Someone Like You (Blue Club Books)

by Robin Hart

  “Because I told you.” She said. “I told you what I’d always wanted to tell you.”

  “About your dad? ‘Cause I botched that-”

  “Shhh.” She said. “Let me finish.” She drew a little circle in the sand in front of their feet. Sean watched the swirl become less pronounced as the sand rushed back to fill it in, not succeeding in completely erasing it.

  “I told you, and you didn’t leave.” She gave him a stern look because she knew he was about to butt in again. “Well you did, but you came back.” She laughed. “And I was horrible to you, too.”

  Sean just nodded. They’d both been horrible. A decade of sexual tension could have a funny effect on people.

  “But I think the key was today.”

  “I know, I saw it in your eyes. I don’t know why though. I just did what was right.” Sean didn’t want her to like him just because he had dominated another man. That was something he’d just done, not who he was.

  “That’s the thing.” She said. “That’s the kind of man you are. You didn’t even think of doing anything else.”

  Sean looked at her with lowered eyebrows and a frown. What else would someone do?

  “You’ve always said those men were bad. That they didn’t deserve me.” She put a hand to her curls as if to see if they were still there. “Gosh why is this so hard to get out.”

  “You don’t have to…”

  “I’m afraid I won’t ever if I don’t do it now, while things are clear.” She turned to him, wanting to face him during this. His eyes looked a deep ocean blue gray rather than their usual vivid blue, and she felt lost in them. No, they were the lighthouses that guided her home.

  “Men have been talking all my life. Men have been saying things all my life. What you said and what the others said was constantly at war, but I didn’t know who was right. In the end, anyone can pretend to be the good guy, anyone can say someone else is the bad guy.” She put up a hand. “And I know that they were behaving badly, but I assumed they just knew something you didn’t, and that’s why. Not because it was them. Because it was me.”

  He saw a tear well up in one eye, and then fall slowly down her cheek. He wanted to reach for her.

  “I thought when you saw what they did, you would be the same. I didn’t want you to see that. I wanted you to always act the way you do.”

  Sean nodded, but couldn’t resist reaching out slowly to gently catch the tear on her cheek and lift it away.

  “But you did see me. I told you everything. Everything they all seemed to know. And you came tonight, and you came for me.”

  He nodded.

  “And you finally got to show me in actions, what you’d been saying in words all those years.” She was crying more freely now, in the way she was used to crying. Face normal, eyes streaming, heart pounding. “I was able to see clearly, who was good, and who was bad. You showed me that I don’t have to wait any longer.”

  “Wait any longer for what?”

  “To tell you that I think you’re amazing. That I want to try to be with you, but I’m scared. But I want to try, if you can be patient with me.”

  He looked at her, and she knew what he was asking. She nodded slightly, and waited, her face turned to his. He leaned forward and placed his hand behind her head. He moved in slowly, watching her. She was expecting to just enjoy the pressure, the softness. She was shocked to feel something spreading from her heart to her fingers and toes as his lips met hers. They fit together perfectly, warm. But it was unlike any other kiss, because it was like her feelings and his had risen up to meet each other, like she could transmit love to him through this simple connection. Everywhere she was touching him, the back of his head, his lips, even where her legs grazed his where she’d leaned over, felt electrified, made her feel heady, dizzy, as if ten years of loving could overflow in one kiss.

  He pulled back, held her shoulders, looked into her eyes.

  “But all I did was beat up a dude.” Sean said.

  She laughed. “And no one has ever done that for me, but that’s not it and you know it.” She looked down at her hands, and laughed quietly. “You know that’s not it right?”

  He did, he knew that without meaning to, he’d somehow given her what she’d been wanting. He couldn’t imagine how it must have felt, never knowing who to trust, or who was good or bad. He wished her dad had done the world a favor by killing himself before he messed up a child’s world so bad.

  “I know.” He said.

