Biggest Flirts (16 page)

I nodded. “I know what you mean.” I remembered marching through the halftime show next to Will on Monday, so close to him physically, but so far away. My stomach turned over. And my heart went out to Sawyer. I couldn’t imagine living with that pain for a couple of years.

“I’m blowing this joint,” Sawyer said, easing up from the swing so it didn’t shift and send me flying. He
could
be courteous, but Kaye would never believe it. “I’m sure I can find a better party.”

“I hope you have a good night,” I called as he headed for the stairs.

Descending into the darkness, he called back over his shoulder, “I hope you don’t fall in love.”

Walking back into the party, I tried to shake the uneasy feeling he’d given me. I’d had a great time with Will that night. Just like my very first night with Will, I counted it as one of the best experiences of my life. The key to enjoying myself with Will was making sure I didn’t think too hard about it. I wanted that euphoria back again.

Will was exactly where I’d left him, talking hockey with the football team. He was even speaking as I approached. But his eyes cut to me and stayed on me. When I reached him, he encircled me with one arm and whispered, “Angelica watched you follow Sawyer out.”

Tingles spread across my face as I whispered back, “Then you and I need to look like we’re finally having that good time we talked about.”

14

I TOOK HIS HAND AND
tugged him farther into the living room. I’d thought we could claim a couch in the corner or—if push came to shove—one overstuffed chair. But the night was growing old, and the comfy furniture was occupied by couples getting to know each other better. Will saw this too. He walked through the stately arched doorway of the living room and kept walking until we reached the kitchen table.

I stepped closer to him and spoke in his ear so he could hear me over the video game music and the laughter. “We can’t flirt here. All the surfaces are hard.”

He turned his head slowly. His eyes were wide and his mouth was twisted to one side to keep from laughing while he pretended to be outraged at me for uttering the word “hard.”

“Damn it,” I said, “you know what I mean.” Surely he did. Settling in for flirting (or more) at a party required plush seating.

“We’ll make it work.” He pulled out a chair for me from under the table. After I sprawled in it with a dispirited sigh, he sat in the chair next to mine. We might as well have been doing our calculus homework together, the turn-on nobody could deny.

And then he reached around my sides, grabbed the seat of my chair, and dragged me toward him until we were facing each other, knee to knee. “There,” he said.

That did seem better for flirting. But all of a sudden, I felt shy around him. I found myself looking toward the cabinets—nothing more interesting there than a state-of-the-art microwave—and then the other way toward the crowd in the living room, where, on the couch, Brody and Grace had not gotten into it sufficiently to draw anybody’s attention for real.

Will put two fingers on the side of my chin and pointed my face toward his again. “Hey. You’re supposed to be flirting with me.”

“Oh, suddenly this is
my
job?
You’re
supposed to be flirting with
me
.”

“I
did
flirt with you,” he insisted. “I touched your chin just now.”

“Oooh!” I said, raising my eyebrows and pursing my lips to show him exactly how impressed I was, which was
not
.

“I touched your
chair
,” he said.

“If that counts for flirting, I’m going outside to touch the right rear fender of your car. That will count for getting to third base.” I started to get up.

“No,” he said, grabbing both my thighs just above the knee.

While the shock of his touch shot through me, I eased back down in my chair. He slowly took his hands away, a horrified expression on his face. He started to put his hands up in the air to show me he hadn’t meant to touch me quite so high—and then realized this didn’t look very flirtatious. He put his hands back on his own thighs.

After another silent thirty seconds of staring at the design on his T-shirt, I said, “I don’t know why this is so hard.”

Then I realized I’d said the
H
-word again. He gave me the fake-outraged look, which should have broken the ice but didn’t. Nothing could. We sank into another excruciating silence. The more our flirting mattered, the worse we were at it.

The song on the video game changed, from an emo classic to a funky groove. Will relaxed as he always did when the beat was good, transforming from an uptight faux-boyfriend to my friend the drummer. His shoulders settled against the back of his chair, and his fingers tapped out the beat on his thigh, his right pointer finger on the snare downbeat and his left finger on the bass drum.

