“And why not?” she asked, a challenge in her voice. She started to beat her egg mixture again. I stared at her for a second, trying to figure out what she was doing.
Clearly, my feelings for Luke were one of the few things we never spoke outright about, and after that weird afternoon when Mel and Naomi were high, I didn’t see this changing. Mel had never done anything to discourage my crush, but she had also never done anything to encourage it. Unless that stuffed polar bear from the Dog Days Fair counted. Did it?
That one moment of distraction resulted in flour blowing in my face, and I used my hand to fan it away.
“Why does it have to be Luke?” I asked now, using his name for the first time in our conversation.
“Oh! That’s who you meant? Luke? My Luke?” She was in a theatrical mood today.
When I rolled my eyes, Mel cackled. “Why does it have to not be Luke?”
Because he was easily the smartest person I knew. Right from the moment I’d met him, a then-bespectacled eight-year-old, I’d always been so aware of how much he knew that I didn’t. About the water cycle and grubs and why thunder always came with lightning.
“I’m not trying to look stupid,” I admitted.
Mel’s expression got serious then. She took my chin and forced me to look at her. Her thumb brushed something I assumed was flour off the tip of my nose. “Not being the best at something doesn’t make you stupid. It makes you human.”
Growing up, Mel would let us get away with saying almost any word, but stupid had always been off-limits.
“Fine, then I’m not trying to look unintelligent.”
Mel sighed. “Anybody who thinks you’re unintelligent is stupid.”
Done with the flour now, I hopped on the counter and watched her continue to work. “Moms have to say that, even if it’s not true,” I said.
“Only to their own kids,” Mel argued. “So when I say it to you, I mean it.”
I laughed. “But not when you say it to Ro and Luke?”
One of the things I loved best about Mel when I first met her was the way she rarely distinguished between me and the boys. We were “you kids” or “the gang.” Little reminders that I wasn’t one of them used to feel like a punch in the chest, and as if she knew it, Mel made sure to steer clear of them. She made nothing of the fact that our skin colors were different. She didn’t even acknowledge some of the odd looks we got in Winchester, which wasn’t the most diverse of towns. It didn’t matter that we didn’t share the same genes. If anything, I was special because I wasn’t Mel’s child. She’d chosen me. Ro would sometimes even jokingly call me just that—“the chosen one.”
Now Mel smiled. “Pleading the Fifth on that. So, Luke will tutor you, okay?”
I sighed. “What if he says no?”
“Who said anything about asking him?” Mel said. “If I ask, it’ll be a Thing. Mom made me do this, blah blah blah.” Her deep barrel-voiced imitation of Teenage Boy sounded nothing like Luke, and I burst out laughing.
“It’s better to just put it out in the universe and see what happens,” she said.
I didn’t understand what she meant until a few minutes later, when Luke got home. I thought he’d been at work, so I expected him to be in his blue polo and black slacks, but he was in a pair of jogging shorts and a T-shirt that clung to his chest, his curls wet with sweat.
He raised his hand to us in greeting, went to the sink, and gulped down a glass of water. His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and I tried to act indifferent under Mel’s watchful eye.
I shouldn’t have worried, though. She was preoccupied with her own plans.
“So, what’s the thing you’re struggling with the most right now?” she asked me out of nowhere. We hadn’t talked about math for several minutes, but by the look she gave me, I knew what she was referring to. “Derogatory units? Derivements?”
“Derivatives?” I offered, confused. Like Mel didn’t know the word derivative.
“That’s the one,” she said, snapping her fingers. “I think we used to do that one with protractors when I was in school. I’d be happy to take a look tomorrow, but I can’t promise anything.”
As though he were an actor in a script, Luke set down his glass and looked at us, playing right into Mel’s hands.
“Oh, um, thanks, Mel,” I said. I couldn’t tell if this was going well or not.
“Of course, Jessi-girl,” she said.
“Luke, do you have one of those math sets Jessi and I can borrow for tomorrow?”
