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What the actual fuck was wrong with me? Were you even supposed to ask a girl about her period?
I had no fucking clue.
Christ, I needed to get the doctors to scan my brain as well as my balls because there was something loose rattling around up there.
Shannon was sitting right next to me, her smell was in my nose, her arm was touching mine, and I could hardly form a coherent sentence.
Seriously, this wasn’t normal.
I’d spent my entire life on display, like a bleeding show pony, and nothing ever fazed me.
But she did. This girl right here did.
Maybe I’d left it so long that I had grown back my virginity, because I certainly felt like I had reverted back to virginal status. No self-respecting lad of my age, with my kind of life experience, trembled over a girl.
Fucking trembled.
And yet, here I was, trying to get my body to calm the hell down so I could at least pretend that I was half-normal and not scare her back into the shell she liked to hide inside.
The questions my mouth was spurting were beyond embarrassing, but I couldn’t seem to get a handle on myself.
She had makeup on. A full face of bleeding makeup that made me want to cry.
She was gorgeous without putting a thing on her face, but knowing she was wearing it around all my teammates made me uneasy. I knew they were looking at her. In the last half hour alone, I’d had to give Luke the death glare so he would stop fucking staring at her from his perch across the row. It was so out of order that I found myself shifting around in my seat just so I could block her from his—and everyone else’s—view.
Thank Christ for Mrs. Moore, who had been roped into assisting Coach in chaperoning the trip. Tommen’s guidance counselor was batshit crazy, but she had a whole host of games and team-bonding exercises planned for the three-and-a-half-hour bus ride. She even had a bag of fucking Easter eggs and little laminated award charts as prizes. She did this every damn time she joined us on an away game, and usually I just ignored the woman until she gave up and left me alone.
I always sat alone so she couldn’t pair me up with the person beside me and make me do those bleeding feelings exercises—and, god forbid, reflection time—she loved so much.
But today? Today I found myself participating in the boring-as-fuck quizzes and charades games, not to mention, I bleeding Spy.
I knew Gibsie, Hughie, and Feely were laughing their asses off at me from the back of the bus—they knew I never joined in on these games—but I didn’t give a shite because playing these games meant Shannon had to talk to me.
Every time I won, the girl next to me smiled. Every time I handed her another Easter egg or stupid little award, she crept further out of that shell she was hiding in.
That was worth the slagging I was going to reap from my team.
She was worth it all.
59Hushed Whispers and True Colors
SHANNON
Sitting on a bus with Johnny Kavanagh was unexpectedly brilliant.
When Mrs. Moore, our kooky guidance counselor, called for everyone’s attention and started passing out quizzes and games for us to play, I had expected Johnny to ignore her—because, let’s face it, he was a bloody rugby star.
But that’s not what he did.
No, Johnny played.
Because we were sitting together, we were teamed up for the games and tasks, and managed to work together in a strange sort of harmony, completing our games and activities with ease.
The games we were given were dumb and childish, but after about an hour, I felt myself completely relax with him. It also didn’t hurt that my partner seemed to be this freakish genius who, when every pair was given a Rubik’s Cube to solve, completed ours with ease in under ten minutes. It was seriously impressive, considering no other person on the bus had solved their cube.
Every single quiz we were given, or competitive task against the other couples, we won.
Well, Johnny won.
