Something New

by Amanda Abram

  Bringing my fingertips up to my swollen, tingling lips, I sighed.

  I was in big trouble.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  I was a bundle of nerves as I knocked on Dylan’s front door the next afternoon.

  After my mom dropped me off at the end of his driveway, I had seriously considered running after her and asking her to drive me back home, but I didn’t. I had promised Dylan he and I would talk and that I would help him clean up the house, so I was just going to have to put on my big girl pants and do it, whether I wanted to or not.

  It took him only a couple of seconds to answer the door.

  “Hey,” he said when he saw me. He glanced down at his watch and smiled. “Wow, it’s exactly twelve o’clock.”

  “I’m nothing if not punctual,” I said, trying to hide the nervous shake in my voice.

  “I can see that.” Dylan opened the door wider and stepped aside. “Come in.”

  I stepped inside the house, instantly assessing the damage from last night. Surprisingly, it didn’t look as destroyed as I thought it would. At least, not the living room. There were only a few cans, bottles, and plastic cups lying around on the floor. Everything else looked like it hadn’t been touched.

  “Well, this doesn’t look so bad,” I commented.

  Dylan shut the door behind me. “You should see some of the other rooms. They’re trashed. This one doesn’t look so bad because I’ve been working on it since I got back from breakfast with my dad.”

  I slipped out of my jacket and draped it over the banister of the stairs. “Oh yeah, that’s right. How did that go?”

  Good, Cassie, keep the conversation on anything but what happened between you two last night.

  Sucking air through his teeth, Dylan ran a hand down his face and sighed. “It went.”

  “What did he want to talk to you about?” I paused and then added, “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to.”

  “No, it’s okay.” He motioned toward the couch. “Have a seat.”

  We sat down next to each other, and I made sure to keep a safe distance from him.

  He was quiet for a moment as he played with a loose thread on one of the throw pillows between us. “My dad is moving,” he said finally.

  I frowned. “Moving? Moving where?”

  “Seattle.”

  My jaw dropped. “Seattle? But that’s all the way on the other side of the country! Why is he moving so far away?”

  “He’s been given a job opportunity out there. One he said he just couldn’t pass up.” He paused. “I never knew this, but he wanted to move to Seattle when he graduated high school. But then Mom got pregnant with me, and I screwed up everyone’s plans. Mom never had any interest in moving out there, so he never had the chance to go. Until now.”

  I shook my head. “That sucks.”

  “It does,” he agreed. “I mean, yeah, I’m still pissed at him for everything, but he’s still my dad, you know? I still want to be around him. Now I’m only ever going to see him on major holidays. If then, even.”

  I felt so bad for him. I couldn’t imagine if my dad had told me he was moving nearly three thousand miles away. I would be devastated. Yeah, sure, Dylan would be moving away from his dad when he went off to college, but he still had a year and a half of school left. What if his dad couldn’t fly back for Christmas? Or his graduation?

  “When is he leaving?” I asked.

  “The weekend after next.”

  “Wow, that’s soon.”

  “It sure is.”

  I could tell Dylan was upset, I just couldn’t tell if he was sad or angry. Either way, he looked like he needed consoling, so without even thinking, I leaned over and pulled him into a friendly hug.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, resting my head on his shoulder. “Are you going to be okay?”

  He wrapped his arms around me and tightened his grip only briefly before pulling out of my embrace. “Yeah, I’ll be fine.” He sat back against the arm of the couch and arched an eyebrow. “Okay, new topic: last night.”

  My breath hitched in my throat. I wasn’t ready to discuss that topic yet, so I jumped up from the couch and changed the subject instead. “Maybe we should finish cleaning this place up first, in case your mom comes home early.”

  Dylan narrowed his eyes up at me like he knew exactly what I was doing, which was stalling. “She called a little while ago and confirmed she won’t be home until around eight o’clock tonight.”

