also totally checks out Flint’s very nice abs—Eden very much included.

  Or maybe not just the female contingent of the group, I realize when I glance over at Jaxon, who is paying pretty close attention as his ex-best friend strips what remains of his shirt off and drops it on the ground, and everyone scatters to take up positions on the field.

  “It’s a good look for him,” I tease.

  “What?” Jaxon asks, seeming a little confused.

  “I saw you checking him out.” I nod toward Flint. “No worries, though. Believe me, I get it.”

  “I didn’t—I wasn’t—”

  I just laugh and take a note from Flint’s playbook and waggle my brows at him.

  But when things finally quiet down again and we start to take sides, I lean in to Flint and ask, “Shouldn’t I at least practice flying before we start actually playing the game?”

  62

  Gravity Bites

  “Don’t worry about it, Grace,” Flint says with a grin. “You’ve got this.”

  “I most definitely don’t have this!” I yelp. “I’ve never even tried to fly before!”

  “Yeah, but you saw me fly. It’s easy.” He’s taking such long strides that it’s hard for me to keep up, but if he’s going to throw all these ridiculous pronouncements out, he’s at least going to look me in the eye when he does it.

  I run to catch up, something that isn’t easy to do as a gargoyle, apparently, and finally manage to get in front of him while Jaxon—and Hudson—look on in amusement. The jerks.

  “Are you smoking something?” I slam a hand on his chest to make sure I get his attention. “I mean, seriously, are you actually high right now? I can’t fly, Flint. I’ve never even used my wings before. There is no way you’re going to just throw a hot ball at me and tell me to fly and think I’m going to just take off.

  “So park your ego at the door for ten minutes, give me some flying pointers and a few minutes to practice, and then let’s ground them into dust. Otherwise, I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”

  Flint’s eyes keep getting wider and wider the longer I talk, and by the time I’m done, he’s actually looking a little shamefaced—an expression that only gets worse when he realizes Jaxon watched the entire exchange.

  “Yeah, of course. I’m sorry, Grace. Eden and I have this competitive thing going and it gets the best of me every time.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” I smile to soften my earlier frustration. “Just tell them we need fifteen minutes and then teach me how to fly, okay?”

  Jaxon laughs. “I’ll go tell them they get to try to beat just me for now,” he says with a surreptitious wink at me, “while you two figure out how to defy gravity.”

  Flint watches him go, a pensive frown on his face. But when he turns back to me, he’s all smiles. “So, flying’s easy. You just need to think—”

  “Happy thoughts?” I ask dryly.

  He cracks up. “You’re a gargoyle, not Peter Pan.”

  I roll my eyes at him, but I don’t think he sees it, as we’re hustling to the other side of the field now. “That was pretty much my point.”

  “What I was going to say is that you need to think about flying.”

  “So, like, I think about flapping my wings?” To my amazement, they flap back and forth even as I say the words.

  “Oh my God, Flint!” I grab him, stopping him from taking another step, and jump up and down. “Did you see that?”

  He’s grinning hugely now. “Of course I saw it!”

  I crane my neck around so I can see it, and then I do it again. And again. And again. “Oh my God! They work! They really work!”

  Flint is full-on laughing his ass off now, but I don’t care. I’m so excited that my wings work that I keep hopping around and making them flap as hard as I can.

  Even Hudson is laughing now, but it’s with me, not at me. “You look good flapping your wings like that.”

  “I do,
don’t I?” I flap them again, just because I can. “I have wings, Hudson! And they work!”

  “Hell yeah, they do.” He shakes his head with a big smile.

  I turn to Flint. “Okay, now what do I do?”

  “You just flap super hard until you get off the ground.”

  “Really?” I ask, my eyes going wide as I start to try that.

  He bursts out laughing, so hard that for a moment he can’t even talk. I’m not sure what the joke is until he finally recovers enough to put a hand on my shoulder. “No, stop,” he says. “I was joking, Grace.”

