Adaline went from slow swaying to a full stop. She pulled back, her eyes searching mine. My throat was bone-dry, my fingers sliding up the smooth, warm skin of her back before I pulled my hand away.
Letting go of a deep, fortifying breath, I reached that hand up, ducking my head down slightly so I could pull the mask off.
Before I could remove it fully, Adaline slid her hand out of mine, where they’d been tucked against my chest.
When I lifted my head, face free of the mask, her mouth fell open.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. The pulse at the base of her throat fluttered wildly underneath the surface of her skin. “Emmett?”
I gave her a lopsided smile. “Hey.”
She took a step back, eyes wide.
There was no flinging of her arms. No teasing smile. No excitement anywhere on her face.
My brow furrowed.
Okay. This was … not what I expected to happen.
“What is this?” she asked. “Is Parker here? Is he like, screwing with me or something?”
“What?” I shook my head. “No, of course not.”
Adaline’s shaking hand rose to briefly cover her mouth. Under her mask, her face had gone pale. “Excuse me,” she whispered, then brushed past me.
“Adaline,” I called out. An older couple wearing bright purple and black masks swayed in front of me, and I grimaced, darting to the side to avoid a collision.
But it was too late. Once she was clear of the dance floor, Adaline picked up the front of her dress with both hands and ran.
Adaline
When I turned sixteen, my family threw a surprise birthday party. It was the first and only one I’ve ever had because we learned a valuable lesson that day when the lights in our house turned on, and fifty people screamed Surprise! at my unsuspecting face.
I burst into tears.
Not pretty tears either. Something about a mass of people yelling at me when I didn’t expect it unleashed a torrent of ugly, face-reddening, eye-puffing tears that I struggled to stop for a solid fifteen minutes. My asshole brothers （I have four of them） took the picture from the exact moment those tears hit me—the ugliest picture of me that has ever existed—blew it up to a 16x20 and duct-taped it to my bedroom door the following week.
To this day, the tape residue remains on my childhood door.
I’m telling you, when you’ve experienced a moment like that, where your fight-or-flight instinct kicks you in the face, you learn really, really fast to bail from any situations that might cause it.
It’s also why I refuse to plan surprise birthday parties, no matter how much my clients beg, because you know who won’t be inflicting that kind of trauma on a young kid? Me.
It didn’t take me long once I’d bolted from the art museum to realize that I may have overreacted. Less than two blocks.
But unfortunately for Emmett, the hotel I was staying in was only a few blocks away and the moment the elevator doors at The Heathman closed around me, I sagged against the wall and knew there was no way I was returning to that party.
The moment his head lifted and I saw his face, I got a flash in my head of that picture from my sixteenth birthday party.
And what a face it was. If you weren’t really paying attention to the way someone aged, you wouldn’t think that massive changes happened in a person’s face from twenty-one to twenty-six.
It was subtle, though. The jaw was sharper, his face leaner than it had been in college. His frame might have been lanky when he was drafted from Stanford, but after years of elite physical training, Emmett had gained muscle. He was a lot bigger than he used to be, even if his height hadn’t changed at all.