by Tina Ferraro
“No way! First of all, that’s just cold. And none of my real friends would have gone with you, anyway. They’d know it would hurt me.”
“Well, that’s what I heard.”
“From who?” she demanded.
He rolled his eyes heavenward as if in deep thought, and then focused his gaze back on her. “Saffron. Yeah, Saffron.”
“Saffron?” Jacy and I echoed. Me because she was also my informant, and Jacy because, well, just because.
“In the courtyard,” he went on, nodding. “When she stopped to help me pull down those effed-up flyers you made.”
“That I didn’t make.”
My gaze ping-ponging between them, I wasn’t sure who was lying, who was telling the truth, and even whose team I was on.
“She told you I made them?” Jacy pushed on.
“Yeah, but she didn’t have to.”
Score another for Saffron because she had told me Jacy had made the flyers, too. Not to forget that little tale she told me about Jacy “letting” Randy go to the dance with me for a free tuxedo rental. Which, of course, was totally bogus. And when I’d pushed her on that, she’d back-pedaled to admit she might have gotten it wrong. Just another way of saying it was all B.S.
Watching Randy and Jacy continue to stare each other down, I couldn’t help wonder what else Saffron had lied about.
“Come on, Jace,” Randy said, the anger falling from his tone. “Who else would have made those flyers? Who else just broke up with me? Who else hated me?”
“I didn’t... I don’t... I don’t hate you. Anything but.” She dropped her head. “Randy, your mom, when she insisted I tell you the color of my dress at that very moment, I lost it, okay? I lost it.”
I could hear her voice thickening, knowing tears wouldn’t be far behind. Making me feel like a total third wheel, not the one who had called this Old Western Showdown.
“We both know she how she feels about me,” she choked out. “I don’t see how we could ever make things work between us as long as she is calling the shots.”
“She’s not calling the shots, baby,” he said, moving in with that arm he seemed to like to drape around girls’ shoulders. Giving me a big old conk on the noggin that his arm around me earlier had been about Jacy, too. His friends didn’t find me hot, weren’t congratulating him on “trading up.” He’d been trying to make Jacy jealous. Because he was hurting. Because he was in love with her.
“I stand up to my mom, Jace. Really, I do.”
I found myself shaking my head, totally siding with Jacy on that one. Mama Schiff had her boy totally whipped. And until he made a clean break—like went off to college—it was in Jacy’s best interest to keep her distance.
Then I realized: wait, what was I thinking? And what was I doing, caught in the middle of this love-fest? I was supposed to be his date, for God’s sake!
“Hey, so,” I said, and did a throat clear.
They turned toward me, her head on his shoulder, his arm around hers. Looking like the perfect all-American Homecoming couple. And bringing to mind a totally random song from my “Sesame Street” watching days: “One of these things is not like the other. One of these things just doesn’t belong...”
That thing, of course, being me.
“I’m going to let you two work on this tonight. And then, Randy, how about we talk in the morning and decide what’s what with us going to the dance?”
His brow went all heavy, and he took a step away from Jacy and toward me. He was probably having an attack of conscience that he’d just screwed this thing up Homecoming King royally.
Jacy was fast, moving around in front of him. “Thanks, Courtney. You’re amazing to do this for us.”
I just shook my head, then pivoted for the trek back across the sand. Wishing I’d stood my ground about driving my car here, but figuring I could catch a ride back to campus with someone. Or make a call.
Besides, transportation seemed the least of my concerns. Because what I could not get out of my head was the sincerity in Jacy’s adamant denials and Randy’s confusion. And the fact that the same name kept coming up again and again in all of this.
Chapter 15
I trudged across the beach toward the pavilion, feeling itchy all over from sand and a generally creepy night.
