Perfect Couple (26 page)

I smiled, and the camera flashed. By now we were getting pushed from all directions by the traffic in the hall. We moved over to the lockers and peered at the view screen. Both of us laughed. Brody looked happy and satisfied. I looked excited. Behind us, the hallway was filled with people, some photobombing us with their tongues sticking out, some ignoring us and absorbed in their own lives.

“I like this concept,” I said. “See? The whole school is behind us.”

“I like your glasses,” he said. “You look sexy as hell. Come here.” He looped the camera strap over my shoulder and wrapped his arms around me.

“This is against school rules,” I said. “Talk about being in danger of getting caught—”

“I don’t care,” he whispered in my ear. “I was worried about you in the storm. I’m just glad you’re safe.” He squeezed me once more and let me go.

*   *   *

At the football game the following Friday night, the photographer for the local newspaper approached me on the sidelines with his hand out for me to shake. I was thrilled. I knew exactly who he was. I’d seen him snapping pictures of the games for years. I’d wanted to
be
him for years.

He asked, “You’re Harper Davis, right?”

“That’s right.”

He introduced himself, then said, “Great shot of the waterspout in the Tampa paper.”

“Thanks. That was just luck. And a tripod.”

He shook his head. “You’re a photographer. You make your own luck. Even now, look at you. Your eyes haven’t left the game. You’re scouting for a photo.”

I smiled, because it was true. As we’d talked, I’d kept watching the field, determined not to miss a key play.

“You’re still in high school?” he asked. “That’s impressive work. I expect you’ll go places.”

We chatted for a few more minutes about my camera and his camera, and the best shots he’d taken of Tropical Storm Debby a few years ago. As I conversed with him, my eyes stole over to Brody, laughing with a local policeman who stood guard every game at the gate onto the field.

I wondered if Brody and I might be back here in five years or ten years or more, me photographing the game while he kept it safe. This wasn’t necessarily
the
future, but it was
a
future. And a nice one to dream about. One I never would have considered if it hadn’t been for a botched yearbook election mistakenly telling us who we were, and helping us find out the truth for ourselves.

The photographer moved off in search of a better angle
as the other team punted and Brody ran for the center of the field, tugging his helmet on as he went.

And then, on the first play, he got sacked. I had a telephoto view, because I was shooting pictures of him when it happened.

I dropped my camera. The weight of it jerked the strap around my neck as I slapped my hands over my mouth in horror.

Five thousand people in the stadium hushed at one time. Every coach ran onto the grass. The entire football team and the visiting team took a knee. The paramedics from an ambulance parked beyond the end zone wheeled a stretcher onto the field.

I was sure he was paralyzed until Noah, huge in his helmet and pads, jogged toward me. He put both hands on my shoulders. “Brody’s okay,” he panted.

“Brody’s okay?” I shrieked.

“I mean, he will be. He didn’t hit his head. Coach ordered a stretcher as a precaution because of Brody’s concussion in the summer. This time he only got the wind knocked out of him.”

“Thank you,” I sighed.

“I couldn’t let you freak out over here,” he said.

“Thank you, Noah.” I wrapped both arms around his wet jersey.

“And I didn’t even fall on him this time.” Noah put a
gloved hand in my hair. “I’ve got to go.” He disentangled himself from me and ran back onto the field with the rest of the offensive line plus the second-string quarterback. Ten men surrounded the stretcher rolling off the field toward the ambulance. The stadium gave Brody a standing ovation.

Blinking back tears, I walked over to the ambulance and stood a few yards away, out of the commotion. Paramedics busied themselves around Brody. Coaches climbed in and out of the truck. Brody’s mom appeared from the stands, the tracks of her tears visible through her makeup. I recognized her from a million elementary school parties, and from pictures of her in her own house at parties Brody had thrown when she wasn’t home.

I waited, heart racing.

One by one, the coaches went back to the team on the sidelines. But I didn’t believe Noah was right, and Brody was okay, until his mom jumped down from the ambulance, smiling and wiping her eyes. She walked around the fence to climb into the stands again.

I heaved one huge sigh of relief, then walked over.

“No pictures,” said a paramedic sitting on the bumper of the ambulance, watching the game. He eyed my camera.