I relaxed too. My unease fell away, and all that was left was the usual desire to be around him, talk to him, joke with him, capture his attention, bask in his glow—coupled with the fun of sitting so close to him, our knees touching.

Slowly I reached across my thighs, across his, and put my fingers on top of his hands. I moved his hands from tapping on his thighs to tapping on mine.

Still drumming his beat, he glanced up at me, flashing those blue eyes, and gave me a sly smile.

I kept coaxing his hands up my thighs, so high that if Angelica had looked in, I might have gotten called a name.

Will was aware of this too, apparently. His lips parted like he couldn’t believe I was so forward and he wanted out.

Now I wished I hadn’t done it. I’d only been teasing him, frustrated that we were reduced to this awkward silence. I hadn’t meant to chase him off and make things worse.

He turned and glanced into the living room. With his eyes still on the front door, he leaned toward me and said, “Angelica just left with Xavier Pilkington.”

Inside, I burst into laughter. Of
course
Angelica was finally going to get it on with Xavier Pilkington. They would be rocking his car with their synchronized typing as they spent the end of their Saturday night working on the English paper that wasn’t due until two weeks from Tuesday.

But I died a little too. I was afraid of what this meant. Now that she was gone, especially with another guy, there was no reason for Will and me to continue this charade. Our heady night together was over.

“Tia,” he said.

I nodded, bowing my head and bringing it closer to his. At least I could feel his breath in my ear one last time before we went our separate ways.

“When we arranged our deal to make Angelica jealous, I didn’t say what I really meant, which was, please go out with me. I want to be with you. I don’t want it to be fake, and I don’t want it to end tonight.”

Heart racing, I sat back in my chair. “So, you never really wanted to get Angelica back? That was just a ruse to get me to go out with you?”

He watched me carefully, like he was afraid I would bolt. “No, not exactly. I didn’t think it all the way through. But you said you wanted to help me. This was a way you could help me. And in the back of my mind I was probably thinking,
Grab
.” He slid his hand around my waist.
“Opportunity.”
He circled my fingers with his.
“Grab.”
Holding my hand, he met my gaze and waited for my answer.

I found the courage, but slowly. “Okay.”

His fingers massaged mine as he leaned forward and whispered, “You left out a stop when you took me on a tour of town.”

“What’s that?” I asked, beaming in anticipation of what he would say.

“A place people go to be alone. Do you have one of those?”

“We do.” It was Harper’s grandfather’s strip of beach. He could have sold it for a billion dollars and retired in a mansion, but he chose to continue living in his little bungalow on the same street as Sawyer’s house and keep his fishing boat down at the city marina. Harper had given Kaye and me the code to open the gate at this private beach in case we ever needed it.

Now I did. Harper’s boyfriend, Kennedy, seemed more interested in talking smack with his artsy guy friends after hours than going parking with her. Aidan and Kaye would stay here at her house until the end of her party. The beach belonged to Will and me tonight.

***

“Do you have a condom?” I asked.

We were driving in Will’s throaty car toward the beach. The question hung so starkly in the air that I almost imagined I could see it centered over the armrest between us, blinking as streetlights and the shadows of palm trees alternated overhead. Asking the question meant clarifying what we were about to do.

After a pause, he said, “Yes. I bought them on my way home from your house that first night.”

I hooted laughter. “A little sure of yourself, weren’t you?”

He grinned. “No. Just motivated.”

“I’m on the pill, too,” I said. “Due to my family history, I make sure I’m super safe.”

He nodded, then swallowed with difficulty like his mouth was dry. “I want you to know something,” he said. “When I got so mad on the first day of practice and threw my phone, and you said my girlfriend had taken advantage of me before I left . . .”

“I was so out of line,” I said. “You were right when you said I hold stuff in and pretend I’m not mad, and it comes out later as a backhanded insult. I’m sorry.”