Not only did I need a ride, but I was dying to bounce these crazy thoughts about Saffron off someone—namely, Flea. Just not tonight in case the girls were all still together at the frozen yogurt store. Or back at one of their houses. Like if Saffron had suggested a sleepover after they’d walked away from me, or—
Stop! I told myself, glancing toward the pavilion lights. One thing at a time. And right now, I had to concentrate on getting to my car.
I went to dig out my phone, only to hear the deep bellow of my name, shouted in a voice so familiar that I knew that job was already done.
Yep, sitting on an empty picnic table was the Big Kahuna himself, his sandaled feet on the bench, hood pushed back, his eyes on me. A few teachers and moms blurred the background, crumbling up tablecloths and covering veggie platters, but the closer I got to him, the stronger I felt a you-and-me-against-the-world thing.
Weird, right? Just the honest truth.
“Hey, little girl,” Adam called out when I got in apparent razzing range. “Why aren’t you around the campfire, singing ‘Kumbaya’ with the other kiddies?”
I waffled between a sarcastic “yeah-yeah” and the smile that wanted out, settling on hiking up on the table beside him. I sat close enough to siphon off some of his body heat, but careful not to give him any bogus messages like that I missed him or wanted to be with him. I mean, really.
“I’m done with that for now.” I didn’t want to come across too desperate about needing a ride. “What’s your excuse? Why are you still here?”
“Oh, my buddies took off, but I wasn’t done watching these jocks act like they discovered and owned the beach. I actually heard a guy tell a girl that being near the ocean is good for the soul because you can only see its beginning, but never its end.” He made a fingers-down-the-throat noise. “Is that what these guys say when they’re trying to get some?”
I pushed my hood off, too. “I wouldn’t know. But sounds more like a line from a sympathy card to me.” Or something twisted out of Science’s mouth.
“What do they think my bros and me are out here doing everyday? You can’t surf the beginning or middle of the ocean. It’s all about riding it in.”
I shook my head and considered telling him the crazy stuff I’d just heard on the beach—about his Homecoming date. But even though he had a right to know, I couldn’t bring myself to go there, not right then. Sitting so close together, beneath the big sky and all the stars, well, Saffron was about the last person I wanted to evoke.
Better I stick to my own agenda. “Hey, I don’t suppose you have your dad’s car tonight?”
“Better than that. Granny’s 1974 Ford Country Squire. Fake wood paneling, AM/FM radio dial, and imitation leather seats that fold down for my board. All a guy needs.”
I nodded. “Technology is so overrated.”
“Why? You need a ride?”
“Uh-huh.”
Leaning forward to rest an elbow on a knee, he turned to me with what was either a street light reflection or a gleam in his eye. “Don’t tell me you and Joe Quarterback broke up? That you finally realized he wasn’t all that?”
“Let’s just say I think I gave him back to Jacy.”
“Think?”
“I’ll find out tomorrow.”
He shook his head as if trying to find room for what I was saying.
“It’s not like I care,” I reminded him.
“Where does that leave you, dance-wise?”
“Could be I won’t go.”
He studied my face for a long moment, his gaze lingering longest on my mouth. Then, as if he got the answer he sought, he squished his face, all puppy dog cute. “Will you live, Courtney?”
“Somehow, Adam, I think I will.”
He gave my arm a long pat, which felt incredibly nice, not to mention reassuring. Overthinker (and overfeeler) that I was, I couldn’t leave it there. I held tight to the memory of his touch, and imagined grabbing that hand back. Not so much for more hand-on-arm action, but to lace our fingers together—
Wait. What? Puh-lease. This was Adam. Who had shown major progress by simply acknowledging me as a friend. Not to mention that I had a romantic commitment at present to someone else. Well, something else. Why split hairs?
“You know,” he said, breaking into my musing, “if only I could get out of my dance date with Saffron...”
My lashes went up to the sky, thinking he was going to continue with, “Then you and I could go together.” That would be supposing he wanted to go to the stupid formal and that he liked me in a way that he didn’t. I just stared at his face, and waited for what I was sure was a disappointing finish.
