Solving for Ex (27 page)

Sometimes I wanted nothing more than for us to be able to go back to last year, when we were just best friends, always one hundred percent comfortable around each other. And I guessed my goddamn socks illustrated that.

“Have a seat, and I’ll go get some pop,” Brendan called on his way back toward the kitchen.

I settled into the same spot where I always sat on his perfectly made-up bed. Brendan returned with a galvanized tin bucket full of ice and pop cans. He cracked open a Dr. Pepper and handed it to me.

“Thanks,” I said. If I couldn’t count on him for anything else, at least Brendan would always know what kind of pop I wanted.

“Even kicked my parents out so we could practice in peace.” He grinned.

“You sent them to Guiseppe’s, didn’t you? The words ‘portobello ravioli’ get your mom every time.”

“Of course.” He smiled a small smile. “Except now I think it’s more like the words, ‘Extra dry martini.”

“Shit. I’m sorry, Brendan.”

Just as I was enjoying the most unbroken eye contact I’d had with Brendan in months, however sad, his phone rang. He scrambled to dig it out of his pocket and checked the display. His voice dropped the slightest bit when he answered, “Hey, Sof.”

It was all I could do not to cringe.

But then his eyes narrowed and he scratched the back of his neck. “Well, yeah—I know they have that party tonight but we—I mean, I guess I could, but you know I don’t have a car tonight…”

My heart stopped. Brendan’s car had been in the shop getting a fancy tune-up over the holiday weekend. But I had a car. I definitely had a car.

I was definitely not going to say anything about it.

“Okay. Yeah. No, Ashley’s here. Okay. Goodnight.” He didn’t sound psyched about me being there, but he didn’t sound too upset either. My heart started beating again.

Brendan cleared his throat. “So, they’re not coming. Guess there’s no point in practicing.”

“Are you kidding me? There’s always a point to practicing math.” Not that it was the number-one thing I wanted to do with Brendan, but right now, it felt like the easiest.

“Come on. Let’s start with something easy.” I picked up a marker. “Find the integral.” I jotted ∫2/x e^3 dx on the board.

Brendan rolled his eyes and started attacking his board with the marker. Two seconds later, I saw his mistake. I lunged forward and grabbed his marker.

“No, no, no. You’re adding one to the existing power and then putting the new power in the denominator. But what you want to think of is, what are you taking the integral with respect to? It’s not about the x. You’re trying to solve for x, even though you can’t.”

“Oh, shit, Ash. I was trying to use the Simpson rule, but that’s obviously wrong. Shit. That would have bitten me in the ass when it came to a differential equation.”

“Well, at least you caught your mistake at the beginning.” I smiled.

“You caught it. I’m always messing that up. So glad you’re here.” Then his face changed from smiling to dead serious, but he didn’t break eye contact with me for a second. He spoke, his voice a pitch lower than it had been a second before. “Sometimes we have an inclination for something that we just can’t shake. You know?”

He was definitely not talking about the damn integral anymore. I swallowed hard and stared at him, afraid to break eye contact. Afraid to interrupt the most intense conversation we’d had in months, even if it did start with a simple equation that got messed up. “Yeah. I know.”

We stood so close together at the board that I could have touched his foot with my toe without moving my heel. Then, his eyes traveled down my face, lingering on my lips. He reached out and ran his fingers down the inside of my forearm. Light and testing. I didn’t pull away. I waited for him to stop, to look embarrassed, to say he was sorry.

But instead, he raised his eyes to mine, hungry, searching.

He reached up, pushed his fingers through the hair at the back of my neck and pulled my face to his. His lips, soft and warm, moved insistently against mine, and I gasped. His breath rushed into my mouth, and I was full of him, like a fire had taken up residence in my chest and the only way to keep it from spreading was to keep kissing him. The delicious pressure of his lips on my lips, his chest pushing against me, and his fingers raking through my hair, completely consumed me. My head spun and the only help for it was letting myself get closer to him. All that was, all that ever existed in the world, was wrapped up in this kiss, full of excitement and terror and promise.