Now Luke was frowning. “A math set?”
“Yeah, you know those small silver cases?”
He was looking at me now. “You need help with derivatives?”
Despite all the buildup, my face still warmed. “Yeah, kind of.”
“I’m a little rusty,” Mel said. “But I was great at geometry. I should actually go and see if I can find that old calculator of mine.” She took off for the stairs. I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. Her rickety old woman spiel had officially entered the vicinity of the ridiculous.
Luke had turned his back to fill another glass of water, but he spoke now.
“I’ll tutor you.”
I couldn’t believe Mel had been right. He was actually offering.
“If you want,” he added, turning around to face me.
“That would be amazing,” I said quickly. “Are you sure?”
He shrugged. “Why not?”
He gulped down the rest of his water, crossed the kitchen, and stopped at the counter, inches from me. I was eyeing him as he reached for an apple in the fruit bowl behind me, so I barely had time to notice when his other hand touched my chin.
“Tomorrow?” he asked.
Both our eyes followed his index finger as the flour he’d brushed off my face left a white smudge on his black shorts.
“Tomorrow,” I whispered.
THEN
Derivatives.
Given how distracted I was, I’d managed to learn a lot more about them than I expected. Luke and I were sitting next to each other at the dining table, where we always sat during dinner at the Cohen house. Except this time it was just the two of us.
Our bodies were angled toward each other, our heads had almost touched twice, and I realized that the whisper of mint I’d smelled in his car the night we picked Rowan up from Celia’s party was from Luke. When I leaned in even closer, a clean, soapy scent emanated from his skin. I stumbled through all sorts of olfactory equations in my mind. Mint gum + the ocean breeze detergent Mel used = Luke’s indelible scent? Or was it breath mints + some as-yet undiscovered shower gel that was making me want to bury my head in his chest?
Rowan didn’t smell like this. He smelled like Old Spice and sweat, which, to be fair, usually lacked that offensive sting that BO had, unless he’d just come from the court. Did they have their separate soaps even though they shared the same shower?
I felt I should know them well enough to answer this question, but it was also creepy as hell—grounds for Mel to throw me out of her house for good if she ever found out how badly I wanted to know.
“You know what you’re doing,” Luke said suddenly, and I knew it was all over. I was caught. He’d read my mind.
“What?” I said, tucking my hair behind my ear and retreating into my chair, as my attempts at sniffing him had sent me almost into his lap. I didn’t know what was wrong with me. Mel was in the next room, for God’s sake.
“You know what you’re doing,” he said. “Don’t overthink it.”
“Oh, thanks,” I said, my face warming. Whether it was from the encouragement or the crazy thoughts I’d been having, I couldn’t tell. “You’re too nice.”
It was true. I knew that Luke rarely lost his temper and was obviously supersmart, but I hadn’t been prepared for how patient he was, how willing he was to go at my pace and compliment me.
“Should I not be nice?” he asked, and his gaze on my face from just inches away was like a physical tou
ch.
“No, nice is good. I like nice.” When I realized what I’d said, I scribbled hard and fast on my paper. Even if I got the problem wrong, at least the sound of our quiet breaths and my loud, traitorous heart would be drowned out by our voices again as we went over it.
I managed to avoid doing anything really embarrassing for the rest of the lesson, and then we were done and packing up.
“You’ve got this,” Luke said. “We can meet a couple nights a week until your final, if that works for you.”
“That would be so great. What do I owe you? I can pay you, you know.”
He shook his head. “You don’t owe me anything.”
“Wow, okay—thanks,” I said before bounding away like an excitable puppy. Later, I wondered if I should have hugged him. I could probably have gotten away with it, right? He was doing me an enormous favor after all.