  “Oh.” I blush a little, but I’m having too much fun to be embarrassed for long. Plus, I want to fly! “So tell me what to do. For real this time!”

  “Okay. What you want to do is think about flying. Not about falling, not about being able to move your wings, not about getting off the ground. Just think about flying. About catching the wind.”

  He looks around, then seems to get an idea, because he reaches out and grabs my hand. “Let’s go to the bleachers.”

  “Are you kidding me? I’m not jumping off the bleachers the first time I try to fly! No effing way.”

  “We’re not jumping from the bleachers, for God’s sake. You’re not a baby bird.”

  Hudson snort-laughs at this, then fades ahead of us, so that he’s lounging on the bleachers with a huge, shit-eating grin before we even get close.

  Once we’re there, Flint stops at the railing right in front of the first row of bleachers. “Although, to be fair, if you did jump off the bleachers and started to fall, Jaxon and I would absolutely have your back. So there’s nothing to worry about, right? Just a simple walk in the park…but, you know, in the sky,” he teases.

  My eyes go wide. “Says the guy who five minutes ago told me I’d figure flying out in the middle of the game.”

  He waggles his brows. “To be fair, I still stand by that analysis. But let’s try this instead.”

  Then, with absolutely no warning at all, he picks me up and puts me on top of the railing in front of the first bleacher. Unlike when I’m in my human form, lifting me like this actually strains his biceps and has him grunting a little.

  Which only makes it worse when he lets go of me—keeping my balance on a railing is one thing. Keeping my balance when I’m stone is something else entirely. And it’s only sheer strength of will that stops me from shrieking when he lets go. But I manage it, because there’s no way I’m going to act like a hysterical little human caught in the middle of a bunch of big, bad paranormals.

  Jaxon deserves better for a mate, but more importantly, I deserve better, too.

  So instead of letting out the scream that wells in my throat the second I’m standing on my own, I swallow it down deep. Then ask, “What next?”

  Flint looks more than a little uncertain when he says, “Jump?”

  “Is that a question or a command?” I ask.

  “Umm, both?”

  “I thought you said you’d give me flying lessons! This”—I gesture around me—“is not flying lessons!”

  “I meant once you were in the air. I do the best triple loops in the school.” He grins.

  I shake my head. “Yeah, because triple loops are what I need right now, Flint.”

  “Look, I’m doing my best, okay?” He chuckles and steps back a few steps. “Now, will you at least try it my way?”

  I place my hands on my hips and raise one pointed brow. “And what way is that exactly?”

  “Just jump and then…” He gestures with his arms.

  “Flap my wings?”

  “Yes. But don’t think about your wings. Think about—”

  “Flying.” I sigh. “Yeah, I got that much before.” I look out at the field and the others who are kind of practicing but mostly just looking at me.

  Okay, what the hell? Better to fall on my ass than never give it a shot. I take a deep breath, close my eyes.

  “Remember, think about flying,” Flint tells me, and he’s a little farther away than he was a minute ago. I’m not sure if that’s because he thinks I’m going to fly or if it’s because he thinks I’m going to crash and wants to be out of the blast radius.

  It doesn’t matter, I tell myself as I try to focus. Nothing does but thinking about flying. The fact that I have no idea how I’m supposed to do that doesn’t matter at all.

  I’m flying. I’m flying. I’m flying. Flint told me to think about flying, so I’m thinking about flying. I’m flying. Like a bird. Like a plane. Like…okay, bad analogy. I’m flying. I’m fly—

  I jump and…land on my stony ass—which, it turns out, doesn’t hurt nearly as much as when I fall on my human ass. Thankfully. Though it is definitely more jolting.

  “It’s also definitely not flying,” Hudson teases from where he’s still lounging a few feet up on the bleachers.

  “Are you okay?” Jaxon asks as he comes jogging over to help me up. “I’m sorry, I was too far away to catch you.”

  Of course he would think he was supposed to catch me. I shake my head and smile. “No worries. Stone is a good shock absorber.”

  He laughs. “No, it’s not.”