He shook his head. “No, I mean, she didn’t. Take advantage of me. We didn’t do it. The whole time we were dating, she said she wasn’t ready. And the night I left, she did it with my best friend. So she
was
ready, just not for me. I guess it doesn’t matter. But I didn’t want you to think that I was that . . .”

“Experienced?”

“Naïve,” he said, “that I wouldn’t know what was going on if she tried to trick me into, like, putting out or whatever.” He glanced at me. “Or experienced.”

I touched his hand on the gearshift, lifted my hand when he had to shift, and settled my hand on his again. “Are you sure you want to?”

“Yes,” he said instantly. He wasn’t smiling, exactly, but his whole face looked happy, starry eyed and breathless with the idea. Then he started laughing uncontrollably. “Yes!” he chuckled. “Good Lord. But you’re not.”

“Me!” I exclaimed. Then a rush of warmth flowed through me. It was relief that we wouldn’t do this. Not tonight. And something more: a deep appreciation that he knew somehow what I’d been feeling without me having to tell him.

“If it didn’t mean anything, you’d be willing,” he said. “Now that it means something, you want to go slow.”

I gazed at him across the car, his head and shoulders mostly in shadow. The moonlight burnished his short hair, turning it bronze, and kissed his long lashes and long nose, his expressive mouth. This time I knew better than to think he looked handsome only because of the moon. I had been a fool to push this guy away.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t know about
slow
.”

He was laughing again as he pulled up to the gate. After we were through and I’d locked it behind us, he drove underneath the palms. The trees were thick at first, then more sparse, until the grove opened onto the beach. The moonlight streaming toward us across the ocean was as brilliant as the sun.

“Wow,” he breathed.

“I told you it was beautiful here.”

He cut the engine. Instantly the sound of waves crashing on the beach rushed to fill that space. He turned to me. Now he would hand me one of his delightfully cheesy pickup lines. It
was
beautiful here, he would say, but he didn’t mean the beach. He meant me.

He caught me completely off guard when he said instead, “I fell for you that first night we were together. And you can say it’s because of what we were doing, or I was rebounding from Beverly, or I was stressed from the move, but I know how I feel. I love you.”

We weren’t touching anymore. I sat on my side of the car. He sat on his, watching me with a serious expression in his shadowed eyes, the worry line between his brows deeper than ever.

“I love you too,” I breathed.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he complained. “Now I’ll
never
get laid.”

I giggled as he tumbled his big frame over into my side of the car and eased the seat back flat. Kissing me deeply, he unbuttoned the front of my dress, then reached around to unhook my bra. Then he bared my breasts and put his mouth on me.

“I like it when you do that.”

His lips brushed my skin as he spoke, and his low voice sent chills through me. “Yeah, I remembered you like it when I do that.”

A long time and endless explorations later, his warm hand moved into the front of my panties and rubbed me there. He knew what he was doing, and I figured he’d done this plenty of times before. Naïve he was not—not about this. I’d done it before too, but with him, it definitely felt different. Before long, sparkles like points of moonlight on the waves washed down my body. He kissed me deeply as it happened.

Then he placed sweet kisses on the corner of my mouth and chuckled to himself. “I’m the king of the world,” he murmured.

In a sexy, satisfied tone that most chicks would use to reaffirm their love, I said, “You are the king of the dorks.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed the tip of his nose back and forth against mine. He breathed into my mouth, “I’m the king of you.”

“Yes, you are,” I said softly, “but not for long.” I slid my hand onto him. “Your turn.”

15

THE ALARM ON MY CELL
phone woke me midmorning on Sunday, and I cursed Will within an inch of his existence. I was justified in doing that now that we were in love. He was the one who’d convinced me to start using an alarm to get myself up in the morning. Now, because I was responsible, the timer had gone awry. After staying up late with him last night, I was up bright and early, rather than sleeping until the last possible second before I had to go in to the antiques shop.