And he did not disappoint. Well, in disappointing me. For his sentence simply died, like bonfire sparks into the beach air.
Suddenly Adam himself was in the air, leaping from the table into a complicated aerial spin that probably involved ninety degrees if not one-eighty. All I knew for sure was that he landed it with knees bent, one palm on concrete, the other out front for balance, but I suspected that in his head, he was all wave and board. In his private place, his happy place—a place where girls and friends like me did not exist.
And while the move was totally awesome, to keep things light, I broke into a series of claps in an imaginary circle.
“God, Courtney,” he said, looking over and laughing. “A round of applause. It’s been a while since I’ve seen that. Like Cub Scouts.”
I felt oddly pleased. Immature or not, I’d gotten a rise out of him. I smiled and scooted off the table, then fell into step beside him, listening to the distant roar of a breaking wave.
For the first time, I didn’t feel the need to fill the air with chatter, to say something just to keep the vibe from getting awkward. Maybe, finally, and for real, we were friends.
* * *
Adam’s grandmother’s station wagon was as old as the hills, and definitely a keeper. Plenty of “way back” room for his surfboard to lie like a coffin in a hearse, an amusingly springy front bench seat, and a strong rumbling engine. Reaching over to kick on the heater, I was betting it worked like a dream.
I let out a contented sigh as he pulled into traffic, thinking how nicely the night had turned around. Which was when I saw him gesturing toward the open seat between us, where a third seat belt lay buckled.
“Good thing you didn’t move in there,” he told me.
Fighting my automatic tendency to take that as a put-down, I merely said, “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. In the olden days, that was where parents put the baby. Here and now, it’s reserved for a baby of another kind.”
I tensed, feeling slapped. Yeah, girlfriend. Sometimes I hated being right. “Okay.”
“You get it?”
“Of course I get it. I’m not stupid.”
“I never said you were.” His brow rose. “Should we try it?”
“Try what?”
“It.”
It?
O.M.G., what was going on here? One minute he was telling me to keep to my side of the car, the next he was asking if I wanted to...
I hadn’t done it with anyone yet (and in my current “relationship,” my virgin status would not be changing). That aside, why in the world was Adam—who just told me not to invade his body space—suggesting we have sex on the front seat of his grandmother’s car?
Enough was enough. The kid gloves were coming off. “Adam Hartnett, are you out of your mind?”
“I thought you liked adventure.” He cocked his head at a wary angle. “And I always stop before anybody gets hurt.”
“Gets hurt?”
“Well, sure there was that one time—”
I folded my arms over my chest so hard that my fingers bit into my upper arms. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“Luckily no one was in the car with me that day,” he continued anyway, making a sudden right into school’s student lot.
“No one?”
“When the board actually crested over the back of the seat. If someone had been sitting there—wow—they totally would have gotten a concussion or something.”
I felt my brow sink down to my eyes. “Your board? Are you talking about your surfboard?”
“Yeah. See how it’s sitting right in the middle of the car? If I get up to twenty five, thirty miles an hour on a city street, and then brake hard for a red light or something?” His grin widened. “Bam-o! Here comes Baby!”
“Oh. My. God.” I covered my face with my hands and burst into laughter.
“What?”
I shook my head.
“What?”
No way I was answering that or going there. Besides, I was too busy laughing. At my own rampant stupidity.
When he pulled into the space beside my Beetle, snapped his seat belt open and turned to me, I knew I was in a race against time. I had to get my hands out of my face and some reasonable explanation out of my mouth before he figured out I’d thought he’d wanted my bod. Which of course had taken root in my brain because I wanted his.
“You think the surfboard thing,” he said, in a tone that was halting, but seemed to fill the close confines of the front of the car, “totally blows?”
I peeked through my splayed fingers, realizing he thought I was laughing at him. And I couldn’t have that. “No, no,” I said, and dropped my giggles and my hands. “I just took the ‘it’ thing as something else.”
