Adored (3 page)

“Mmm,” Julian pulled away slowly, bringing Tinsley back to earth. “You need shoes.” He already had his red-and-brown clownlike bowling shoes laced up, his black Vans tucked neatly under the plastic bench.

The idea of wearing such ridiculous shoes made Tinsley’s skin crawl. They looked like something a blind, crack-addicted designer on
Project Runway
might call “authentic.” “Do you have any idea how many feet have been in those?”

Julian shrugged, his amused eyes focused on Tinsley’s lips. She wondered if he was thinking about kissing her again. “You wear secondhand clothes, don’t you? It’s the same thing.”

Tinsley’s lips twitched under the scrutiny. “Correction: I wear vintage. And wearing a vintage Chanel dress is not the same as wearing a pair of bowling shoes that league ladies sweat in once a week.” She stuck her tongue out at Julian but grabbed a pair of sevens from the gray-haired woman at the shoe counter. Once her yellow-and-red-patched shoes were on her feet, she modeled them for Julian, holding out a leg and pretending they looked sexy with her black Earl jeans. “Should we just get it over with and join a league?”

“I think you have to be good to join a league,” Julian answered, grinning as he plopped a pink bowling ball in Tinsley’s hands.

“You’re good,” she protested, dropping her favorite art nouveau wire ring into the pocket of her jeans for safekeeping.

Julian tucked Tinsley’s hair behind her left ear, and her heart beat faster, hoping he was going in for another kiss. “It’s not me I’m worried about.” A couple in their thirties with two whining children stared at them from a couple of lanes down— probably pining for the days when they were young and hot and not saddled with two snot-nosed brats.

“That’s it,” Tinsley mock-scowled, tossing her hair and stepping onto the polished hardwood of the lane. “I’m throwing spares today.”

“You mean strikes.” Julian picked up a swirly green bowling ball. “Watch this.” He tiptoed toward the lane and then in one long graceful motion extended his arm, releasing the ball so that it skittered across the worn wooden lanes. The pins all fell as if by magic.

“You didn’t tell me you grew up in a bowling alley,” Tinsley complained lightly, smiling.

“My next-door neighbor in Seattle had a lane in his basement,” Julian confessed, walking back and casually tracing a finger against Tinsley’s knee, almost making her pass out. She’d read somewhere—
Cosmo
, maybe?—that the knees were one of the great, underappreciated erogenous zones. She’d always been skeptical about
Cosmo
‘s “research department,” but suddenly she was a believer. “We’d spend all our time down there, bowling and watching the
Lord of the Rings
movies.”

“Just the two of you?” Tinsley teased. She didn’t know too much about Julian’s life in Seattle, before Waverly, and she wanted to know it all. She’d only been to Seattle once, and it rained the whole time.

“We were kind of dorks.” Julian yawned, and Tinsley could see a filling in his back molar. “If you can imagine that.”

Tinsley smiled as she stood and made her way toward the lane, swishing her hips as she walked for Julian’s viewing pleasure. She liked the idea of Julian spending his free time with his dorky neighbor, bowling the afternoons away instead of chasing girls the way someone like Heath Ferro had probably done since puberty. Julian wasn’t consumed with sex the way Heath was, and that made him seem so much more grown up, despite his age, than the rest of the Waverly boys.

Most of all, she loved the way Julian looked at her, not like he was wondering what she looked like naked, but wondering what she was thinking, or what she might say.

But it still made her want to get naked with him.

Fifteen minutes later, Tinsley had knocked over only a handful of pins—not that she cared—while Julian had bowled like a professional. He held up his hand to get a high five after throwing another strike. Tinsley laced her fingers through his and pulled him down to the hard plastic bench. She kissed him on the cheek, her lips resting there a moment longer than necessary.

“Get a room,” a ten-year-old kid called as he ran by to the bathroom.
Not a bad idea
, Tinsley thought.

