How to Hook a Bookworm (How To #3)

“Curse this thing.” I roll side to side and listen to him laugh over me. It’s not till after I threaten to pants him that he finally helps me to my feet. My brow feels like a waterfall in the heat. “Can we please go inside to air conditioning?”

  “Yeah… air conditioning. That’s what you want.”

  “Someone’s getting a big head. I’m not sure it fits you.” I tease, ticking his glasses off-center as I walk past him into the house. Mr. Silver’s snoozing on the living room couch, his cup of coffee pouring from his dangling hand and onto the carpet. Adam shakes his head.

  “You head up. I’ll be there in a second.”

  Trying to be as quiet as I can, I sneak to Adam’s room and pull at the costume zipper. After two weeks of sign tossing and costume dancing, I’ve finally been able to maneuver in and out without help. Though, sometimes I fake it just so Adam zips me up… and sometimes down—just to watch him blush.

  After I’ve wiggled out of the fur, I dig into my purse for gum and my body spray. I spritz and chew, then I rebraid my hair and slide onto his bed. I don’t have to do the sexy thing, I know that. But I still don’t want my breath to wreak or to smell like a roasted, sweaty, wet dog—which I think that scent is permanently infused into that costume. I turn my face into Adam’s bed sheets, memorizing the way the material feels against my fingertips, the smell of smoked almonds engrained into the pillow, the sound the fabric makes when static pops through my shirt.

  I’ve sat on this bed a million times. Talked about my mom, my grades, and just everything. I keep things in, but when I was here, I would let them fall out to the person I trust.

  And in two weeks, I’ll have to find a new place to let go of my fears.

  A squeak jolts me up, and I watch as Adam adjusts his desk chair before sliding it to the edge of the bed. I lie on my tummy, and he taps my knuckles with his own. His fingers slip between mine, causing tingles to prickle through the palms of my hands. Warmth spreads from the point of contact all the way up the back of my neck, and my grip tightens.

  “Can I sketch you?” I ask him, eyeing our twined hands as he plays with the ring on my pointer.

  His lip picks up at the corner. “You’ve done that before.”

  “I need another one… or fifty.”

  He laughs and reluctantly slides from my grip for two seconds to reach to his desk. I adjust a little on the bed, and he slips a sketchbook under my nose. He taps my lips with the eraser of the pencil before tucking it between my fingers. Then he leans back, hands behind his head, one leg propped on the other—like he’s totally cool and smooth—and he leans a little too far, gets a wave of vertigo, and jolts back up. I’m laughing as the first stroke flies across the page.

  “You don’t need to pose. I know your face.”

  The room heats a few degrees as he inches closer, giving me goose bumps just by watching me draw. He pushes a loose strand of blonde hair from my face and smiles when our eyes connect for a brief second before I go back to my sketch.

  “Is this what you want to do?”

  “What do you mean?” I say, letting the pencil create the sharp line of Adam’s jaw.

  “For life, you know? Be an artist.”

  One of my shoulders lift. “Maybe. I haven’t thought that far ahead, I guess.” I give him a knowing look. “I don’t like to think about things that scare me.”

  “Your future scares you.”

  “Not knowing what’s in my future… or not in my future… scares me.”

  My pencil lines turn wobbly, so I pull my hand back and shake it out.

  His hand catches mine. “I’m pretty sure drawing is in your future… among other things.”

  My stomach jumps. His thumb runs over my forearm. Pings and pops gather near my heart, and I hope he means him. I hope he means we can survive what we’ve been avoiding talking about. But here on his bed, I feel like I can talk about it with him. That I can tell him I don’t care how far away he is, he is it for me.

  “Eight hundred and fourteen miles,” he says. “That’s how far it is from your room to my dorm.”

  “Google?” I ask.

  He sucks in a deep breath, fixes his glasses, and drops his eyes to the skin-to-skin contact we have. “Four point five months. That’s how long it takes for a long distance relationship to break down. Statistically speaking.”

