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For all that Shane doesn’t believe in the supernatural, the possibility that he’s developed a sort of preternatural sense for when a camera is on him is a theory he’s willing to at least entertain.
Sure enough, there she is, Kelsey Impicciche, The Most Earnest Girl in the World, pointing her phone at him with a smile brighter than any of the strobing lights at Buzzfeed’s annual holiday party. Something bubbles up in him, something he can’t get ahead of, that drives him to tip the brim of his hat like an old-timey cowboy and wink at her.
Her video must time out there, because she lowers her phone and laughs in a way Shane can hear just from the look of it, then tips an imaginary hat right back at him. Their gazes stay locked longer than the bit merits, and Shane is two seconds away from doing something supremely dumb like jazz hands when Jared claims her attention with a hand on the bare skin of her arm. She starts and allows him to drag her away, turning a few steps in to wave goodbye at Shane with the hand still clutching her phone.
Shane waves back, bobbing his head like his body can’t figure out how to settle. He watches her go, her red dress easy to track through the crowd, until she and Jared are swallowed up by a group of fellow producers from Multiplayer.
“Sad.”
Sara’s pithy snort catches Shane off guard, and he nearly jumps out of his skin. She’s pressed close into his space, barely an inch between their chests, her warmth and the smell of her eucalyptus shampoo familiar and steadying.
“Wh-what?” Shane asks with a soft, uncertain chuckle. Sara steps forward, and Shane takes it as his cue to wrap his arms around her middle. One hand raises to her hair to wind one springy curl around his finger.
Sara smiles, sly and slow. “You,” she elaborates. “You’re sad. I feel like I’m watching a schoolboy with a crush, but also the weird guy that loiters around the playground, together as one single pathetic entity.”
Her hand on his chest is soft, but the words hit him like cast stones, and he flinches back, forcing distance between them as he tries to get a better look at the expression on her face, or as much as he can read of it in the odd lightning.
“I-I’m not,” Shane stammers, brow pinching tight between his eyes. “Wh-” he tries asking again, but the back half of the word gets stuck in his throat, just below a damning, acrid lump.
“No, it’s fine,” Sara says, waving her hand dismissively, the backs of her fingers brushing against Shane’s plaid button-down. She fists the material in her hands and yanks him forward so she can bury her face in his chest. He thinks she might be getting foundation on him, but the feeling of her body pressed so close is worth more than an evening wearing a smudge.
“I get it,” Sara continues, trailing her finger in a vertical line over his chest. It makes Shane hot under the collar. “She’s cute. And obviously into you.”
Shane opens his mouth to protest, but Sara steamrolls right on. “Plus, you’re pretty cute, too,” she says, prodding his chest with her pointer finger for emphasis. “The whole
nervous schoolboy
look is a
thing
.”
Shane chuckles, despite himself. He takes Sara’s small, dainty wrists between his much larger hands and squeezes them gently. “Is that so?” he teases.
Sara smirks. “I can tell no lies.”
Raising a hand, Shane tucks Sara’s hair behind her ear and rubs the lobe between his thumb and forefinger before moving on to tenderly stroke the corner of her jaw. “Sorry for making you feel icky,” he whispers, his sincere gaze holding hers. “I’m all eyes on you from now on. What Kelsey? Who’s Kelsey? I don’t even know her.”
Sara snorts and shakes her head, giggling softly and placing a kiss to Shane’s palm, just above his wrist, over his pulse. “That’s very chivalrous of you,” she assures him. “But I don’t actually feel icky.”
“Well, good,” Shane says with an abrupt, decisive nod. “That’s good.”
Shane’s still bobbing his head, full of awkward energy thrumming under his skin louder than the bass of the music, when Sara slithers in closer and dances her fingers up his chest to brush the side of his neck. “I said I don’t feel
icky
.”
The way she emphasizes the word causes a chill to run up Shane’s spine almost as much as the way her nails rake through the hair at the back of his neck.
“
Oh
,” Shane says, soft and surprised and a little wanton.
Sara chuckles. “Yeah,” she agrees. “More like that.”
“Petition to put a pin in this conversation?” Shane asks, low and in her ear. Sara shivers in his arms. “Because I do very much want to unpin it, believe me, but this feels like the wrong time to start sporting a semi.”
“There’s a wrong time?” Sara teases, but she lets up with one last brush of her fingers along the nape of his neck. Stepping back, she pats him squarely on the chest and offers up an impish grin.
