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Well, that nonchalant mention did nothing to improve my lack of oxygen. I wanted to look away. I should’ve looked away. Focusing on his brown-eyed gaze and his hair that shifted in the wind was so not helping. My body had its own ideas, and the memories he conjured just by looking at my mouth had me freezing. “Whatever.”
“I know we’re not talking about it,” he went on, letting theitlinger in the air for a moment. A strange quality creeped into his words then, a curiousness that almost sounded plaintive. “But we can be friends, right?”
Friends. It was a neat, orderly category. Like the box at Timeless Treasures,Friendswas scrawled clearly across the front. It fit me in with Landon, Connor. It didn’t fit me in with Cindy and the other girls he’d kissed in the past. To throw off the scent of my utter shock, I forced myself to scoff. “I’m Rachel’s friend.”
“Why can’t you be my friend too?”
Why not? Because in all the years that I’d known him, he was always Rachel’s twin. Never my friend. Never the person I’d confide in, never the person I knew more than a handful of facts about. He was alwaysthere, the way Rachel’s father wasthere, but I’d never stopped to get to know him.
“The better question is, why do you want to bemyfriend?” I replied, blinking expectantly. “I’ve always been the annoying girl that hangs out with your sister. Why change your mind now?”
“You don’t talk to Rachel about what’s going on at home,” he said simply. “You should have someone to talk to. I can be that person.”
Once again, his words knocked me off balance. What would being friends with him entail? Sharing secrets? Saying hi in the school hallways? Getting each other gifts once in a while? I thought about the comic books that were currently in my purse. If we were friends, could I give them to him?
I opened my mouth to respond, but I realized someone was walking up behind him. It took me a belated second to place the face.
“There you are.” Cindy came up behind Reed with her full lips twisted into a little frown. “I didn’t realize you came outside.”
Reed took a step away from me once he saw her, putting six feet between us. Enough space that it could’ve looked like we were two strangers standing together. “Just needed some air.”
Cindy’s attention wandered past him to me, and she did one of those up-and-down scanning looks, but it was accompanied by a friendly smile. “You’re one of Rachel’s friends, right?” she asked. “Reed said you were both on the list. So, which one are you? Marrying the math book or never having their first kiss?”
A part of me wanted her to guess, but my ego probably wouldn’t have been able to take it. “Never have their first kiss.”
“Ava,” Reed added. “Her name’s Ava. Rachel’s other friend is Maisie.”
“You’re the one who runs Brentwood Babble, right?” She placed her hand on Reed’s back and leaned into his side. I hadn’t noticed how tall she was before. Even in her bowling shoes, she was only an inch or two shorter than him. “I think that’s socool, you know. You must feel so powerful to have all the dirt on everyone.”
It was true that I had tons of info on people in Brentwood, not even just Top Tier. Even if things never got posted, I read every submission, even all the scandalous ones. “I wouldn’t saypowerful.”
“For running the school’s gossip column, I wouldn’t have thought you’d be on the Most Likely Tos. So, you haven’t had your first kiss yet? Kind of rude someone thinks you won’t ever have one.”
This conversation was rapidly inching up onawkward, especially with Reed pointedly not looking at either of us. “Yeah, kind of rude, but most of the labels are,” I replied, trying to keep my voice lighthearted.
“Have you thought about just kissing someone random to get it over with?”
Funny story, Cindy...“Uh, no. Not really.”
“We should go inside,” Reed said, grabbing Cindy’s hand and giving it a tug. “It has to be our turns by now.”
“You guys go,” I said, fishing out my cell phone and holding it up. “I need to call my mom really quick.”
Another lie, one that had to be painfully obvious too. But the reason I’d fled the alley in the first place had only followed me outside, and I needed to reorganize my thoughts before facing Rachel and Maisie again. I was sure that if I walked in now, my feelings would have to be written all over my face. Unease and uncertainty in equal measure, leaving my heart pattering unevenly as they turned away.
Reed turned once before they disappeared inside, and in the second that our gazes locked, I had one single thought:what’s high school without a little drama?
Initially, I’d been fully present in the conversation with my best friends Friday afternoon. Maisie was sitting on my bed and hugging a pillow to her chest, and Rachel was rummaging through my closet in search of…something. I couldn’t remember. As soon as I glanced out the window, I was lucky to remember my own name.
I’d lived across the street from the Mannings for all of my seventeen years. Seventeen summers where their lawn needed mowing, and not once—not once—had I really paid attention to who mowed it.
But now, what was supposed to be a quick peek out the window, turned into me totally ensnared by Reed Manning’s naked chest, by the way the sun glistened off his skin, by the way his forearms flexed as he pushed the mower in horizontal lines across his yard.
White earphones hung from each ear, the wires drawn to his pocket where his phone presumably was. He pulled the mower toward him, pitching it on two wheels to angle it around and start back across the yard, the movement so fluid that I couldn’t look away. And I so wasn’t looking at the machine.
Reeddidlook hot.Warm. Maybe he needed someone to bring him out a glass of water.
“What are you looking at, Ava?”