  My brows pull in. This is the part where he says stats aren’t everything. That he knows better than that. But he rubs my hands between his and says absolutely nothing.

  “I bet the length of high school relationships is even lower,” I joke, but he doesn’t crack even a hint of a smile.

  “That’s October, Brea. Four and half months away. You’ll be just starting school again. You don’t have internet. No computer. Not even a lot of phone minutes.”

  I know. I’ve thought about all those things. Hell, I think about them constantly because I see all my friends with that stuff, and I have to do things old school. But Adam bringing up my lack of connection makes me pull from his hands, sit up on the bed, and cross my arms.

  “People did long distance before Skype and Facetime or whatever crap like that.”

  “And the stats for those relationships lasting are even lower.”

  Panic and anger in an equal mix swirl in my chest, and I swing my legs off the bed, pressing my knees against his. He needs to look at me.

  “Hey,” I say and wait till his eyes meet mine. “No matter where you are, you’ll be my best friend. That won’t ever change, and I know it. And I’m ready to add boyfriend to that list, too. I want to be with you, and I want you to want to be with me.”

  The corners of his mouth twitch. He takes a deep inhale through his nose and lets it out through his mouth. “You’ll be my best friend no matter where you are, too.”

  The tiny weight that pressed on my chest starts to flutter away with his words. “So… you feel the same way?”

  “I feel the same way about you. I love you, and I have no doubt I’ll love you for way longer than four months.”

  The weight leaves completely now, and my mouth lifts with it. “Finally.” I sigh, dropping backward on the bed. His hand runs over my leg, and he helps me back up to face him as he laughs.

  “Finally what?”

  “I told you I loved you two weeks ago, Adam. And you haven’t said the damn word back.”

  “I haven’t?” He looks genuinely clueless. “No! I told you the night you told me.”

  I shake my head. “Trust me, you didn’t. I’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for it. Way to give a girl a complex.”

  His eyebrows rise, and he gets off his chair to lean over me. “Wow, I’m sorry. I love you. And I’m so stupid. I thought it was obvious, I’d been feeling it since your birthday and thought it had come out at least once or a million times. Man, I—”

  I pinch his lips together. “Don’t ever call yourself stupid.” Then I attempt a wink, and he shakes his head with a small laugh. I let go of his lips as he takes a spot next to me on the bed.

  “I love you,” he says again, and the words won’t stop giving me goofy smiles. “And you are my best friend. But we have to think about this logically, Brea. All this will lead to is resentment. On one or both of our parts.”

  The weight is back, and it replaces my smile. “Wait… you’re saying you don’t want to?”

  He shuts his eyes, as if the expression I’m giving him is too hard to look at. “We can’t. It’ll ruin what I want to keep.”

  What he wants to keep… so not me? “What?”

  “Our friendship.”

  “Don’t you think you’re kind of destroying it right now?” I clip. The weight on my chest is now pressing into it.

  “No. I’d rather be friends than force you into a statistic.”

  “Who the hell says we’ll be a statistic?”

  “Facts, Brea. This is just how it is. I’m not going to put us in a long distance relationship when it’ll end up wrecking everything. What if I don’t want
a relationship with your voicemail or your Facebook page? What if we end up hating each other because we can never truly be there? I don’t want that. Especially with you. I can’t lose this with you.”

  His voice forces mine down my throat, and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to argue with him. Adam is always right. Always. Everything he’s helped me with has been spot on. How can I compete with that? I’m the girl who makes stupid decisions. The girl who can’t pass her classes. The girl who has a hard time talking and reaching out and never understands things unless it’s in hindsight.

  But even telling myself all that, I want to be right this time. I need him to be wrong.

  I stare at our entwined fingers, and the only word that manages to fall from my lips is, “No.”

  His knee hits the mattress. His side presses against mine. I wonder if he’s trying to torture me, because his words say one thing, yet he touches me like this.

  “I love you,” he says again. Only this time I want to smack him for it because he’s saying it like it’ll be the last time he ever says it. “That’s why we can’t.”