But when I glanced at the screen, I saw it wasn’t the alarm. It was Violet calling. That meant she was in trouble.

Five minutes later I was on the phone with Will. “Can I borrow your car?”

“Yes,” he yawned. “Why?”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

“I’m asking.”

I let out a sigh that lasted for about seven seconds, one for every year my mom had been gone. “Violet wants to come home. She wants my dad to come get her right this moment before her boyfriend shows up, which means she feels threatened. And I can’t wake my dad for this. He has to get a full night’s sleep before he goes to work tonight, or it’s a safety issue. He used to take off work all the time to get Izzy and Sophia out of trouble, and he racked up so many demerits that they were threatening to fire him. He can’t take off work for that shit anymore. I’ll go get her myself.”

“I’ll go with you,” Will said.

“No!” I exploded. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to wake up my dad with my hysterics. I said more quietly, “This is exactly why I shouldn’t have called you, but I thought you would be furious if you found out I called Sawyer.”

“Tia!” he barked right back. He must have been afraid his parents would overhear him, too, because he took a deep breath, then lowered his voice. “Sawyer wouldn’t let you go alone either. No guy in his right mind would let you borrow his car to do something dangerous by yourself.”

“It’s not dangerous, exactly,” I qualified. “Maybe not. Her boyfriend disappeared with his friends for three days and left her at their apartment with no car. The only reason it might be the slightest bit dangerous is that they have a bad habit of coming back.”

“Who is
they
?”

“My sisters’ boyfriends and fucked-up husbands,” I explained. “And in all the times my dad has rescued my sisters, a gun has never come out, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I keep up with the news. This is how people get shot.”

“Then why are you going?” Will demanded.

“My dad can’t,” I said. “So I have to.”

“Then so do I,” Will said. “I’ll be there in five.” He hung up.

I cursed him again, not because he’d fallen down on the job this time, but the opposite. I did
not
want him witnessing the Cruz family’s annual audition for a reality show. But he was right. I should have known there was no way to borrow a guy’s car without the guy attached.

If he was coming with me, though, I was going to use him. After finding something to put on among the piles in my own room, I waded to the laundry room and searched there. When we’d first moved in, I’d been very careful about sorting the clean laundry from the dirty. I knew the clean shirt I wanted was under there somewhere. But we’d had way too much stuff to store in this tiny house, and over the months, the laundry room had become the place to stash things. I excavated the back wall like an archaeological dig. By the time Will knocked softly on the front door, I’d found it.

I pulled him inside the house. “Put this on,” I said, handing him one of my dad’s sleeveless T-shirts that he used to cut grass in, back when he cut the grass. “It’s clean.”

Will held it up and eyed the oil stains dubiously.

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “It’s been washed. But you know what? You’re right. You have a respectable tan now, and you could just take off your shirt when we get over there.” I stretched the bottom of his T-shirt up above his waistband to make sure there wasn’t a preppie flat front going on, like Aidan would wear. They were cargo shorts, which would do nicely. My eyes moved to his thick arms. Briefly I considered giving him a Sharpie tattoo on his biceps.

“You’ve got your shades?” I asked. “And a baseball cap you can turn around backward?” When he nodded, I said, “Let’s go.”

The apartment was worse than I’d pictured. I knew Violet and Ricky had moved three times in the five months they’d been together. They had a nasty habit of not paying their rent. I figured the apartment had gotten worse each time, but I wasn’t prepared for this: brick buildings that didn’t look so old but hadn’t been taken care of at all, tagged with black graffiti—not even colorful, pretty graffiti—underneath a tangle of palm trees and dehydrated-looking water oaks, surrounded by long grass and trash, all practically underneath the interstate.

Will pulled his car into one of the empty spaces, between a rusted-out truck propped up on concrete blocks and a scary-looking van for plumbers or kidnappers. “Wow,” he said, gazing at the building. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “Honk the horn.”

“That’s rude,” he said. “You’ll get us shot.”