  “Well, still.” I reached down and picked up a half-filled garbage bag that Dylan had already been working on filling. “A clean home is a happy home.”

  He chuckled as he stood from the couch himself. Striding over to me, he grabbed the trash bag out of my hands. “Briggs, this can wait. We have more important things to do right now.”

  My mind flashed with all sorts of things we could do right now, and none of them involved talking. Blushing furiously, I backed away from him. “Okay, fine. You want to talk? Let’s talk.”

  “Okay. Let’s.” He let the bag drop back onto the floor and then crossed his arms over his chest. “So, last night.”

  “So, last night,” I said coolly, placing my hands on my hips.

  “Let’s see. What happened last night?” He tapped his finger against his chin and glanced up at the ceiling as if deep in thought. “Oh, that’s right. You told me you were jealous of Claire.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t specify I was jealous of Claire, I just said I was jealous. I could have been talking about anything.”

  “And then you said you wanted me too.” He took a step toward me.

  I backed up a step. “That was just a misinterpretation on your end. You thought I was saying t-o-o, meaning ‘as well’, when I actually meant t-o as in, I wanted you to do something. You just didn’t let me finish my sentence.”

  “Uh-huh,” Dylan said, clearly not buying my explanations. He took another step forward. I took another step back. “But then you kissed me.”

  Okay, I didn’t have an explanation for that. “Well, that—”

  “And then I kissed you back.”

  I nodded. “You did. And then we got interrupted by Nick. Which reminds me, what was the thing that got broken?” I was proud of myself for somehow finding a way to change the subject.

  “A lamp,” he replied, closing in on me. I continued backing away from him. “A generic one my mom got from Target. I’ve already replaced it with an identical one. She’ll never know what happened.”

  My back suddenly hit the wall behind me, and I cursed under my breath. I moved to side-step him, but Dylan was too quick; his arms shot out and he planted his hands on the wall on either side of me, successfully trapping me.

  “Now, stop changing the subject,” he said. He lowered his gaze to my lips and my heart skipped a beat. I found myself yearning for him to lean down and kiss me, but he didn’t. Instead, he dropped his arms and stepped back, giving me some space. The expression on his face was no longer playful; it was serious now. “Cass, what are we going to do?”

  I swallowed hard and removed myself from the wall. A wall was the last place I wanted to be with Dylan right now.

  Clearing my throat, I put as much distance between us as possible. “Well, I’ve been thinking.”

  That was an understatement. Because I hadn’t been able to get to sleep at all after I arrived home from the party, I spent hours awake in bed asking myself that same question. What were we going to do? There had to be a solution. One that would make everyone happy. One where everyone would win.

  Unfortunately, I never figured out what that solution was, and now I was wondering if it existed at all.

  “Okay,” Dylan said, intrigued. “What did you come up with?”

  I began to pace back and forth in front of him. “The way I see it, we have only three options to choose from. We just need to pick one and go with it.”

  He cocked his head to one side. “And what are these three options?”

&nbs
p; I took a deep breath. I knew he wasn’t going to like any of them. I didn’t like any of them myself. But unless he could come up with something better, it’s all we had.

  “Option one is that we pursue this—” I motioned between us with my hand. “—but we do it in secret and we don’t tell anyone. And I don’t just mean we keep it from Elijah, I mean we keep it from Lauren, all our other friends, our parents, Caitlyn. Everyone.”

  He mulled it over for a moment. “A secret romance, huh? That could be kinda hot, sneaking around behind everyone’s back. Stealing kisses under the bleachers when no one is looking.”

  “But it could also be risky,” I pointed out. “If we slipped up—and there’s a good chance we would at some point—it would be way worse than if we were just upfront about everything to begin with.”

  Dylan nodded in agreement. “Good point. Besides, if I get the chance to date you, I’m going to want the whole world to know.”

  I could feel a blush creeping onto my cheeks, so I quickly continued. “Which leads us to option number two, which is where, if we decide to pursue this, we just do the mature thing and tell Elijah.”