“Well,” Julian said softly, “I’m going to try for strikes every time if that’s the reward.” He ran his fingers on the inside of her forearm and she felt the electricity surge through her body. She’d never been this into anyone for as long as she could remember. Not even Chiedo, the sexy college student she’d hooked up with in South Africa, whose face was becoming fuzzier and fuzzier as the weeks slipped by. Tinsley just stared at him, distracted by the slow realization that Julian might be the guy she’d lose her virginity to. She instantly imagined their two bodies intertwined on a set of sheets, dusk falling outside the window. The fact that Julian was a freshman and that they’d be losing it to each other gave the image an extra sweetness that Tinsley hadn’t previously considered. She’d had plenty of chances to lose it before, but now she thanked the virginity gods that she’d waited.

“Another game?” he asked, straightening up and leaning against the back of the bench. She hadn’t realized they’d played a whole one. “Or do you want to get something to eat?”

Tinsley had forgotten about food entirely, her body craving only one thing. She glanced around her toward the other lanes, which had suddenly grown silent. The kids from a couple lanes over had disappeared, and the parents were making out like wild animals on the plastic bench. “I hope they’re not going to do it right here,” Tinsley laughed, pointing them out to Julian.

“Where’s the ‘get a room’ kid when you need him?” Julian laughed, too, as he put their bowling balls back on the rack. “He should definitely check them into a hotel.”

“Is that how you’d do it?” Tinsley asked innocently, kicking off her gross bowling shoes and brushing his leg with her foot.

“Well, there are easier ways.” He shrugged, unlacing his own shoes and sliding his feet into his Vans. He tickled the bottom of Tinsley’s foot lightly.

“Yeah? How would you know?” She’d meant the question as a flirty tease, just another in a long afternoon of flirty teases. But it came out with a hint of jealous suspicion she hadn’t expected.

“I’ve got a little experience in that area,” he confessed, touching his hemp necklace.

Tinsley pulled her foot away from Julian’s tickling fingers and leaned over to grab her own shoes, letting her dark, smooth hair fall in front of her face, hiding it from his view. “Experience doing what?” She kept her voice cool, but she felt anything but. Was Julian trying to say he’d
slept
with someone before? He was fifteen—that wasn’t even
legal
in most civilized states.

Tinsley looked up and into Julian’s wide brown eyes, which suddenly weren’t as innocent as she’d previously thought. A shy smile played on his lips, but for once, Tinsley was unmoved by his dimple. “Experience doing exactly what I’d like to do with you someday.”

Tinsley flicked her long hair over her shoulder. Instead of exciting her, Julian’s words sent a chill down her spine.

“You’ll have better luck sticking with bowling,” she said calmly, getting to her feet and flouncing to the front counter, bowling shoes in hand. But her flesh was on fire. When the
hell
had Julian lost his virginity?

And, more important, whom had he lost it
to
?

Email Inbox

Dear Brett,

Hope you had a great Thanksgiving break and are ready to finish off the semester!

Would you mind stopping by my office this morning or afternoon? As our junior class prefect, I’ve got a special project for you to spearhead. Don’t worry, it’s not a typical assignment, and I have a feeling you’ll find it very rewarding.

Best,

G. W.

B
randon Buchanan strode across the Waverly Academy dining hall on Wednesday afternoon with a tray full of food, feeling more confident than he had in weeks— months, even. All he could think about since he’d hooked up with Helga Dunderdorf over Thanksgiving break, was, well, Helga Dunderdorf. Or, rather, Hellie Dunderdorf. That first night, when Brandon was tracing his finger across her flat, milky-white stomach, Hellie murmured, “Call me Hellie. All my friends do. Helga makes me sound like a Viking.”

Hellie was one of Professor Dunderdorf’s gorgeous and brilliant twin daughters. She and her sister went to the exclusive Le Rosey boarding school in Switzerland but had been home for the break. Heath Ferro, Brandon’s shamelessly horny roommate, had managed to procure an invite to Professor Dunderdorf’s Thanksgiving dinner, having heard of the sisters’ legendary hotness. Brandon and Hellie had hit it off immediately, and they’d wound up kissing in her bed on Thanksgiving night. Then on Friday night, Brandon managed to climb a ladder into Hellie’s attic room—barely dirtying his Brooks Brothers chinos in the process—for another intense night together. It was insane. The whole weekend had passed by in a blur of very un-Brandon-Buchanan-like activity. Only now, three days after kissing Hellie goodbye, was he starting to come down from his cloud. But he was coming down as a changed man.