“I’m his girlfriend.”

“Oh.” He moved aside for me.

I climbed into the back of the ambulance, my heart beating harder and faster. No matter what Noah had said, it was terrifying to see Brody lying on a stretcher that wasn’t quite big enough for his body, surrounded by sinister equipment. His helmet and jersey and shoulder pads lay heaped in a corner. He wore an athletic shirt with high-tech pads sewn into the sides. With his arms crossed on his chest, he looked slender and young and vulnerable. His long, wet hair had escaped from his headband and stuck to his forehead. His eyes were closed.

I took his hand and squeezed it.

He squeezed back, opening one eye to look at me. He closed his eyes again. “I’m okay. I couldn’t breathe for a minute.”

“Is that all?”

He laughed shortly. “Did you see the guy who got me? He must have weighed five hundred pounds.”

The guy hadn’t been that big, but football players probably looked a lot bigger to Brody when they were about to sack him. I decided to delete that series of pictures.

“I was just lying here”—he took a deep breath and exhaled slowly—“doing the relaxation exercise you taught me. I think I’m ready to go back.”

“Are you sure?” I asked. The alarm from seeing him flat on the field, not moving, was too fresh.

“The paramedics already cleared me,” he said. “I didn’t hit my head.”

“If you did,” I said, “would you know?”

“Maybe not,” he admitted.

I let go of his hand and held up seven fingers.

“Seven,” he said.

“Who’s your best friend?”

“Noah.”

“How long have you played football together?”

“Since third grade.” He answered every question with no hesitation. His brain was working fine.

“What are you doing after the game?” I asked.

“I’m going to the Crab Lab. With you. We haven’t talked about what we’ll do after that, but I was planning to get you to your granddad’s beach again and show you what a perfect couple we are.”

“Oh, really,” I said archly. “Are you looking forward to that?”

He crooked his finger at me. I leaned closer. He whispered, “This is going to be our best night yet.” His mouth caught mine in a sexy kiss.

Then he sat up slowly. “Goddamn, I’m going to hurt tomorrow. But right now, I feel great. Let’s go play some football!”

I fished his pads out of the corner of the ambulance. “You’re crazy, you know that? You definitely hit your head.”

After we got him suited up, he jumped down from the ambulance. With a last salute to me, he jogged along the sidelines to rejoin his team and finish his adventure.

I brought up my camera and snapped a picture.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt thanks to my editor and favorite cheerleader, Annette Pollert. Every author of YA romance should be lucky enough to have an editor who draws little hearts on the manuscript.

To my brilliant agent, Laura Bradford. I would not be here without you.

And to my long-suffering critique partner, the best friend I could wish for, Victoria Dahl.

Don’t miss Jennifer Echols’s

the superlatives

I LEFT CALCULUS A MINUTE before the bell so I’d be the first to arrive at the student council meeting. Our advisor, Ms. Yates, would sit at the back of her classroom, observing, and I wanted her vacated desk at the front of the room. At our last meeting, Aidan had taken her desk in a show of presidential authority. But as vice president, I was the one who needed room for paperwork. A better boyfriend than Aidan would have let me sit at the desk.

A better girlfriend than me would have let
him
have it.

And that pretty much summed up our three years of dating.

The bell rang just as I reached the room. I stood outside the door, waiting for Ms. Yates to make her coffee run to the teachers’ lounge and for her freshman science class to flood
past me. A few of them glanced at me, their eyes widening as if I were a celebrity. I remembered this feeling from when I was an underclassman, looking up to my brother and his friends. It was strange to be on the receiving end.

As the last of the ninth graders escaped down the hall, I stepped into the room, which should have been empty.

Instead, Sawyer De Luca sat behind Ms. Yates’s desk. He must have left his last class
two
minutes before the bell to beat me here.

