I turned around and lifted my hair so he could get the back of my shoulders. As I did, I locked eyes with Raelynn and her death glare. This was an unforeseen complication of the fake relationship—I hadn’t anticipated gaining an enemy out of it.
“So, come on,” Lydia said as she crossed her legs. She batted her eyes at Jamie and me. “Tell us everything. Why did you hide it, anyway? To think, if we hadn’t walked in on you last night, we’d never have known.”
Okay. It was time to officially, officially kick this fake dating thing into gear. “We were just… testing it out, I guess,” I told them, recalling our rehearsal this morning. “We knew it could make things awkward, so we just went slow. Kept it between ourselves to see how we felt first.”
“They even kept it from me,” Nellie said. “Which, yeah, fine, I get. I would’ve talked them out of it if I had known from the beginning.”
“When did you find out?” Lydia asked.
“Uh, did younotsee my face last night?” Nellie gave a full-body shudder. “Same as you.”
We’d all figured that’d be the most believable answer, given the way Nellie had reacted. “You should’ve knocked,” Jamie said simply, to which Nellie sputtered out a gasp.
Beck chuckled around the straw in his mouth. “Thatta boy.”
I bit down on the side of my lip to fight off a smile.
“Here,” Jamie said, having finished spraying the sunscreen on me and offering the can out. “My turn.” Something in his eyes looked like a challenge.Your turnwas what he really meant.Your turn to prove how good of an actress you are.
Oh, gameon. I tossed my red hair over my shoulder, picking at the buttons on his shirt. “Your turn,” I agreed, eyes flicking up.My turn.
I letmy fingers linger on the fabric, gently sliding the button through the hole and brushing the fabric aside.See, I thought at Jamie, undoing the second button from his collar.I’m totally good at this. Better than you.
My confidence, though, flickered when I got to the middle button, and my knuckles grazed against the hot skin of his stomach.
Jamie’s frame was definitely more thin than muscular. He was the kid who was always picked last in gym class, and would usually sneak off to read underneath the bleachers without the teacher noticing. Worlds different from Dalton, where the muscle obviously corded his arms and bulked his shoulders.
I’d always been more partial to the muscular look—because,hello—but with my romance brain turned on, something about the moment… shifted. I forgot my task, brushing my knuckles against Jamie’s stomach again, the skin just above his navel. The hot,hardskin, because even though he didn’t have a rippled six-pack, there was still muscle underneath. Quiet and hidden, just like Jamie himself.
When my eyes finally crawled their way up his chest, skimming past his prominent collarbones and to his face, I found Jamie staring down at me, unblinking.
It was the intensity in his brown eyes that knocked me off-kilter, because it wasn’t a look he wore often. Jamie’s expressions were usually a language I spoke fluently, every glance and smirk loaded with meaning I could almost always translate.
But now I had nothing. I swallowed hard, the sound of it loud in my ears.
In a soft but level voice, Jamie murmured, “You’re taking your time.”
I snatched my hands back from his shirt to the chorus of laughter, because though his voice had been soft, everyone heard it. And then, to make it worse, Beck cooed out, “Oh, she’s downbad.”
All at once, heat flooded through me, so sharp and suffocating that I thought I was about to drop dead right there on the sand. I did not—could not—look at anyone. Definitely not Dalton. To Beck, I threw back, “Look who’s talking,lover boy.”
Beck laughed, nudging Nellie, who looked vaguely nauseous.
Raelynn’s voice sounded irritated. “What, have you never seen him shirtless before, Daisy?”
I’d seen Jamie shirtless tons of times. We’d gone to pool parties before. I’d seen his shirt rise up when he’d taken off a sweatshirt. This skin was nothing new to me—and yet I’d nearly just had an aneurysm over it.
The sun was so stupidly hot. “Shut up. All of you.” I couldn’t look at Jamie. He started spraying sunscreen to his own skin, not asking for my help again.
“Well, I don’t know about you all,” Dalton said suddenly, awkwardly shifting his feet in the sand. “But I came here to swim.”
Lydia objected, “Your slushie?—”
“The heat’s making me feel a little sick, actually. I think I need to cool down before I drink anything sugary.”
Is it us?I wondered.Are we making him feel sick?My stomach knotted, conflicted.
Beck reached his hand up for Dalton’s drink. “I’ll guard it closely.”