His hand slipped down to my waist, pulling my body against his. I reached up and cupped the side of his face with my palm, wanting to hold on to the place where our lips met, never wanting to forget how it felt to taste, to touch, to feel. He parted his lips against mine and pressed his fingers into my waist. I arched my back, pushing my chest into him, and parted my lips, too, tracing his bottom one with my tongue. The tangy richness of the Dr. Pepper mingled with the sweet warmth of his breath.

Nothing would ever taste as amazing to me again.

I had no idea how I knew how to do any of this. My lips must have known what they wanted to do to him long before I did. Like my body was instinctively guarding against the inevitable loss of contact, I sucked on his lip for a fraction of a second, letting my teeth graze against it. He clutched at me even tighter as a sound rumbled from his throat, vibrating through me. I wanted to devour him.

His lips moved against mine desperately, like there was no way he could ever get enough of tasting and exploring whatever was so irresistible. God knows I felt the same way. When his tongue slipped into my mouth and his hand slid under my shirt, I moaned. His palm pressed against the bare skin of my back and his fingers splayed out, digging into my side. But in one sudden breath, the heat between us grew so intense that whatever connection had been holding us together strained and snapped. The kiss broke and my hands dropped from his face. I stood there, chest heaving, and looked into his eyes again.

But something was wrong with his face. It had the wrong expression on it. Instead of smiling, grabbing me again, and kissing me until I couldn’t see straight, he sat up even straighter, pulled his hand away from my waist, and looked down at it.

Oh, hell. Sofia. My hand flew up to my lips, which still vibrated from the memory of his against them. I wanted to press it away, wanted to forget how he had made me feel. Like we were the only two people in the whole word.

Of course that wasn’t true.

Seconds dragged by. I was so afraid of Brendan’s response to what I was about to say that I almost didn’t want to say it. But I knew I had to. “You’re still with Sofia.”

“No, let me—”

“Brendan,” I said, an edge of warning to my voice. He would know, he had to know, that now was not the time to play games. “She was making out with you—at our café—like a week ago. Don’t give me that shit.”

“It’s complicated, Ash.”

“What, and I’m too stupid to understand?”

“We were never really together. I told you that.”

“Well, you’re not exactly just friends either, are you?”

“Okay, yeah. We made out. So?”

“So, if you’re going to grab me and kiss me, you owe me an explanation.”

His face turned red, and his expression twisted. He looked like he was in pain. “You wanna talk about Sofia? Then I guess we can talk about Vincent, too. What do you see in him, anyway?”

Brendan didn’t know that I’d told Vincent no. My stomach twisted, but I steeled myself. I didn’t really want to talk about that debacle, but there were things I liked about Vincent. And since Brendan was so damn clueless…“I don’t know,” I said, exhaling heavily. “He pays attention to me. He wants to take me out. He was excited about Sadie. We do things. He takes me places. He…he got a camera.” Now that I said these things, they sounded lame. The reasons I always loved Brendan had nothing to do with any of that, but at least they were real. Tangible things I could touch.

“You never used to care about any of that stuff,” Brendan said.

“Well, now maybe I do.”

Brendan’s unbreaking gaze made me feel jumpy. I couldn’t let the silence continue, and the fact that Brendan was even allowing the silence made it that much more infuriating.

“Besides, he drove to Williamson to see me, which is more than you did. You didn’t even call. I mean, God, Brendan. I know you have Sofia, but we’re best friends. We were.”

“I have…” He stared off into the distance, clenching and unclenching his jaw.

“I know I told you that I thought you should go out with Vincent,” he said, his voice suddenly louder. Assertive. “But now...”

I glared at him. If my eyes were daggers he would have been dead five times by now.

“Now, what?

“Now, I don’t know.”

I continued glaring at him while my brain tried to work out what the hell was going on. Why he suddenly cared what I did with my love life after too many months of not realizing that I even wanted one with him.

“Listen, Brendan. You...” I swallowed hard while I tried for a split second to figure out if I actually had the guts to say what I was about to say. You missed your chance. Instead, I choked out, “You never cared if I was going out with someone before.”

“It’s not that I care if you’re going out with someone, Ash.”

A lump formed in my throat that kept my words from coming out louder than a whisper. “Well then, what is it?”

“It’s…I have a weird feeling about him.”