“Later,” she says, and it sounds like a promise.
As it turns out,
later
is a promise, and
later
comes much
sooner
than Shane is expecting.
“I love your dress,” Sara says, chasing Kelsey down in the crowd and catching her from behind, smoothing her hand down the satiny red fabric that drapes over Kelsey’s thigh as Kelsey turns, mid-step, to look back at her.
Immediately, Kelsey’s face lights up, and it makes Shane a special kind of disappointed in himself that he never fully realized just how much her smile makes his heart swell.
Stupid schoolboy crush.
“Oh my goodness, thank you,” Kelsey squeals, high-pitched and giddy, brining her hands up to cradle her face, hiding the gorgeous flush that reddens her cheeks even more than Buzzfeed’s open bar has pinked them.
She spends another few seconds giggling before she reaches out to Sara and grabs her around the biceps, squeezing tight. “You look so, so beautiful,” she says, and Sara ducks her head.
“Aww,” she murmurs, barely audible over the music blaring from the speakers. She grabs Kelsey’s forearms in return and rubs them sweetly with her thumbs. “Thank you.”
“And you,” Kelsey says, turning to look at Shane but keeping her hands firmly on Sara. “Don’t you look dashing.”
Shane recognizes the nervous tick for what it is, but can’t stop himself from raising his hand to his hat and tipping it to her again. “Why thank you, ‘lil lady,” he says with his best, put-upon southern drawl. Kelsey’s answering laugh is lilting and absolutely breathtaking.
Sara kicks him pointedly in the side of the shin.
“You look wonderful,” he hastens to tell her, a safe choice as far as complimentary adjectives go, and Sara kicks at him again.
“Gorgeous,” he amends, offering Kelsey a nervous but genuine smile. “You look gorgeous.”
Kelsey’s face flushes as bright as her dress, and she extracts one arm from Sara’s grip to scratch at the back of her neck. “That’s so sweet of you to say,” she mutters, the sentence trailing off into a chuckle. She casts Sara a furtive, uncertain glace, like she’s waiting for her reproach, but Sara gives her nothing more than a sly smile, and it stops Kelsey’s hand in midair as she makes to lower it to her side.
“We’re very upfront people,” Sara says, swaying into Kelsey’s space until they’re almost pressed front to front. It would be an unmistakable signal of her intent if the music weren’t so loud, but Kelsey seems to get it anyway. For good measure, Sara adds, “if you know what I mean.”
Kelsey’s eyes widen.
“Sara,” Shane scolds, elbowing her enough to jostle her.
The damage, however, is already done.
“
Oh
,” Kelsey says, soft and surprised and a little wanton. Shane has the impression of looking in a funhouse mirror.
“Do you maybe wanna come back to our place after this whole shindig wraps up?” Shane asks, leaning in close, too, his heart fluttering a mile a minute in his chest. “Unless you have other plans. Or also if you just don’t want to. You can make it very clear if you don’t want to.”
His eyes are steady and firm when he impresses that point upon her.
Kelsey, immediately, shakes her head. “I want to,” she says, then chuckles nervously and tries again, this time with a bit more of a pause. “I mean, yes,” she says. “I would like that. Whatever
that
is. I’m on board.”
Not so surreptitiously, Shane leans over to speak into Sara’s ear, though he’s loud enough for all three to hear. “Do we know what
this
is?” he asks.
Sara purses her lips. “To be determined. If that’s okay?”
Shane shrugs, even as nerves bubble up in his chest. They’re good nerves anway. They feel like good nerves. “You know me,” he says. “I can be a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kinda guy.”
“And you?” Sara wonders, turning to look at Kelsey with sharp, inquisitive eyes. Shane looks at her too, fights the urge to gnaw at his lower lip.
Kelsey smirks. “I’m not even wearing pants,” she replies.
With an extra sway in her step, Kelsey walks past Shane and Sara and makes a beeline for the refreshment table, squeezing Sara’s arm and patting a hand against Shane’s chest as she goes.
“Come find me at the end of the night,” she says. “If you’re really game. I’m in.”
Shane and Sara both watch her go, and Shane fights back the urge to skip.
“Well golly-gosh, would you look at that,” he says with a whistle under his breath. He raises his hand, but Sara stops it halfway to his head.
“Tip the hat again and you lose it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”