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"Come grab some pizza with me."
He didn't reach for her again or try to keep her from fleeing, but his abrupt suggestion had the same effect. "You want to go get
pizza with me?"
She could still see the concern in his eyes, but he was doing his best to mask it with a grin. "Have you eaten at Pizza My Heart on University yet?"
"No." She hadn't ventured too far off campus yet. Barely beyond the library, in fact.
"Then someone's got to introduce you to the best pizza place on the West Coast."
She'd made herself walk away from him so many times already. But right now, she just didn't have it in her to do it again. "Okay. I'd like that."
He reached for her bag and had it off her shoulder and onto his before she could think to protest. "I know why you looked so upset," he said as he shifted her bag over his back.
She'd been walking beside him as they headed down from the path to Palm Drive and into downtown Palo Alto, but now she stopped cold. "How could you possibly know?"
His brows lowered as he stopped and faced her. "I was making a joke about how the load of bricks you're carrying around in this bag is practically making me cry." He reached out for her again, put his hand on her arm. "Serena, what the hell happened today?"
Sympathy was the worst thing of all, she realized, because it brought up all the emotions again. "I don't want to talk about it." Belatedly, realizing how cold her response must have sounded when he'd been nothing but awesome today, she added, "I mean, you've been so nice about it, but--"
"You don't know me."
She blinked up at him, surprised that he'd understood. Sisters, she thought again. Something told her he'd been a good brother to them.
"Given what I do--" She stopped to correct herself. "I mean, what I used to do--"
Ugh, she didn't want to sound like a prima donna, or as if she thought she was such a big star that she couldn't say anything to anyone for fear that it would end up in People magazine. But the problem was, sometimes it did. It was the same reason why she hadn't really hung around her dorm room much since the frat party the week before. Of course Abi would want to know what had ended up happening with the guy Serena had been making out with. On the one hand, Serena desperately wanted a girlfriend to confide in. But on the other, what if it turned out that Abi wasn't trustworthy?
"I get it," Sean said easily as he walked beside her. "My brother Drew has a band that's getting pretty big. He's into it for the music, not the fame, but there doesn't seem to be an easy way for him to escape the spotlight."
"Wait a minute," she said as she suddenly put two and two together, "Drew Morrison is your brother?" When he nodded, she said, "I love his music."
"It's pretty good," Sean agreed with another heart-stoppingly gorgeous grin. "We're all proud of him."
From the way Sean talked about his brother, she could see that he really was. There was no jealousy over Drew being one of the biggest up-and-coming rock stars on the planet. Only good-natured ribbing from one sibling to another.
"You mentioned sisters before. How many of you are there?"
"Six."
"Wow. I've always thought it would be cool to have siblings, but I always imagined one or two. Not growing up with five other people always around. Do you like having such a big family?"
"I do. Most of the time, anyway. Everyone's got their weird quirks, but you learn pretty quickly how to avoid the rough spots...or use them to your advantage if you need to."
She laughed, realizing with no little surprise just how easy he was to talk to. And to kiss, a little voice inside her head reminded her. But she shouldn't be thinking about kissing Sean right now. Not when she was enjoying their conversation so much that it no longer seemed completely impossible that she might actually be making a friend.
A really hot friend.
"I'd love to hear about the rest of them."
"Grant is twenty-five, and never lets any of us forget he's the oldest. His office is actually not far from where we're having pizza, near a bunch of other high-tech companies."
"That must be nice that he's still in the area."
"It is, though we haven't seen much of him since he founded Collide."
"He started Collide? The social networking company with the tagline When Worlds Collide?"
"Yup, that's Grant's company."
She knew she was sounding like a dork, first with how she'd goggled over his rock-star brother, and now how stunned she was to learn that Sean's oldest brother had founded one of the fastest-rising social networking companies in the world.
"That's amazing."
"It is. But," he said with another grin, "if you tell him I said that, he'd probably have shirts printed up with the word amazing and his face on them. So let's just keep that between us, okay?"
Since she seriously doubted she'd ever get the chance to meet Grant Morrison, she wasn't particularly worried about breaking Sean's confidence.
"Drew is the next oldest, and then my sister Olivia. She's a senior here, majoring in Education."
"Are you all geniuses?"
"Olivia definitely is," he said with a fondness that told Serena just how much he admired his older sister. "Although my brother Justin's brains pretty much put all of us in the dust. He's also on campus, doing a double major in Biology and Robotic Engineering. He got all the brains in our twin cave, but I'm okay with that."