Sensing my presence, he turned in the chair, flashing deep blue eyes at me, the color of the September sky out the window behind him. When Sawyer’s hair was combed—which I’d seen happen once or twice in the couple of years I’d known him—it looked platinum blond. Today, as usual, it was a mess, with the nearly white, sun-streaked layers sticking up on top, and the dark blond layers peeking out underneath. He had on his favorite shirt, which he wore at least two times a week, the madras short-sleeved button-down with blue stripes that made his eyes stand out even more. His khaki shorts were rumpled. I couldn’t see his feet beneath the desk, but I knew he wore his beat-up flip-flops. In short, if you’d never met Sawyer before, you’d assume he was a hot but harmless teenage beach bum.

I knew better.

I closed the door behind me so nobody would witness
the argument we were about to have. I wanted that desk. I suspected he understood this, which was why he’d sat there. But long experience with Sawyer told me flouncing in and complaining wouldn’t do me any good. That’s what he expected me to do.

So I walked in with a bigger grin on my face than I’d ever given Sawyer. “Hi!”

He smiled serenely back at me. “Hello, Kaye. You look beautiful in yellow.”

His sweet remark shot me through the heart. My friend Harper had just altered this dress to fit me. I didn’t need her beautifully homemade hand-me-downs, but I was glad to take them—especially this sixties A-line throwback as vivid as the Florida sunshine. After a rocky couple of weeks for romance with Aidan, I’d dressed carefully this morning, craving praise from him.
He
hadn’t said a word.

Leave it to Sawyer to catch me off guard. He’d done the same thing last Saturday night. After two years of teasing and taunting me, out of the blue he’d told me he loved my new hairstyle. I always had a ready response for his insults, but these compliments threw me off.

“Thanks,” I managed, setting my books down on the edge of the desk, along with my tablet and my loose-leaf binder for student council projects. Then I said brightly, “So,
Mr. Parliamentarian, what’s procedure on letting the vice president have the desk? I need to spread out.”

“
I
need to spread out.” He patted the stack of library books in front of him: an ancient tome that explained procedure for meetings, called
Robert’s Rules of Order
, plus a couple of modern discussions of how the rules worked. For once Sawyer had done his homework.

“Taking the parliamentarian job seriously, are we?” This was my fourth year in student council. We’d always elected a parliamentarian without fully understanding what the title meant. Ms. Yates said the parliamentarian was the rule police, but we’d never needed policing, with a charismatic president like Aidan at the helm and Ms. Yates lurking in the back. Nobody ran for parliamentarian during officer elections in the spring. Ms. Yates waited until school started in the fall, then pointed out that “student council parliamentarian” would look great on college applications. One study hall representative volunteered, got elected, and never lifted a finger during meetings.

Until now. “I have to be able to see everything and look stuff up quickly.” Sawyer swept his hand across his books and a legal pad inscribed with tiny cryptic notes. “Last meeting, Aidan didn’t follow parliamentary procedure at
all
. But I’ll share the desk with you.” He stood and headed for the back
of the room, where a cart was stacked with extra folding chairs for the meeting.

Normally I would have told him not to bother retrieving a chair for me. His suggestion that we share a desk was the best way to make me drop the subject and sit down elsewhere. He knew I wouldn’t want Aidan to think we were flirting.

But this week wasn’t normal. Aidan had hurt my feelings last Saturday by dissing my hair. We’d made up by Sunday—at least, I’d told him I forgave him—but I wasn’t quite over the insult. The idea of him walking into the room and seeing Sawyer and me at Ms. Yates’s desk together was incredibly appealing.

Sawyer held the folding chair high above his head as he made his way toward me. He unfolded the chair behind the desk. I started to sit down in it.

“No, that’s for me. I meant for you to have the comfy chair.” He rolled Ms. Yates’s chair over, waited for me to sit, and pushed me a few inches toward the desk, like my dad seating my mother in a restaurant. He plopped down in the folding chair. “Will you marry me?”

Now
this
was something I’d expected him to ask. In fact, it was the first thing he’d ever said to me when he moved to town two years ago. Back then I’d uttered an outraged “No!” He’d wanted to know why—he wasn’t good enough for me?
Who did I think I was, a bank president’s daughter?

After a while, though, I’d gotten wise to Sawyer’s game. Every girl in school knew he wasn’t exclusive and meant nothing by his flirtations. That didn’t stop any of us from having a soft spot for this hard-living boy. And it didn’t stop me from feeling special every time he paid me attention.