  “And I risk losing my best friend,” he said grimly. “What’s option number three?”

  I bit my lower lip. Option three was the worst one of all. The one neither one of us wanted to hear. “Option three is where we don’t pursue this at all, and we just go back to the way things were before any of this happened.”

  “And then I lose you,” he said in a low, tight voice.

  I shook my head. “You won’t lose me. We can still be friends.”

  He laughed, but it was humorless. “Cass, I love being your friend. You know that. But you also know there is no way we can just go back to the way things were. Not until our feelings go away. I can’t speak for you, but I don’t see mine disappearing anytime soon. I’m too far gone.”

  “I don’t feel any different, trust me.” I ran a hand through my hair. “Which is why I propose that we go with option two.”

  “Tell Elijah?”

  “Yes. But we need to be smart about it and do it the right way.”

  “What’s the right way?”

  “Well, for starters, I need to be honest with him and tell him that he and I are never getting back together. And that we shouldn’t go to Winter Formal together.”

  Dylan inhaled sharply. “You can’t cancel on Winter Formal.”

  “I need to,” I said. “Lauren said that I’m leading him on. She’s right, and I don’t want to do that anymore. I never wanted to; I’ve just been unsure how to handle the whole situation. I’m planning on telling him tonight when he gets home from New Hampshire.”

  “Okay,” he said slowly. “And then what?”

  “We cool things down between us for a few days, and then we tell him about us. We’ll tell him together, and we’ll just explain everything to him. We’ll explain how between being paired up together as a married couple and you consoling me after he cheated on me, we just sort of…”

  “Fell for each other,” he finished for me.

  “Yeah,” I said quietly. “That.”

  Dylan groaned and dropped back down onto the couch. “He’s not going to take the news well.”

  I sat down next to him. “You don’t know that. He might be happy for us.”

  He turned his head and shot me an incredulous look. “You’re not that naive, are you? He’s going to see this as the ultimate betrayal. And rightfully so.”

  “But he and I are no longer together. It’s not like I cheated with you like he cheated with Hannah.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” He dropped his head against the back of the couch and stared up at the ceiling. “What matters is that you were together, and he wants to get back together with you. That makes you off-limits to all his friends—especially me, since I’m his best friend.” He sighed and returned his gaze to me. “But he’s not just my best friend, Cass. He’s like a brother to me. Growing up, I spent more time at his house than my own because my parents were always fighting, and I couldn’t stand being at home. He’s always been there for me, and this is how I repay him?”

  It was just like Lauren had said when she warned me not to get involved with Dylan. If Dylan’s friendship with Elijah went up in flames, I would be the one holding the match. And I didn’t want that.

  But we didn’t know for sure that Elijah was going to freak out. Sure, he was going to be upset. And most likely mad. But he’d get over it eventually, right? If the two boys were as good of friends as Dylan thought, then their friendship would be able to survive something like this. It wasn’t the end of the world.

  “I think he’ll be okay,” I said, keeping my voice positive. “Maybe not at first, but I think in the end, he’ll come around.”

  I could tell Dylan wanted to believe that, but he wasn’t convinced. “I hope you’re right.”

  “I mean, if you’re worried about how Elijah is going to react, we don’t have to do this. Option three is still on the table—”

  “No, it’s not.” He took my hand and laced his fingers through mine.

  I stared down at our joined hands and smiled. “Okay, so now that everything is settled, do you want to finish cleaning this place, or what?”

  “I think that’s a great idea,” he said. He stood from the couch and picked up the garbage bag from the floor. “We should focus on the kitchen; that’s the room that got it the worst.”

  He wasn’t lying. Empty cans, bottles, and cups were strewn everywhere: the floor, the countertops, the stove; there were even some on top of the refrigerator. There were piles of crushed potato chips, pretzels, and tortilla chips all around, and someone must have dropped a jar of salsa at one point because the floor behind the island was completely covered in it.