  “No, it’s not,” I agree, brushing the grass off my fleece pants. “But I swear it didn’t hurt. I’m all right.”

  “Good.” He nods to the railing. “You want to try it again?”

  “Not even a little bit.”

  He lifts a brow. “Going to do it anyway?”

  I lift my chin. “Abso-freaking-lutely.”

  63

  There Aren’t Enough

  Happy Thoughts

  in the World

  Jaxon holds out a hand. “Let me help you up.”

  I think about arguing, then decide, why would I? I have no interest in hauling my stony self on top of a three-foot railing. To be honest, I’m not sure I could get my regular self on top of the railing, either.

  Two minutes later, I’m back on the ground, and this time my ass does hurt.

  Three minutes after that, my ass and my pride hurt.

  “Are you sure I don’t need to think happy thoughts?” I ask Flint.

  He grins. “I mean, you can try, but I don’t think that will help, either.”

  “Yeah, well, the grumpy thoughts sure aren’t cutting it.”

  “No shit.” Hudson shakes his head and leans even farther back, placing both his hands behind his head. “Although the entertainment value is priceless.”

  Flint helps me up this time. “So, fourth time’s the charm?”

  “Fourth time is let’s try something different,” Jaxon interjects, taking my hand and pulling me toward the center of the field.

  “How am I going to fly out here?” I ask. “Don’t I need to start from someplace higher?”

  He grins at me. “You are going to start from someplace higher.” And then he lifts us up, up, up, until we’re hovering close to the roof of the practice field.

  “Umm, while I appreciate the ride, it’s not flying if you’re lifting me up.” I have to bite back an honest-to-God snicker as I imagine the two of us floating around up there like a few blimps. Hudson would never let me live it down.

  “Guess you’d better fly, then, huh?” Hudson says. “Otherwise, I’m going to live off this for days…”

  “Trust me, I won’t be lifting you up for long.” Jaxon pulls away a little, floating backward until we’re no longer touching. “Now, try.”

  I look down at the ground about fifty feet below and wonder if I really want to try from this height. But trying on the ground didn’t work at all, and if there’s one thing I do know, it’s that Jaxon won’t let me fall. So what do I have to lose?

  With that in mind, I close my eyes and think happy thoughts about flying. I’m not saying it worked, but I am saying that for the first time, my wings start to move—and
they do it without my consciously deciding to move them.

  It’s a weird feeling. Not a bad one, but definitely a weird one. On the ground, I didn’t feel much of anything when I was moving my wings, but now that I’m up here, it’s a very different story. There’s pressure underneath them that I didn’t expect, and each time my wings push through, it gives me a little jolt.

  “You’re still holding me, right?” I ask Jaxon as I start to move forward.

  “Absolutely,” he answers with a grin that he’s trying really hard to hide.

  I know it’s because I look ridiculous—I keep catching myself stroking my arms out in front of me like doing the breaststroke in midair is actually going to get me somewhere or something.

  The absurdity is made worse by the fact that the faster I get my wings to go, the more likely I am to end up bobbing up and down. Which means if I don’t get this whole thing figured out soon, I’m going to find myself swimming through the air, all while looking like I’m practicing bizarrely timed evasive maneuvers anytime I want to fly.

  Probably not the way I want to go, considering even my mate can’t keep a straight face. I can only imagine what Flint and Macy and the others are thinking down below.

  “I think we should quit,” I tell Jaxon after a few more minutes of attempting to stay semi-vertical and also fly. “I’m never going to get this.”

  “That’s not true. You’re already so much better than you were.”

  “Considering my worst was plummeting off a railing, I feel like you’re sugarcoating things.”

  He grins at me, and though he’s several feet away, I swear I feel him caress my face. “One more time,” he says. “For me. I’ve got an idea.”

  “What’s your idea?”

  “I’ll tell you after. Just go ahead and try.”

  “Fine,” I agree, “But after this, I’m done being today’s entertainment. I’ll have to find another way to contribute to the team…like being the water/blood girl.”