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But tonight I’d done myself up in black winged eyeliner with a thin line of red on top of it, and sparkling red eye shadow, with dark red lipstick to match. I thought I looked pretty damn good, and hey, red was a Christmas color, wasn’t it? So it all worked out.
I turned eighteen last month. I was finally legal. There was nothing that could stand in our way if we wanted to be together. The only key would be to get Pike to actually want to be with me.
He had never noticed me all this time. Now was my chance to change all of that.
The timing was perfect. Pike had broken up last week with his on-again, off-again girlfriend Amber. I could understand why he’d dated her. She was gorgeous, intelligent, and sophisticated. Super rich parents and popular as hell, just like Pike. Of course they went out together. I had been seething quietly with jealousy the entire time but I’d never said anything, not even to my best friend Michelle. I couldn’t risk it getting out and everyone gossiping about me. It wasn’t like Pike had tried to get me to fall in love with him.
But he’d broken up with Amber at last, and I’d overheard him talking to my brother right afterwards about it. I hadn’t meant to spy on them, but sound traveled easily in our house. As a kid I’d been terrified of what I’d thought was a ghost only to learn it was the creaking floorboards from my mom walking around late at night. The sound had been so loud it had felt like someone was walking right outside my bedroom door.
“I’m sure it’s hard,” Morgan had said to Pike, trying to be supportive. Morgan had never been into dating around the way Pike was. Not that Morgan wasn’t plenty popular—he definitely was—but he was much more focused on other things like earning his Eagle Scout badges and working on fixing up the cars in the mechanics’ shop. He always said he’d find time for a girl later.
“You know what?” Pike had replied, and I had felt like my heart was stopping, “It doesn’t hurt the way that I thought it would. We were together for five years, overall. I think it ran its course. I’m ready to find someone new.”
“Don’t think I didn’t notice you broke up with her right before the Milner kegger,” Morgan had pointed out with a sly tone in his voice. “You’ll be single and ready to mingle.”
“And I definitely intend to do a lot more than mingle,” Pike had shot back.
I’d started making my dress that night. Before that I’d planned on wearing the same dress I’d worn last year. The kegger was a chance for everyone to wear something that was considered too daring to wear to any event an adult would be at, like Homecoming, so I’d already planned to be a bit sexier and more revealing than usual. But once I’d heard Pike say that… of course I had to wear something special to catch his eye.
Morgan would kill me if he knew what I was thinking and planning. I could see him across the barn with Pike, the two of them laughing it up with some other friends. I was damn luck that Canyon, Texas was a college town. Our population might not have been more than 15,000 but it meant a fuck ton of those people were college kids, and both Morgan and Pike had stuck around after high school graduation.
The idea of Pike going somewhere else for college, somewhere far away where I didn’t even have a single hope of catching his eye… it made my guts twist painfully.
But he wasn’t off somewhere else. He was going to West Texas A&M University, which meant he was here, and I had a chance.
Pike laughed at something Morgan said, flashing those dimples that made me weak at the knees. It was too far away to see his eyes, really, but I had memorized their striking green color long ago, knew exactly how they shined when he was amused by something. Sometimes, when he was over at our house and hanging out with Morgan, I would say something that got him to laugh, and I would cherish the memory for ages.
Was I being a pining cliché? Maybe. But who could blame me with a gorgeous man like that to pine over?
Morgan would get over himself, I decided. He would just be worried that things would change between him and Pike once Pike and I had slept together. That maybe Pike wouldn’t want to be as close to him. But it was going to be fine. There was no reason for anything to change, and Morgan would see that.
Michelle came up to me, looking a lot less scandalous than I was. Michelle was shy where I was sassy, and we complimented each other perfectly as a result. “You’re supposed to be distracting Morgan!” I whispered. There was no way I was going to be able to go up to Pike and be all flirtatious with my brother standing right there.