  “But I realized I’m more likely to grow healthier by letting myself be with you than by waiting till I can see douche bags better. Besides, you can see them for me now.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled. “I’m pretty good at that, aren’t I?” He sat up, looking smug, and folded his arms on his chest. Nicole looked at the muscles there and wanted to get grabby again. She wanted him, though it was foreign, a type of want she’d never felt, a forever want.

  “I’m glad I brought him, though it was just to make you jealous.”

  Sean’s eyebrows shot up like someone had pulled them with a string. “To make me jealous?”

  “Yup.” She said, reaching for one of his hands. She lifted it into her lap and ran her fingers along his palm. Then up his arm.

  He stiffened, then relaxed and exhaled. “But.” He said. “I thought you didn’t see me like that.”

  “Gosh you are dense.” She said. “Stop fishing for compliments.”

  “Oh I’m sorry, I guess I thought 10 years of rejection would end with a bit more groveling.” He laughed and looked to the side with a long sigh. She laughed and tackled him back into the sand.

  “You’re right.” She said. “I guess after all this time you deserve a little more.” And she kissed him again. She hadn’t realized kissing could feel so good. She didn’t feel herself leaving her body in her mind. She was here with him. She was safe. They were locked.

  He rolled them over until they lay side by side, and looked into her eyes.

  “So what does this mean for us?” He said. “It’s not that I’m not happy, it’s just that I don’t want you reacting in a rush, just out of stress.”

  “It’s not rushed.” She said, putting a hand to his cheek and realizing she’d been waiting to do that for too long. For forever. “I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s not.”

  They sat up. There was sand in her hair, and Sean itched to brush it aside for her.

  “I guess it’s like the glass is removed, and I finally get to be in the candy shop with the other kids.”

  He smiled. “And I’m the candy?”

  “I guess.” She said.

  He pulled her closer, and she fell in between his knees in the sand, looking up at him. Then his hand came gently up behind her head, and the other cradled her cheek and he pulled her up. He kissed her cheek, then her neck, then her mouth.

  She burned. She wondered. She felt that she’d been missing something her whole life. She should have known that only the man who’d been weirder than all of the rest would be the one to give it back to her. She felt so aware of the cool sea breeze, the splashing waves, the light mist dampening their clothing and the ground around them. At the same time she felt encapsulated, as if all of her love and all of her emotions were swirling within the two of them and building an unbreakable wall around them. As his lips settled into a rhythm, caressing hers and then releasing them, she felt her heart ache, feel full, overflow. Finally he pulled back, looked down at her.

  He’d been waiting so long. It was still like a dream. He knew he didn’t understand completely what was driving her, he just knew that things were right now, that this was a start for them. Something real was finally happening between them.

  “You know.” She said, running a hand through his curls. “I always thought, even if I wasn’t healthy enough for you, I always hoped I could at least have someone like you.”

  He smiled. He pulled her close, pressed her against him as if he could meld her to him. He knew that the morning w
ould come soon enough. He knew that things wouldn’t be perfect, and that there was so much more for them to explore. He knew he had more to teach her about himself, and he knew that there were many intricacies he would still discover about her. But he had a lifetime for that.

  “I’m glad you get me instead. I love you.” He said. “So much.”

  “I love you too.” She said, looking into his eyes and feeling more free and healed than ever before. “So much.”

  They both let silence fall over the moment. Nicole turned to face the sea, pulling Sean’s arms around her like a blanket. As her thoughts became cloudy in the space between sleep and wakefulness, she saw two children watching her. A girl with wild, dark hair holding hands with a serious, blue-eyed boy. They smiled at her as she drifted to sleep.

  Thank you for reading Someone Like You! I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please help other readers find this book:

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  If you loved Sean and Nicole’s story, you’ll want to check out Justin’s, which I’ve excerpted for you below. Again, thank you for taking the time to read my work, and I hope you enjoy it.

