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I pull her close. So we can dance, sure, but to feel her, to experience her warmth. “You couldn’t have picked one of the two dozen hockey players in this house to tease me with?”
She spins around, grinding that delicious ass against me. I miss half a step before splaying my hand over her belly, keeping her body close to mine.
“Teasing?” she says, turning so her lips are against my ear.
My grip on her tightens. “Julio’s one of my guys.”
“Evan, then.”
“No.” I spin her, and the unexpected, actual dance move makes her smile. I file that away. She has many expressions, but her smiles are the best. A rarity. “Me.”
“Who says I’m still interested?”
I let my breath wash over her ear. Even though it’s hot in here, she shivers. “It’s pretty fucking obvious, di Angelo.”
She twists, looking me in the eye; with her high heels, we’re practically the same height. I want to take off those heels, then peel down her jeans real fucking slow. Her eyes are molten, ringed by that trademark eyeliner. “Penny’s going to spend the night here.”
“Like Cooper would let her out of his sight.”
“You can come to the room.”
I grin at her. Maybe there’s part of her—even if it’s buried—that likes my smile.
I shouldn’t hope so, but God, I do.
2
MIA
May 6th
I skidinto the Bragg Science Center with a minute to spare before my meeting with Professor Santoro. If there’s one thing she hates, it’s tardiness, so I take the stairs to the fifth floor at a run. I shouldn’t have agreed to drinks with Erin, one of the seniors in the physics department, last night—because it wasn’t just drinks, of course, we ended up at her place after a few rounds—but I was feeling reckless, and now I’m paying the price.
I nearly heave as I take a breather on the third floor landing.Definitelypaying the price. My head feels like someone is hitting it with a sledgehammer repeatedly. And the hookup wasn’t even worth it. Way too much spit.
I’ve always been full of bad ideas. Experiments of the explosive variety in the chemistry lab at St. Catherine Academy. Bonfire parties in the woods at the edge of my hometown in South Jersey. Hookups of all kinds in closets and classrooms and public bathrooms. Lately, I’ve had plenty ofextrabad ideas.
It’s easier to jump headfirst into hookups and parties with every bit of my spare time than think abouthim, after all.
Sebastian Miller-Callahan. Disgustingly nice. Disgustingly good at making me come. Disgustingly good at baseball, too, and that’s something that should have tipped me off—it’s never easy with athletes.
Not to mention the fact he’s my best friend Penny’s boyfriend’sbrother. Nope. Mr. Golden Baseball God is in my life for the long haul, and no number of hookups can change that fact.
Hasn’t stopped me from trying for over a month now. Hasn’t stopped me from wishing I was a different sort of girl. If I was a nice girl, and deserving of Sebastian, then maybe I wouldn’t have fled the day his brother walked in on us about to get down to business.
I smooth my hair as I rush down the hallway. I might be hungover and more heartbroken than I’d ever admit, but there’s no way I’m letting that mess up this assignment. Talking my way into Professor Santoro’s lab this summer, even though I’m only going into junior year, is something I refuse to take for granted. I worked my ass off in high school to get into McKee and its top five undergraduate astronomy department for this exact moment. A chance to do real research, to start what will hopefully be a long career spent staring at the stars—and to give my application to the astrophysics study abroad program at the University of Geneva a leg up.
I remember the exact moment I fell in love with space. I’d been aware of it before, of course, but it wasn’t until a summer bonfire during a family vacation that I looked up and reallysawit. My nonno—a dreamer in a family of practical people—brought a telescope to the beach, and while everyone drank wine from paper cups and laughed around the bonfire, I followed him to a quiet spot by the dunes.
“Let’s find a planet,” he said as he set up the telescope. “Maybe we can see Mars or Jupiter. Summer is a good time for planet hunting.”
It felt like magic, peering at the sky through the telescope. We found them, and Saturn too, my eyes wide as I glued my face to the lens.
“One day,” he said, hands in the pockets of his linen pants, gazing up with as much reverence as I’d seen when he prayed in church, “maybe they’ll find another little girl gazing at the sky through a telescope, wondering about Earth. Maybe you’ll be the one to do it, Maria.”
He always told me that I could do anything. As I grew up and my interest in space consumed me, he sent me articles from NASA that we’d read together. He encouraged me to sign up for advanced math and science classes and join the robotics club. The morning before he died of a heart attack, he picked me up from school—I’d gotten in trouble with the nuns yet again—and told me that he knew I was destined for something great.
When I get to Professor Santoro’s office, I knock on the door, and spend the five seconds waiting for an answer combing through my messy hair. Ugh. Why did I hook up with Erin, again?
