Page 33 of Let the Games Begin
“June seventh… a photo shoot.” He looked away, quickly scrolling past the pictures.
“Is that what you look like when you’re embarrassed?” she said with amusement.
“I’m not embarrassed.”
“Yes, you are. See, now I want to see the photos.”
“Nope,” he said, feeling a sudden wave of self-consciousness.
“Zeke!” she said, her eyes widening. “You can’t tell me you were doing a photo shoot and then not show me the photos.” Sheleaned toward him mischievously. He was finding it harder and harder to say no to her.
“All right, all right,” said Zeke as he gave her his phone to look at the photos. As she scrolled through, he tried to guess what she was thinking, but her face was impossible to read.
“What’s the verdict?”
She looked at the photos, and then back up at him.
“You look good,” she said matter-of-factly. “Did you get your eyebrows done for it?”
“Yeah, I did, but I think they’ve started to grow back now. Look,” he said, pointing up at his eyebrow to show Olivia the short thin hairs growing back outside the lines the stylist on the photo shoot had shaped them into.
“Zeke, you know how I’m good at a lot of things…” She rummaged through her bag.
“I don’t know if I like where this is going,” Zeke said, half in terror and half in amusement as he watched her take out a makeup bag and a bottle of hand sanitizer.
“Trust me,” she said, excitedly pulling out a pair of tweezers.
“You are way too enthusiastic for me to trust you,” said Zeke, looking at the tweezers and then the delighted, to the point of maniacal, smile on Olivia’s face.
“Okay, this might hurt a little bit,” she said.
“I did kidnap training, remember? I’m familiar with torture.”
Olivia rolled her eyes and leaned over to place her hands on the side of his head. They were warm, soft, and smelled like vanilla. The gentleness caught him by surprise.
Maybe it was the fact that she was hovering right above his face or maybe it was the fact that they’d been talking to eachother for almost an entire hour now, but he felt like something was shifting between them. Like he’d known her longer than just the past few days. He felt so at ease with her that it made him nervous. Zeke could feel himself getting gently pulled in. Their faces were just centimeters apart, so close that he could smell the perfume on her skin.
“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to make a move on me,” he whispered.
“If you’re not careful I might end upaccidentallyoverplucking you,” she whispered as she leaned so close to him there was barely any separation between their bodies. Taking the elevator was the best decision Zeke had made all week.
28Olivia
DAY FOUR OF THE 2024 OLYMPICS
That was how Olivia found herself hovering just a couple of centimeters away from Zeke’s face for ten minutes. Taking her time as she plucked his eyebrows hair by hair until they started to resemble the form they’d been shaped into for his magazine cover shoot. She kept looking back down at the photo as a reference image, and each time it was a relief to be able to look at something that wasn’t his actual face. Somehow the photo captured Zeke exactly as he was up close, so handsome that Olivia couldn’t look at him for too long without wanting to touch his beautiful eyelashes or kiss his absurdly gorgeous lips. She caught a glimpse of the hair-thin necklace that had slipped under his shirt, the gentle ripples of fabric accentuating all the hours he clearly spent in the gym. His cologne was warm and musky.
“How’s it going up there?” he whispered after a few moments of silence.
“Just thinking about how you talk abiggame for someone whose eyes started watering two seconds into this,” Olivia said.She gently stroked the skin around his eyebrow, absentmindedly tracing a line around it. His skin was soft and smooth.
“My eyes aren’t watering, it’s… it’s just the light and the angle,” he said unconvincingly. She shook her head, smiling to herself.
“All right, I’m done,” she said softly, sitting back to check that his eyebrows were completely symmetrical.
“How do I look, Olivia?” he asked.
She loved hearing her name on his lips. “Good,” she said. For some reason, she didn’t feel the need to follow it up with a joke or fill in the silence. While she’d moved back a little bit, their faces were still just a few centimeters away from each other. Everything in her wanted to lean nearer and close the distance between them. And, it turned out, he felt the same.