  Preview of Blue Club Book #2, Into the Blue

  Molly couldn’t stop looking at the guy a few seats down. It was a typical first day of the new semester at her university. The girls still wore makeup rather than pajamas and bed head to class, the boys still acted interested in lecture, notes in hand and on lap. Molly didn’t usually join any of the social mating practices though she sometimes watched them with interest when her eyes were too tired to stare at her computer screen anymore. She preferred to sit, reading Japanese manga on her laptop in the back row where no one could see what was on her computer screen. She preferred to learn by reading, and so preparing the night before, was ready for any question the professor might ask to throw her off guard or to try and catch her doing something she oughtn’t on the computer.

  Most of the guys around her would never have caught her interest anyway. Molly’s rabid consumption of manga had somewhat altered her views of ideal masculinity to slender, girlish men with sparkly eyes and soft hair, and the average college guy was a scruffy, buff, intimidating and unrefined type. Molly would rather be alone in her head with the men on her screen then out in the ‘real’ world with men like the ones around her.

  It hadn’t hurt that these men were the ones who’d teased her from childhood, on her baggy clothes, her chubby figure, her frizzy hair, her freckles, her glasses, pushing her to retreat to a world where all the men said ‘I’ll protect you’ instead of ‘hey fatso’. Not that Molly was fat anymore, per se, but she’d stopped looking under the sweater in a critical way a while back and didn’t care. Most of the time, she could care less what was happening in real life. She got good grades easily, she had always been told that those who flourished in high school would bomb later anyway, while she would rise to the top, as a natural nerd. It always made her shrug and pick up a romance novel.

  Which is why she was unprepared to see the man a few seats down and couldn’t stop staring even though she knew it would be detrimental as soon as she was caught. But he looked like he’d walked out of a manga. He had blonde, thick, soft looking hair that was lighter than his skin, which was a natural golden color. It fell around his face and ears and a little bit fell to his collar. His eyes were a green, though the actual color was hard to see because of dark, long lashes that overshadowed them. His nose was long, and straight, with the tiniest discernible lift at the end. Probably a nose that would be too delicate for other women’s taste. One could hope. The only way she’d have access to a guy like that would be if he had no other options, probably. His mouth was utterly girly, lips that were a deeper pink than most girls, and a small rounded upper lip with almost no indentation above a very full lower one that made it look like he was pouting. She wanted to eat him up.

  His hands were tented in front of him, graceful straight fingers just meeting at the tips. She could just imagine how those hands would feel, gently tilting her chin to his…and she knew what he’d say in one of her mangas. She made a huge effort to turn back to her computer before he saw her staring. She promised herself that she could at least picture him during the story she was reading. Luckily, she was in a particularly exciting part, where the hero was rescuing the heroine from some evildoer, but had yet to show up. Leaving the girl wriggling against the wall helplessly, the evil teacher looming over-

  “Wow, she’s in trouble, huh?”

  Complete panic ran up Molly’s spine in an unpleasant, searing line and she slowly turned, as if the lead in a horror movie that has just realized the killer is standing right behind her. A murderer, someone reading over your shoulder on your laptop, same thing as far as she was concerned. The face she looked into was too beautiful to do murder, however. It was the guy from a few seats down, who was now no seats down. She felt an incriminating blush start to fill her face and tint her a deep pink.

  “I’m sorry.” He leaned back and held up his hands in a placating gesture. “I needed to borrow a pencil. You didn’t respond when I asked. I had to see what you were so involved in.”

  She glared at him, too choked by embarrassment and attraction to do more than that.

  “I know, it’s stupid, who forgets a pencil on the first day of class?” He said. “But I’m more of a pen guy anyway. Not that I have a pen today, I just hate erasing things.”

  So much for being a manga hero. This guy was just loud. She held a finger up to shush him, reached in her bag, and brought out a mechanical pencil.

  “Thanks.” He turned and put the pencil to paper. “This is a boring class huh? I hate pre-recs. What’s your major?”

  “Engineering.”

