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What do I feel like?
She stops eating, just stands there as if she realized how that sounded.
It’s good to know that she sees through his mystique a little. She’s never asked why I left. She’s only ever asked why I lefther.
Taking her fries, I dump them back into the bag, and then I take my onion rings and do the same. She watches as I fist the bag closed and shake, mixing up the contents.Opening it back up, I pluck out a handful of onion rings and fries, dipping one into her shake as we share the Coke.
We eat and drink, music playing and people pulling in and out of the parking lot, and I want to take out my phone and reply to one of the many texts she’s sent me over the past year that I never answered, and I want to do it with her sitting right here, because I want to see her smile.
But I don’t want her thinking we’re friends. We can never be friends again.
“Don’t race Phelan’s Throat, okay?” I warn.
She doesn’t look at me as she pulls an onion ring out of the bag and a tiny laugh escapes her.
“I didn’t have my lucky charm today,” she says. “That’s why I had bad luck.”
I look away before I roll my eyes. She always races with the same necklace her dad raced with. A piece of clay with her mother’s childhood thumbprint.
“And you don’t look like Kade,” she tells me, swallowing down her food. “You look like your mom. A little more than he does.”
My heart kicks up speed, and I take a big bite of an onion ring to hide my smile.
I inhale a deep breath, close my eyes, and lock my fingers behind my head. I tense every muscle in my body as I lay in bed.
I didn’t sleep for shit last night.
I couldn’t stop staring at her mouth at Breaker’s. I know she saw it. Every time she chewed, swallowed, spoke…
My cock stretches against my sleep pants, straining to stand.
My abs tighten harder still, and my biceps brush my ears as I try to get everything to burn, so I’ll be too tired to think about her today.
She told me I looked more like my mom, who still has that mildly aggravated, ‘your-idea-of-fun-isn’t-my-idea-of-fun, I’m judging you’ glint in her eyes that she had in all the photos I’ve seen of her as a teenager. I don’t look like that.
And yet, I like that Dylan thinks I do. My mom’s cool. I love my dad, but he thrives off bullshit that I find intolerable. Suits, politics, compromising, and never being able to say exactly what you mean. I know it has to be done by someone, but I’m glad it’s not me.
Light fills the room on the other side of my eyelids, and I focus on a face—any face but hers. Coral’s blonde hair and her eyes that amplify her smile. Mace’s curves. Arlet washing Farrow’s car weeks ago in a bikini that I couldn’t help rolling my eyes at, because it’s ridiculous how he coerces women into being his maids, but I also did a double-take at the view too. She likes me. She’s been sending me signals the size of Mack trucks.
But all I see is me last night, tearing Dylan’s phone out of her hand at the bonfire and almost crushing it in my fist, because I’m sick of how he troubles her. Her spine straightened like a steel rod, and she barely looked like she was breathing.
Not nervous.
Tense.
Maybe I want her to feel like that with me.
And maybe she will, now that he’s not here to interfere like he always did.
“No, I don’t want to get in,” Dylan cries.
But she’stotally smiling too.
Kade grabs at her ankles, water sloshing around his waist as she leaps around the pool deck, just out of his reach. Stoli and Dirk have Danielle Hardy and Gemma Ledger on their shoulders, the girls trying to push each other off and into the water. Dylan wants to get in the pool, but she and Ledger aren’t okay. Kade doesn’t give a shit.
She pops a grape into her mouth from the handful she holds as she slides out of his reach again.
“Kade, leave her alone,” I say.