He squinted, and then I could almost see the light snap on in his eyes. “Oh,” he said, his reaction spilling into a grin. A big, boyish one, providing another sudden transport back to middle school days. “Yeah, okay.”
He lowered his head, while I got super-busy unlatching my seat belt. Awkward!
“Well,” he continued, “that was probably because of the way I was acting tonight.”
My gaze fled back to him speedball fast.
“Look, Courtney, I’ve tried to be chill about Randy. I know the guy from way-back. I’ve heard some of the jokes he tells, crap he says about girls behind their backs. And tonight, seeing you together, I got a little crazy, thinking he wasn’t going to, you know, respect you. I know it’s none of my business what you do. And that you don’t need me or anyone watching out for you. I get that.”
He swallowed, and his Adam’s apple bounced. “But I feel sort of connected to you. I mean, it seems you’ve been in my life forever, and I’ll never forget how great you were that night I vented to you about my parents’ divorce. I just knew I’d never forgive myself if, you know, something happened and I wasn’t around to help.”
My hand moved to my chest, pressing open-fingered, which I hoped was relaying the gratitude I was struggling to vocalize. I just didn’t have words for this, to respond to someone stepping up out of the blue for me. Who was putting me front and center of his life.
I wasn’t a girl who people watched out for. The opposite. I’d been taking care of others for as long as I could remember. That was my comfort level, my baseline. I expected this of myself now, I guess because others always did.
I couldn’t even count on my friends to have my back these days—not even Flea, who seemed to be under the constant influence of more than just alcohol, but Saffron Willis, too.
To have Adam, of all people, want to go to bat for me was just...awesome.
“Are you mad?” he asked, his gaze ricocheting all over my face.
“No!” I forced out. “Adam, that is, like, the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.” I swallowed against something hard in my throat. “I mean, I totally had that situation covered with Randy, but you didn’t know that. And you worried.” My voice softened. “And you waited.”
I inched toward him for a hug. A friend hug. One th
at he’d more than earned. “Thank you.”
He must have leaned in, too, because our bodies smacked together quickly—so fast I hadn’t even fully raised my arms. Since my hug was happening at a clumsy mid-shoulder range, the obvious balance was a kiss on the cheek. Which I fleetingly imagined to be all puckered and chaste, but somehow, too, lost its scope and direction.
Maybe it was because he tilted his head to look down into my eyes in that way I perceived special. Maybe it was the nearness of him—the husky sound of his breath, the touch of his skin, his masculine, sea-salty scent—making me lose my head.
That thank-you kiss shot on past his cheek, landing bulls-eye on his mouth. On warm lips that seemed frozen in surprise.
I could feel his chest rising and falling with his breath, and suddenly, in my head, was his voice, replaying what he’d said earlier: “I feel sort of connected to you.”
Driving home that maybe I hadn’t been on a one-way-street all these years, with these stirrings and feelings and yearnings. Maybe what he needed was a take-charge girl (who for once was choosing not to keep under the radar) to get things started.
I inhaled and jacked my arms up to his neck, leaned my head, parted my lips, and gave him my best shot.
Giving myself one of life’s perfect moments.
He let out a sound that I told myself was one of joy, then his hands moved to cup the back of my neck, just below the hairline. As if holding me—and the kiss—in place.
If my mouth hadn’t been so busy giving my all to his, I think it would have burst into a smile. I’d never been kissed like this before, never known this feeling of being this incredibly lost and yet so found.
I mean, this was Adam...
We shifted angles, went back at each other, then shifted again. Simply coming up for air, I thought.
Until he jerked entirely away from me.
“Courtney,” he said, his first clear word in what seemed like minutes. “I—I can’t do this.”
My breath backing up in my lungs, I tried to steel myself. What? I had to keep it together. And then, it struck me. Of course. Saffron. Her dad’s endorsement. He needed to stay free.