“Not for that,” I said. “They’re used to it.” Teenage high school dropouts had their own code. I was a little horrified that I knew it so well.

He hit the horn, two short beeps.

“No, really lay on it,” I said.

Grimacing, he gave the horn a good long honk.

I watched the apartments. Violet opened a door and waved. I waved back so she’d know where we were, because Will’s down-and-out 1970s Mustang blended in pretty well with the other vehicles in this lot. Will fit in himself with his aviators on, his hat backward, and his shirt off. I didn’t mention this to him.

The next second, Ricky appeared beside her in the doorway. He grabbed her raised arm. She jerked away from him and vanished into the apartment. He shot us the bird before following her.

“Nice,” Will said. “Shouldn’t we go help her move her stuff? Because it looks like that asshole isn’t going to.”

“Nah, she won’t have much.” She hadn’t left with much, and I doubted she’d had the money to buy anything while she’d been here. “But here’s how you can help.” I dug in my purse and handed him the cigarettes and lighter I’d bought when we’d stopped for gas. “Stand against the bumper, light a cigarette, and glare toward the apartment. Flex your guns if you can find an excuse.”

He stared at the package in my hand. “I’ve never smoked.”

Sighing impatiently—and then wishing I hadn’t, because Will was doing me some very serious favors here—I unwrapped the cellophane and drew out a cigarette for him. “Light the tobacco end, with brown stuff in it. Suck on the filter end. Just inhale the smoke into your mouth, not your lungs, so you don’t have a coughing fit.”

Taking the cigarette and lighter, Will swore and slid out of the car, slamming the door behind him. He rounded to the front on the side nearest the apartments and leaned back against the hood, as instructed. Though the midday was oppressively hot and sunny and calm, like every August day in Florida that happened to be hurricane free, he cupped his hand around the cigarette while he lit it, as if he were standing in a high wind. Then he exhaled in one steady stream of smoke. He must have seen this on TV. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t tell whether he was glaring at the apartment, but he’d followed my other instructions impeccably. He was probably following that one too.

Ricky watched him through the apartment window. If he’d toyed with the idea of convincing or forcing Violet to stay, in the face of my tough boyfriend who’d come to help rescue Violet, now he was thinking twice.

Ricky disappeared from the window. Violet backed out the door. Ricky came after her. I could see him yelling and hear the echo on a two-second delay. But he didn’t follow her, just hung on to the doorjamb and hollered as she jogged down the stairs with a garbage bag slung over her shoulder.

“Show’s over,” I told Will. “Come inside.” I was afraid that if he was going to get shot, now would be the time.

He bent toward my window and blew smoke at me. The sight surprised him, and he jumped a little. “Sorry,” he said, exhaling more smoke at the same time. He coughed and turned whiter than normal. “What do I do with this?” Discreetly he held up the butt in front of his body, where Ricky wouldn’t see what he was asking me.

“Throw it on the ground and step on it to put it out,” I said carefully, like I was presenting Smoking 101 on
Sesame Street
.

“That’s littering.”

I gestured out the window. “They seem to like that here.”

He couldn’t argue with that. He threw down the cigarette to join the others on the asphalt, ground it out under his shoe, then rounded the car and slipped behind the wheel, reeking of smoke. “I think I might throw up.”

“From the heat or the smoke?”

He closed his eyes and leaned back against the seat. “Both.”

“Sorry,” I said, patting his knee. “You did great.”

“How many other sisters do you have, again?”

I watched Violet turn around in the parking lot and scream a parting shot at Ricky before running toward us. “Two,” I said absently, “but they’ve already been through this, so maybe we’re done.” More likely, we
weren’t
done, but Will and I would have moved on from each other by the time history repeated itself.

With a start, I realized that my usual way of thinking about Will was wrong. We were together. He would still be around the next time Violet did something stupid like this.

Or, now that I finally had a boyfriend, maybe it was
my
turn to do something stupid.

Stupid
er
.

