He slipped his hands beneath my sweater, rough fingers warm and reassuring against my waist. “That was for, like, two seconds. Lindsay plopped down into my lap from out of nowhere. I promptly turned her down, and she moved. The end.”

“That’s it?” My body relaxed, the ability to breathe returning to normal.

“That’s it. Nothing happened,” he said, voice gentle. “And it wasn’t recently; it was before Ty’s party.”

The explanation was genuine. And I was a complete jerk. A jerk who’d been baited into overreacting by Luke’s crony.

Chase narrowed his eyes. “Who told you this?”

“Paul…”

“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, shaking his head. “Consider the source, James.”

“But she did sit on your lap. Kind of.” I didn’t know why I was arguing that point, except to say I felt silly for having gotten upset in the first place. And even sillier for how I’d handled it after that.

“Paul twisted things around to suit his agenda and you know it. Please don’t let that asshole get in your head.”

“Thin walls.” I lowered my voice and gestured behind me. “Amelia?”

Chase glanced over my shoulder at the door, raising his voice a level. “I said, Paul is an asshole. He can’t fucking skate, either. Feel free to quote me.”

Despite the situation, I laughed. He was an instigator to the bone. At some point along the way, it had become endearing. He was my instigator, at least.

Then he looked back down at me, and his tone softened. “Paul say anything else to you?”

“Um…Well.” I drew in a breath. “He said that you slept with his cousin’s friend.” Oh, and then he called me a desperate puck bunny. But that would make Chase even more angry, and I wasn’t sure I needed to fuel that fire.

He nodded, studying my face. “Is there any chance it’s the sex thing that set you off?”

“Maybe a little,” I admitted. But it wasn’t fair to hold the past against him.

“Just because I have had meaningless sex in the past doesn’t mean it’s meaningless with you. It’s definitely not. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“As far as the other thing goes, I’ll tell you when girls hit on me if you want, but it seems kind of pointless when I’d never act on it. Besides, I’m sure you shoot down guys all the time.”

Not really. My little bubble of journalism classes, the school newspaper, and seeing Chase didn’t lend itself to being on the receiving end of many pick-up attempts. It was sweet he thought that, though.

“Probably not nearly as much as the other way around.”

“You’re going to have to trust me for this to work,” he said tersely.