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“Prove it. Give me one of those infamous Piper Barlow smiles.”
I glared at him.
“Hmm…close, but no.”
“You could be home by now.” Which would be totally preferable to me.
“Come on, Barlow. Give me a smile.”
“I’m fine. Thanks,” I answered with as close to sarcasm as I got with anyone but Hadley.
He pulled ahead of me and I actually thought that he’d given up and was just going home. Then he pulled a trick, didn’t land it, and ended up on his arse in a puddle, looking up at me expectantly.
I bit my lip to suppress a laugh but the answering humour in his eyes made me smile despite myself.
“There it is!” He pointed at me, totally victorious.
“You fell off your board. Of course I was going to laugh at you,” I huffed, trying hard not to smile and failing spectacularly.
I instinctively held my hands out to help him up and he took them with one hand as he picked his board up with the other.
“Fell off. Sat in a puddle. Much of a muchness.” He flicked his wet hair out of his eyes and looked at me with that characteristic Roman Lombardi intensity. “The result was as expected.”
I looked down and kept walking. “Roman Lombardi isn’t the kind of guy to fall off his skateboard to make someone else smile…”
He walked beside me at my pace. “Isn’t he?”
I’d snorted and said “no” before I could stop myself.
He laughed. “Then, it must have been an accident.”
“Must have,” I said softly.
Once again, I couldn’t look at him. Roman wasn’t the kind of guy who would do anything to make someone feel better; the fact that he spent so much time at school pulling pranks on people proved the opposite. But here he was, heavily implying he’d fallen off his board because he knew that would make me smile.
But actually, I had to admit it wasn’t the first time he’d done something similar in the last three weeks.
Never where anyone else would see him, of course. That wasn’t his style. It was only along this stretch of road.
He’d make some quip that never failed to make me smile or did something to make himself look stupid. And he’d never outright said he was trying to make me feel better, but it was one of the things that made me feel antsy and weird around him because it seemed so out of character for him.
I lost all ability to be intelligent the same way I did around Mason, but Roman annoyed me and confused me. At school, on Main Street, at parties, he was the town bad boy. But on this stretch of road, when it was just the two of us, he acted like there might have been more.
His little stunthadbrought me a little bit out of my funk and I appreciated the fact that he didn’t feel the need to talk as we continued walking.
Sometimes, he chattered incessantly whether I had my headphones on or not. And, sometimes he just seemed content to wander along beside me in an almost companionable silence, like today.
Although, today he wasn’t quite silent.
As we walked along, I realised he was humming. He had a nice voice – as much as you can tell when someone hums – and I thought I recognised the song. I stopped as he got to a bit I totally recognised and I blinked at him in surprise. He either didn’t notice or didn’t care because he kept walking and I hurried to keep up.
Yep, he was humming ‘Waking up in Vegas’.
That made me snort.
And when he got to the chorus, he surprised me totally by breaking full into song. Even a pretty decent singing voice couldn’t stop me laughing out loud. He slid a questioning look at me as though there was nothing weird going on until he got to ‘why am I wearing your class ring?’ and looked at me like he was truly asking me.
I couldn’t stop laughing as he continued. Apart from a small head-bop, he kept walking as though everything were normal until he got to the chorus again and he added a little extra swagger into his walk.