  “This is a disaster,” I lamented, looking around the room in horror. I moved to take a step and almost couldn’t because my shoe was sticking to the floor. Apparently, people had spilled beer, soda, and other beverages everywhere as well.

  “Yeah,” Dylan agreed with a heavy exhale. “I don’t think I’m going to be throwing any more parties anytime soon.”

  I glanced down at my watch. “Do you think we can get this done in the next eight hours?”

  “I think so. Once we’re done with the kitchen, the rest of the house will be a piece of cake.” He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “What do you say we order some pizza? It’s going to be a long afternoon; we need to make sure to stay fueled.”

  My stomach growled at the mention of pizza. “Yes, please. I’m starving.”

  Dylan placed the order and we got to work. While he began picking up the garbage from the floor, I began sweeping and mopping up all the messes.

  “This feels like such a married couple thing to be doing,” Dylan commented as he tossed another cup into the trash bag.

  I smiled. “I know, right? It’s like Madeline threw a party while you and I were away for the weekend, and now we’re back home and having to clean up her mess.”

  “Right.” He paused and narrowed his eyes at me. “Wait, why are we cleaning up instead of making her do it?”

  “She had a photoshoot today. Remember? She’s a supermodel now?”

  He blinked in surprise. “Wow. She’s a supermodel now? When did that happen? I thought she was just a regular model.”

  “She got promoted.”

  “Is that how that works?”

  I threw my hands up in mock frustration. “How should I know? She never tells me anything.”

  Dylan laughed as he tied off the garbage bag that he’d just got done filling and set it aside. “Our pretend daughter has a pretty great life, doesn’t she? She’s beautiful, working a glamorous profession, and she’s got the coolest parents ever.”

  “We’re the lucky ones,” I said, leaning the mop against the counter, “for having such a perfect pretend daughter.”

  Dylan smiled as he sauntered over to me. “She takes after her perfect mother.”

/>   I blushed as he pulled me into his arms. He leaned down like he was going to kiss me but stopped when his lips were only a couple of inches away from mine.

  “Oh, wait, sorry,” he said. “I know we’re supposed to be cooling things down for the next few days.”

  I already regretted suggesting that. “Well, um, I never said the cooling down had to start today.”

  He pulled me tighter against him. “No?”

  “Nope,” I said matter-of-factly. “So, like, if you were just thinking about kissing me, then I guess I could allow—”

  He didn’t give me the chance to finish before pressing his mouth to mine in a gentle, soft kiss that was nothing like the other two kisses we’d shared. This one was slow, calculated and confident. Confident because now we both knew for sure how we felt about each other.

  Smiling against his lips, I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him closer as he swiftly lifted me onto the counter.

  “Explain to me,” he murmured, removing his lips from mine and trailing a line of soft kisses from my jawline down to my neck, “exactly how we’re supposed to cool things down.”

  My mind went numb as his lips grazed my collarbone. “I—I don’t know. I—”

  A sudden knock at the front door broke us both out of our trance. Letting out an irritated breath at the interruption, Dylan let go of me and stepped back. “That’ll teach me to order pizza,” he grumbled, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. “I’ll be right back.”

  I couldn’t help but giggle as he left the room. He was so cute when he was annoyed.

  Sliding off the counter, I started opening cabinets looking for plates and cups, but froze when I heard Dylan answer the door.

  It wasn’t the pizza delivery guy who had knocked. It was Elijah.

  “Elijah,” I heard Dylan say. “What are you doing here?” I could hear a bit of guilt in his voice, and I just hoped Elijah couldn’t detect it.

  “I got home earlier than expected,” Elijah replied, “so I thought I would stop by and see if you needed any help cleaning up.”

  I could hear the front door close, and in a panic, I spun around and briefly considered running out the back door or diving under the kitchen table so Elijah couldn’t see me. But then I thought that would be silly. Why would I need to run and hide? It wasn’t like I’d done anything wrong.