  “What type?” He asked, tapping the eraser lightly on his notes.

  She hadn’t expected him to ask. She hadn’t expected him to be smart enough. People that beautiful have no right to be smart as well as beautiful. It just made the world too unfair. Sure, he’d gotten into the same university, but it really wasn’t right.

  “Computer.”

  His eyes widened. “Really? Me too.” He leaned back in his chair, slumping a little and yawning. “I guess that means we are going to have a lot of classes together.”

  Oh dear, she thought.

  “I guess we should be friends then.” He held out a hand. “My name’s Justin, what’s yours?”

  “Molly.”

  “Wow.” He said. “Cute name.”

  She felt the traitorous blush crawling up her face again. Couldn’t this nitwit shut up and let her get back to her manga?

  The bell rang. He stood, having much less to pack up than she did. He reached behind them and pulled out her plug for her. “I guess I’ll see you around then, Molly.” And he placed it next to her gently, and strode away, revealing a body that was not anywhere as feminine as his face. Molly was a little disappointed, but then people were never like books or manga. She couldn’t tell if she was disappointed or hopeful at the prospect of seeing him again. Certainly not what she had expected.

  “Argh, no.” Justin whispered to her as the professor finished writing the most recent assignment. “Not another lab. This is killing me.”

  Molly looked at her best friend of two years, her only friend, and once again marveled at his face. It just wasn’t something you got used to, no matter how long you looked. And she’d looked for a good while. She was probably not his best friend. Just his lab partner and the girl he always sat by in class. She knew by the way girls waited in the halls for him to come out of class that he had many admirers. He was friendl
y, and beautiful, so that was to be expected. She was neither, so it was equally expected that she had pretty much zero friends outside of the online message boards where she talked about manga with other rabid fans.

  Still, she felt a great deal of pride when he sat by her, when he talked to her, though she typically said little in return. She felt like one of the cool kids, one of the pretty girls, for the first time in her life. And she kept her head down, so that his crowd wouldn’t notice her, notice the huge disparity in their looks and tell her why she shouldn’t be around him.

  Not that college was like high school. It was just too big for the same cliques, and most people were nice. But she knew what type of girl was expected to be around Justin. It was why she always said no to hanging out with him on weekends, or outside of study needs. She knew her place.

  “Why won’t you come to the movies with us this weekend?” He said, hair dropping in his face as he tried to catch her attention in front of her laptop screen. “You need to get out.”

  “I don’t.” She said. “I don’t like getting out.”

  “Why?” He said, still annoyingly blocking her screen.

  “Everything I have is right here.” She said, patting her compy.

  “Wow, you really need to get out.” He tried to close it with one long, delicate looking hand.

  That made her laugh. “Look Justin, I appreciate how nice you always are. But I just don’t belong with your crowd.”

  “That’s what I like about you.” He said.

  But Molly knew shoujo manga wasn’t real life. The popular, good-looking boy, didn’t really fall in love with the nerd and become interested in her just because she wasn’t interested in him. Just a year left to graduation, and she could happily work more with computers than people for the rest of her life.

  Justin felt mildly annoyed, watching his best friend flip screens on her computer with a flick of her finger, looking bored as usual. Looking completely unaffected by him, which he loved. He was tired of girls seeing his girly face only, he was tired of the simpering around him. He was tired of being lumped in the category of gay best friend or underwear model. With Molly, he was just a classmate. And when she looked up at him with her big, blue eyes and wrinkled her small nose in annoyance at being interrupted, he felt…something. He looked forward to seeing her in class. To trying to distract her as she squinted at her screen, her hand grasping her leg with varying pressure depending on what she was reading, or more specifically, what part she was at in her girly comics. A good deal of the class she actually paid attention, now that they were in upper level classes, it was pretty imperative to do so. But there were still moments where he could see her intently focused on her screen in a way engineering couldn’t possibly be inspiring, and then he loved to tease her.