Thankfully, the next time we met was significantly less awkward. Mel was in her room taking a nap and Rowan was at work, so it was just us, with Sydney by our feet. We seemed to always schedule our tutoring sessions while Rowan was at work, and since we worked around Luke’s schedule, I wondered if that was intentional on his part. Maybe he thought Ro would be a distraction. He probably would, but I found myself missing him all the same. He’d gone back to being MIA ever since that morning he’d snuck into my room. He was hardly ever at home when I was at the Cohen house, and he barely answered my texts. I told myself that he was just busy, or he was just struggling with Mel’s illness, but I couldn’t help wondering once again why Rowan had become so distant.
I ignored the ache in my chest and focused on the present, this moment, with Luke.
That second time, while I worked on problems, we chatted about a bunch of things—Mel’s treatment. Senior year. College.
“Mom really wants me to go,” Luke said, watching as I scribbled out a problem from the textbook. “She says it feels better for her to see us living our lives instead of putting them on hold for . . . however long.”
However long, we both knew, meant as long as Mel had left. The one thing about Mel’s Big Bad was that it had never given us any hope. There was no good outcome; it was only a matter of when.
“That maybe this way, she might even get to see me graduate college,” he continued, his voice dry.
“So maybe you’ll go?” I asked now.
“I . . . I think so.” He raked his hand through his hair, and I could feel his conflict. “Is that what you . . . You still wouldn’t?”
It was a weird question for him to ask. Did he care that much about my opinion? What I would do if Mel was my mom?
“I won’t judge you for going, if that’s what you mean,” I said at last, because it was the truest thing I could think of to say. It was easy for me to make declarations about what I would and wouldn’t do if I were Mel’s daughter, but as Ro had painfully pointed out all those weeks ago, I wasn’t. I got to love her in that selfish, uncomplicated way people who weren’t related got to love each other. And, like I’d come to see over the years, maybe that was why Mel meant so much to me. Her love for me was optional and totally unwarranted, not forced upon her by blood or relation or any sort of obligation, making it all the more special and unusual. In the same way, I got to love her with as much bias as I wanted. I didn’t have to know whether she was bad with money. I didn’t have to care if she had been as unfair to Dr. Cohen as he had been to her. I got to blindly choose her side. All her suggestions to me were just that—suggestions—but to Ro and Luke, they were directives.
Maybe I loved her just as much as they did, but I loved her differently.
I could admit that.
At my next tutoring session, Luke seemed distracted and didn’t offer many directions, corrections, or compliments as I worked. He didn’t say much of anything.
“Is everything okay?” I asked at last, worried as I always was that something had happened with Mel that no one had told me. As privileged as I was to have our uncomplicated love, I was also at a disadvantage: I didn’t live with them. They weren’t obligated to tell me everything.
Luke rubbed the back of his neck. “You know how I said you didn’t owe me anything? You still don’t,” he said quickly. “But I could use your help with something.”
“Okay, shoot,” I said, sitting up straighter.
Minutes later, Luke was opening the door of his bedroom and leading me in. He had revealed the reason for his distraction, and it led us on a mission, of all things, to find him something to wear. Sydney, who had trailed us up the stairs, weaved around me and settled in a spot at the foot of his bed. I followed her, knelt, and stroked her fur, pretending not to be the least bit affected by being in Luke Cohen’s room.
“Sorry about the mess,” Luke said, as if the state of his living space even registered on my radar. Of all the rooms in the Cohen house, Luke’s was by far the place where I spent the least amount of time. I’d been in it a bunch when we were younger, playing games on his computer or spreading out a board game on his carpet because his room had more space than Ro’s. But it had been a couple of years since I had seen more than glimpses through an open door.
His room was nowhere as neat as mine. He had piles of books everywhere—on his table, in stacks on the floor, and spilling over off his two shelves. There were a bunch of weights in one corner and shoes in another. His bed was unmade, but clean-looking.
“Hey, Sydney,” Luke said now. “Should we show Jessi our little trick?”
Sydney jumped up obediently at the sound of her name and ran over to him.
“Ready?” Luke asked, and I grinned, not sure whether he was talking to me or the dog.