The dining hall buzzed with lunchtime activity, and Brandon spotted Lon Baruzza, Alan St. Girard, Ryan Reynolds, and Heath crowded around the round table smack in the center of the room. They claimed it offered the best girl-watching positions, and indeed, as Brandon strode up to the table, the boys’ eyes were glued to Trisha Reikken’s obscenely short plaid mini-skirt as she leaned over the salad bar. Brandon set his tray down next to Lon. “Shove over, will you?”

Lon glanced up at Brandon in surprise before shifting over to make room. The dark-haired senior scholarship kid had an oversize nose, which somehow served, for the Waverly girls, as evidence of his other oversized body parts. Brandon suspected that Lon had started the rumor himself.

“Lamest Thanksgiving ever,” Teague Williams interrupted as he gracelessly dropped his tray onto the table, sending splashes of orange Gatorade across everyone’s plates. Teague was a tall redheaded senior on the swim team who always smelled like he just got out of the pool. “My sister was going to set me up with her roommate at Smith, but she turned out to be a total dog. I spent most of the weekend hiding in my room with my Wii.”

“Dude.” Heath soaked a piece of French bread in his plateful of overcooked spaghetti and popped the whole thing in his mouth. “You know those Smith chicks are all pent-up nymphos. You should have hit that!”

“Right?” Ryan ran his hand across the sorry-looking thatch of stubble that had appeared on his chin over break. Combined with his ill-conceived platinum eyebrow stud, the stubble made him look like some kind of low-budget pimp. “Just keep the lights off.”

Everyone laughed. Brandon normally would have added some scathing criticism to their blatantly moronic chatter, but he was in too good a mood. He bit into his tomato and mozzarella sandwich, careful to avoid leaking pesto onto his pressed Burberry flat-front trousers. Hellie had gone back to Switzerland on Sunday, but she’d been texting him pictures of her school world—the medieval château at the center of campus where she took her Latin classes, her sunny, slope-ceilinged dorm room with a poster of a Botticelli painting on the wall, the dance studio where she took ballet three times a week. She’d even taken a picture of herself, looking unbearably sexy, in the faded gray T-shirt with a Le Rosey crest and the boxer shorts she wore to sleep. Which only made Brandon wish even more that she were sleeping next to him.

“Dude, I would have come back to Waverly before I let some ugly Smith chick push me around,” Lon declared.

“Yeah, like I was going to spend Thanksgiving on campus,” Teague snorted, flicking a crumb off his black button-down. It would have looked good if it had ever seen an iron. “And what? Play spin the bottle with the international students? Eat me.”

“You guys don’t know what you missed,” Brandon offered between bites, waiting for the others to ask him about Hellie. Although he normally wasn’t a bragger, he was kind of excited to have, for once, something to brag about.

“You bring back any Thanksgiving leftovers?” Ryan asked Alan. He pinched his thumb and forefinger together and brought them to his lips, inhaling. Alan’s parents were infamous around campus for running their own marijuana farm in the backwoods of New Hampshire—for medicinal purposes, of course.

Alan stroked the brown scruff under his chin and smiled dolefully. “Enough to keep me stuffed for a month. Maybe more.”

“Righteous.” Ryan nodded. He pushed his dirty lunch tray to the center of the table. He had an annoying habit of “forgetting” to take his tray to the tray return, instead leaving it on the table for the overworked dining services staff to take care of.

“Heath and I stayed back, didn’t he tell you?” Brandon asked the table in a moment of silence while everyone stuffed their faces with food.

Lon and Ryan exchanged glances. “Yeah, heard about the, uh… Swedish model.” Lon leaned back in his chair and popped a couple of grapes into his mouth.

“She’s Swiss, actually,” Brandon corrected Lon. He munched on a couple of chips while the rest of the table waited for him to regale them with Tales of the Sauna. He anticipated their congratulations as eagerly as he did Hellie’s next pic. “And she’s not a model… although she could be.”

“
Swiss
model, right,” Ryan said, thumping the heel of his hand into his forehead. “We stand corrected.” Alan St. Girard chuckled, then crammed a forkful of mashed potatoes into his mouth to hide it.