I knew he was trying to get a rise out of me, to plant thoughts in my head and gloat when they bloomed. Knowing that didn’t change anything. My eyes, on their own accord, dipped.
Beckham Jennings’s mouth was perfect. I remember the first time I’d thought it. We’d been playing chess out in one of Alderton-Du Ponte’s gardens, with the moonlight illuminating the stone board, brightening his expression. He’d been an okay chess player with a terrible poker face, and I’d watched him react every time I moved a piece. His eyes would shift, and his lips would quirk to the side.
His top lip was fuller than his lower lip, and when he smiled—really smiled—it stretched thin. They were plush and rosy, and just as I’d thought about it every time I saw him, I wondered, now, what it’d be like.
What it’d be like to kiss them.
And even now, I found myself trying to remember. I’d touched those lips before.
I’d kissed those lips before.
When you want someone, you’ll look at their mouth. You’ll imagine kissing them. You won’t be able to help it.
“Where’s your head at, Eleanor Brighton?” Beck crooned, and I jerked my eyes up to find his eyes crinkled with the victory. A match he’d won. I’d barely even put up a fight. “You’re gonna make me blush.”
The seatbelt snapped open beneath his fingertips. The sound startled me, like it broke the tension. Beck eased the straps off my lap before climbing back out of the convertible, holding the driver’s seat down for me to crawl out. “Come on,” he said neutrally, as if nothing had just happened, and as if my pulsewasn’tin cardiac territory. “I don’t have all day. I’m illegally parked, you know.”
His nonchalance suddenly enraged me, like a switch flipping. I could literally feel the anger within me go from a five to a one hundred, from a simmer to a boil. “I can’t stand you,” I told him, temper flaring over. I not-so-gracefully got out of the car, gripping my backpack strap like I was about to use it as a weapon. Maybe I was. “I don’t want to see you, don’t you get that? I don’t want you butting in on my life, or my friend’s lives, or anything. You should’ve stayed out wherever you came from, because no one wants you here.”
Beck stood at the edge of his car and listened to me rage with a small smile on his face, as if I were performing a play personalized for him. The look was all too familiar; the sort of patronizing expression you’d give a child throwing a temper tantrum.
Yeah, I really was about to start swinging my backpack at him. “Can’t you just leave me alone?”
Beck raised his shoulders in a lazy shrug. “Can’t.”
“Go meddle in Lydia’s life if you’re that bored.”
“You are far more fun.”
“Beckham.”
His eyes glowed like a cat’s. “I like the way you say my name,” he murmured, that small smile lifting further. “Say it again.”
This time, I couldn’t stop my hand from raising, reaching back to gather the momentum I needed to shove him into the car.
“Eleanor?”
I whirled around at the sound of my name behind me, because out of anyone who could’ve called out to me, I hadn’t expected it to be Carter Pembleton.
But it was.
Carter stood on the top step that led up to our front door, in his socks. The door was open behind him, with another figure standing in the entryway. At first glimpse, I’d thought it was Jamie—which, again, would’ve made sense—but instead, it wasDad. He wore his dark pajama pants and a light gray shirt, one with a few questionable stains, and he was squinting as if he hadn’t seen the sunlight in ages. He probably hadn’t.
Carter’s socked feet. He’d been at my house long enough to take his shoes off. Long enough to talk to Dad without me there.
My brain locked up, and the first word that came to mind wasH-O-R-R-I-F-Y-I-N-G.
“Well.” Beck swung his car door shut, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Isn’t this a party?”
CHAPTER 9
Apparently, Dad, in his zombie-like state, had enough mental awareness to politely invite Beck in for something to drink.
And apparently, Beck didn’t have the situational awareness to decline.
More like he didn’t want to.
If I had known the Brighton household was about to become Awkward Central, I would’ve risked Mom’s wrath and stayed at Daisy’s. It was a cosmic joke—because how on earth did I wind up sitting between Carter and Beck at my kitchen table, with Dad across from us?