I got out of the car and pushed my seat forward so Violet could collapse into the tiny back seat with her garbage bag containing all her worldly possessions—other than the ones littering my own bedroom floor. Will immediately cranked the car and backed out. I think all three of us tensed, watching the rearview mirror, until we made it up the ramp onto the interstate.

Violet let out a long sigh. “Where’s Dad?”

“Asleep.”

“On the weekend?”

“Yes, he’s going in tonight. He’s worked the last twenty-eight nights without time off.”

“Jesus,” Violet said. “Well, thanks for rescuing me, sis.” She leaned over the seat to plant a kiss on my cheek. “And you.” She kissed Will’s cheek.

“Violet is like me but drunk,” I explained to Will, “even when she’s sober.”

“Violet Cruz,” she said, sticking one hand very close to Will’s face.

Will reached back to shake her hand awkwardly without looking around at her. “Will Matthews.”

“You talk funny,” she said. “Are you from Russia?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Are you a friend of Tia’s, or . . .”

“I’m her boyfriend,” he said self-righteously.

Violet gasped dramatically. “
You
have a
boyfriend
?” she squealed at me. “You said you would
never
have a boyfriend.”

“Yes.” My stomach turned upside down. Now I knew how Will felt. I might vomit, but not from the heat.

“Are you pregnant?” she asked me.

I whipped around in my seat. “Sit down and put your seat belt on.” Waiting for her to do this, I said, “You look like shit.” She really did. She used to put a lot of effort into her clothes and hair and makeup, drinking up anything Izzy could teach her. This morning she wore sweats pushed up to her knees and a tank top. She could have used her blue-and-green bra. She had dark circles under her eyes. At least her dirty hair was done up in a cute topknot like she hadn’t completely lost touch with how teenagers dressed when they were trying to look like they didn’t care but they actually did.

She smirked at me. “Thanks.”

“You look like you dropped out of high school and spent the last five months smoking pot, getting screwed, and watching TV.”

“The cable got cut off.” She settled back against the seat and let out another long sigh. “Downtown Tampa is really beautiful.”

I looked around at the skyscrapers surrounding us as the interstate snaked through town. I supposed it was a pretty city. But then, when we crossed the bay, she said, “This bridge is really beautiful,” and when we turned onto the coastal highway, she said, “This town is really beautiful,” even though at that point we were passing a used car lot. I thought she was just glad to get away from Ricky.

“Oooh, boiled peanuts!” she exclaimed at a hand-lettered sign in front of a big boiler on the side of the road. “Stop stop stop! I haven’t had breakfast.”

Neither had I. Will might not have either, but it was all about Violet. He pulled the Mustang into a gas station parking lot and stopped. I climbed out of the car and pushed the seat forward to let Violet out. As she stood, she asked me, “Do you have three dollars?”

“Listen,”
I told her. When we were little, my sisters had screamed bloody murder at me when I so much as
touched
something of theirs. I wanted them to love me, though, so I let them take anything of mine that they wanted—until I figured out what was going on. I had really gone off on Izzy one day. It had been a week before any of them spoke to me again, much less laughed at my jokes, but they
did not take my stuff anymore
.

“O-
kay
,” Violet said, digging in her own pocket for cash and stomping toward the guy ladling peanuts into plastic bags that looked, frankly, used.

I leaned against the car while she finished this important transaction. Will looked at me through the window. “You’re not dealing well with this.”

“Shut up,” I snapped. I knew I should regret that, because Will was helping me out and I was supposed to love him, but all I felt was fed up.

Violet skipped back to the car and ducked inside. As I slammed the door and Will pulled back onto the road, she tried to hand me a peanut still in its shell. “Want one?”

“Violet,”
I said.

“Jeez!” She exclaimed. “Will Matthews, do y’all eat boiled peanuts in Russia?”

He laughed nervously. “No.”

And then, of course, she shelled the peanut and pressed the meat of the nut past his lips, into his mouth.