"Twins?" Her mind reeled trying to imagine a second guy who looked as good as Sean walking around campus. No doubt just seeing them together in one place would make a girl's brain melt out her ears. "Are you two close the way they say twins are?"
"Yup, we get along pretty well, probably because we're so different and rarely compete for the same stuff. Although, he's one hell of a baseball player."
In the week since she'd met--and kissed--Sean at the frat party, Serena had learned that Sean was a junior and the star first baseman and hitter on the Stanford baseball team. Funny, she thought as they crossed at a traffic light, he spoke so easily about his family but hadn't yet mentioned anything about his own achievements. Wouldn't most guys have bragged about themselves by now?
"Does Justin also play on the Stanford team?"
Sean raised an eyebrow at her also, as if to say, So you do know something about me, huh?
She blushed in confirmation as he told her, "Nope. He'd rather spend hours geeking out in a lab than standing in the outfield waiting for someone to hit a fly ball in his direction."
"Do you guys have that twin sense you hear about in movies? You know, where one of you cuts himself and the other feels it?"
Sean laughed. "No, thank God. Although, sometimes I do feel like I can read his mind. Especially when it comes to this girl, Taylor, that he's been friends with forever and is secretly in love with. He's so frustrated, it's sad."
"If he's in love with her, why doesn't he let her know how he feels?" She was surprised to find herself asking such a personal question, but Sean made it so easy. "Is it because he's afraid to ruin their friendship just in case it doesn't work out?"
"Maybe. Or maybe she's made it clear that she's just not interested."
"Do you think she's not interested?"
He thought about it for a second. "Taylor is a cute girl, but all up in her head like Justin. She's pretty nervous around guys." He shrugged again. "Heck, who knows if she's even been on a date before."
Serena tucked her head down just in case Sean might guess from just looking at her reaction that she'd never been on a date before, either. Maybe she'd have to go look this Taylor up and the two of them could bond over their utter cluelessness around men.
Especially the Morrison twins.
"And then there's my sister, Maddie. She's still in high school, graduating this year." He shook his head. "She's a little spitfire. Not to mention too smart, too talented, and too pretty for her own good. We all try to watch out for her to make sure she doesn't get into trouble, but it's hard now that we're not at home with her anymore."
Sean opened the door to the small pizza place and they stepped into what had to be the best smelling restaurant on the planet. "What do you like on your pizza?"
Pizz
a was one of the many menu items at the top of her mother's Do Not Ever Eat list. But, what the heck? If Serena was going to eat pizza, she might as well do it right. "Everything."
He looked momentarily surprised and then pleased as he said, "Two slices with everything. And two Cokes."
The restaurant was small, with only a handful of scratched-up Formica tables. A couple of minutes later when they were sitting down with the biggest pieces of pizza she could have imagined in front of them, she said, "Your brothers and sisters all sound amazing. I'll bet your parents are great, too, aren't they?"
Suddenly, that same pain she'd seen in his eyes on the dance floor at the party flashed through them again.
She instinctively reached out to him. "Sean?" His arm was warm beneath her hand. "What happened?"
His expression had already shuttered, but he told her, "You're right, my parents are great." He swallowed before amending it to, "Were great. My dad is still around," he clarified. "He works in real estate, gives out loans to people. It's my mom." He inhaled a breath that she could see shook him. "She passed away three months ago from breast cancer."
"Oh Sean, I'm so sorry."
"I am, too. She was great. A schoolteacher. Third grade. Everyone misses her."
Serena had never come face-to-face with such grief. "She sounds like she was an amazing mother."
"She was." But it was obvious that he didn't want to talk about it anymore. "What about your family? You said you're an only child, right?"
"It's always been just me and my mom." She wasn't telling him anything he couldn't have read online if he wanted to look her up, but it still wasn't easy to admit, "I never met my father."
"That sucks."
She looked up at Sean, surprised by his bluntness. But somehow, it helped settle her down a bit. "Yeah, it does. But I've never known anything else."
"Must have been hard for your mom to let her only kid go away to school."
"You have no idea." Her mouth felt so dry that she picked up her Coke and gulped down half the bottle.
Soda was another thing she'd very rarely had due to the empty calories and potential bloating from the sodium and carbonation. But as she licked her lips to savor every last drop...wow, all those bubbles and sugar and caffeine tasted so good. No wonder people got addicted to it.