“Shoes!” he said.
At the command, Sydney ran over to the corner that was full of Luke’s shoes, found one gray house slipper, and brought it back to him.
“Other foot,” Luke said, and Sydney trotted back to the shoe pile and retrieved the matching slipper, dropping it in front of him.
“No way,” I said. “How did she know which pair—”
“Secret,” Luke said with a grin.
“Good girl, Syd,” he said, bending to set the slippers next to each other in front of Sydney, who stood patiently wagging her tail. “And now for the grand finale . . . okay!”
At that command, Sydney slid one paw into each slipper.
“Oh my God,” I cheered, bending down to pet her again. “You’re so good, Sydney. Such a clever girl. Yes, you are.”
Luke and I both loved on her for a few seconds, and she beamed up at us, letting us pet her.
“Think we should take our show on the road?” Luke asked.
“Um, heck yes,” I said. “I’d pay good money to see that. You need to put it on YouTube or something.”
Luke just laughed, standing again, and I remembered that he’d brought me up to his room for something other than watching the tricks he’d taught Sydney.
I stood too, then sat on the edge of his bed, trying but failing not to wonder how many other girls had sat on it. Luke walked over to his closet, pulled it open, and rifled through a bunch of shirts hanging there, and my attention veered back to the fact that I was in his room. In the place where he spent most of his time. Where he slept and dressed and undressed. Based on the number of times he’d come down for breakfast, hair disheveled and in pajama bottoms that hung low on his hips, I knew he didn’t sleep with a shirt on. But were the bottoms only for the sake of modesty, something he pulled on before rubbing the sleep from his eyes and trudging downstairs?
“So, clothes—” he said now, and my body felt warm all over.
“Yep, clothes. A definite necessity,” I squeaked, squirming.
Luke gave me a weird look, but all he said was, “Thanks for doing this. I’d have asked for Mom’s take, but you know how she gets.”
I smiled. “You mean, Forces of the Universe, is it possible my firstborn has somewhere to go on a Friday night?”
“Pretty much,” he said. I thought my impersonat
ion had been pretty spot-on, but from the way he rubbed at his neck, I could tell I’d embarrassed him.
He held out a bunch of shirts.
“Um, so you’d wear them with dark jeans?” I asked, absently inspecting each shirt. They were all so soft. If I had a moment alone with them, I’d bury my face in them.
Luke nodded.
I wondered if he was interested in patenting his smell so girls like me (mostly me) didn’t have to reduce ourselves to sniffing him or his clothes.
“And you said it’s karaoke night?” I said, trying to remember what he’d told me downstairs. If he wasn’t doubting my brain capacity at this point, he soon would be. I pulled out a dark blue T-shirt and a gray Henley that was one of my favorites. And, okay, I was a creep for having favorites from his wardrobe, but it was what it was. I hadn’t claimed to be any kind of saint.
“I have to be honest,” I said. “I wouldn’t have thought karaoke was your thing.”
“It’s not,” Luke said. “It’s really not. But I got invited, and I’m trying to step out of my comfort zone more so college isn’t a complete culture shock. I figure I should start changing.”
I glanced up at him, surprised. “You don’t have to change.”
“Yeah, I do. College is a whole different ballgame,” he said. A moment later he added, “And you know what I’m like.”
“What you’re like?” I repeated, not bothering to hide my confusion. He’d already seen me do calculus; there was no way he held my IQ in high regard.
“You know,” Luke said, looking at the shirts hanging off his arm and not at me. “I’m not Ro.”
I did know. Luke wasn’t gutsy and expressive and spontaneous like his younger brother. He never had been.
“That’s not a bad thing . . .”
He shrugged in response.
Silence stretched all around us, and I took a breath, determined to mine as much information as possible from whatever this interaction was turning out to be.
“So, am I to take it that you’re trying to impress a girl?” I said in a teasing way, making my voice as light as possible.
“That’s . . . uh, I can’t answer that.”
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