“Does the weird feeling have anything to do with the hood of his car and Mount Washington?” Tears burned at my eyes, and I had no idea which of the twenty emotions running through me right now was responsible for them.

“Jesus fucking Christ, Ashley. I’m trying to—I know something about him, and I think you should know.”

I stared at him, waiting.

“I had dinner with my mom and dad last night. Dad told me why he and Sofia are really here, at Mansfield Prep.”

“Yeah, I know. His dad’s looking to open a new office, Mansfield’s a snobby college prep school…”

Brendan rolled his eyes. “No, more than that. He was in some trouble at his old school. Cheating, big time. Hacked the AP testing system, sold answers to about twenty kids. They all got expelled, lost their scores.”

My chest constricted with a strange mix of horror and relief. Vincent was more than just pissed off that I didn’t want to make out with him anymore. He was exactly the kind of person responsible for the worst misery of my life. And I’d known well enough, somehow, to get away from him. “Holy hell.”

His foot scraped back and forth against the chipping paint on the bottom stair. “Yeah, and I don’t think it’s good if you’re mixed up in that. I’m just looking out for you, you know.”

“Oh my God. You can quit, Brendan, okay? I don’t know what your freaking problem is, but we broke up.”

“Looks like he hurt a lot of people. Including you.” Brendan’s eyes studied my face.

“No, I’m okay.” I shook my head and looked right back at him, wanting him to hear the depth of what I said. “I mean, we only went out a couple times.”

“Still. Considering everything…”

What did Brendan think we’d done? Oh, hell. I had to clear this up. “We didn’t…do that. No. Just…no. I wouldn’t have…God, Brendan!” I cried out and hoisted myself up. Why did saying things like this to him have to be so damn difficult?

His eyes flared wide, but he stood still as stone. “You guys didn’t…?”

“No! We drank hot chocolate, we kissed, I dumped him the next morning at breakfast. Because there were no banana pancakes. If we’re gonna pretend that you give a shit at all. Because for some reason, the only person I want to eat banana pancakes with is you.”

I wanted to tell him everything. Wanted to blurt out that I’d loved him since the day I’d met him, that him kissing me in his bedroom and pulling my body to his and digging his fingers into my skin was everything I’d dreamed of since then. Wanted to throw myself at him and grab his shirt and slam a kiss on his mouth and never break away from him ever again. But I couldn’t do that until all this Sofia shit got straightened out. Of course I wanted Brendan—hadn’t ever stopped wanting him, I admitted to myself—but no guy was worth being a girl guys cheated with.

I stood up straight, looked him in the eye, and said, “I don’t know how you feel about her. And I don’t know how you feel about me.”

Brendan opened his mouth and stuttered out a few syllables, but I cut him off. “I don’t want to know. Not now. Get your shit together, and when you do, we can talk.”

Suddenly, I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Before I even thought about doing it, I’d shoved my stupid neon striped socks into my gross slippers—seriously, how could I have worn these things over here?—run down the stairs and threw the front door open. The wind gusted in, chilling me to the bone.

“Ashley, wait!” Brendan stood at the top of the stairs, his face twisted in an expression I didn’t recognize.

I stopped at the door. “Yes, Brendan. I’ll still be at the competition. But only because I’m gonna be the captain next year, and we both know it. So I kind of have to see it anyway.”

“That’s not what I wanted to say.” He ran his hand back through his hair, and for a moment, I was seriously lost. What had I been doing, trying to convince myself I wasn’t still in love with him? “I…uh…You gonna be okay out there?”

I dropped my gaze. A short laugh barked out of my throat, and I swore that was the only thing keeping my heart inside my body. “It’s just next door, Brendan.” My voice sounded poisonous. I didn’t mean for it to. Tears pricked at my eyes, burning now.

My feet had crunched through the frosty grass once, twice, three times, before Brendan called, “I’m sorry, Ash.”

I didn’t turn back. Couldn’t look at him, even from across the lawn and in the dark.

I got home, fell into bed, and let the floodgates open. Anger and hatred for myself, for what I couldn’t say, sent the tears tumbling out of my eyes, dripping off my cheeks and onto my comforter. Sobs wracked my body, and got even worse when I realized that, just two minutes ago, gasping for breath had felt like a really, really good thing.