  “No,” I repeat like a two-year-old on a tantrum.

  He sighs, rests his forehead against my temple. His breath warms my neck. “Yes.”

  “So, what now, then?” I whisper to our hands. “I just have to pretend I don’t love you for the next two weeks till you leave? Resist kissing you? Can I even be around you or what?”

  “I’m not going to make rules.” He playfully nudges me. “Like you’d follow them anyway.”

  I’d roll my eyes if he wasn’t gutting my heart out.

  “But it’ll probably be harder when I leave if we act like a couple while I’m here…” he says, like he knows it’s logical, but he doesn’t want it to be. “Clean break and all that.”

  “We’re just friends then.” I’m still talking to our hands. “Like before.”

  “Yeah…”

  Great. Welcome to the city of sexual tension to the max with no relief. I push his hands away, but he grabs my neck instead. He cups my face, and I finally meet his eyes. I’ve been good at keeping my tears under control. Not a speck of them, but Adam hasn’t been so lucky. And it breaks me.

  He presses kisses to the apples of my cheeks then he kisses my mouth. His lips bruise my heart. They shatter my hope. Cut down my soul piece by piece, and it’s painful to kiss him, but I think it would be worse to part—to never know when I’ll feel him this close again. Or worse, if I’ll ever feel this close.

  So I keep hold of him for as long as I can, till the sun sets and he’s had to slide his glasses off to keep them from pressing a permanent mark on the bridge of his nose. My sketch is long forgotten, crunching under our legs as we twine together. And even though we kiss and hold each other all day, my lips don’t stop tingling, and my heart still doesn’t want to give up yet. Even if his already has.

  Chapter 28

  Well, I thought that’d be royally awkward. Wrong again.

  The clock ticks past the hour mark, and the final bell rings. My hands are shaking as I cap my pen and tuck my things away. Most everyone is out the door, it being the last period and all, but I hang back, watching my history teacher wipe the whiteboard clean.

  “Uh, Ms. Weber?”

  She looks over her shoulder, her blonde bun unraveling from the long day of teaching. But she gives me a warm smile. “What can I do for you, Brea?”

  I pop my gum, forgetting that it’s not allowed in the classroom, but she doesn’t say anything about it.

  “Well, I… I have to make up that last test to pass the class.”

  She nods, wiping her hands free of marker dust. “You’ll take the test on the last day of school if you choose, since finals are over.”

  “I know the drill.” Unfortunately. “I was just kind of hoping that maybe… I mean, is it possible to get a different version of the test?”

  A wave of apology crosses her face. “I can’t change the questions.”

  “I know.” I pick at the strap of my backpack. “I was thinking maybe the format of the test. Can I do a long answer one instead of multiple choice?”

  An amused flicker of a grin touches her lips as she crosses her arms and sits on the desk in front of me. “I have to say not once in my career has a student asked for a harder test.”

  I pop my gum again, nerves still running under my breath even though I’ve asked all my other teachers this question throughout the day. “I guess… I don’t know, they seem easier for me.”

  She scratches her knee with her fake red nails, bunching the fabric of her dress pants. “You’re set up for the online practice tests, right?”

  I nod.

  “Tell you what,” she says. “I’ll make a long answer practice one. See how you do, then if you decide that’s what you want on the day of the re-test, I’ll give you the test without the multiple choice. Sound doable?”

  “Doable.” I smile and stand from my desk. “Thank you.”

  “Yep. I’ll send you an email tonight when I get the practice version up.”

  I tell her thanks again, adjust my backpack, and weave through the desks to the hall. Man, I hope this works. But even just asking feels like an accomplishment.

  I get to my locker and pull all my big books out. Geometry, History, English, and Biology. While most kids are turning in all their stuff for the end of the year, I’m carting it all home in the hopes I get a normal summer.

  “You know what color I hate?”

  Jay’s voice startles my Biology book right to the floor. He grins and crouches to pick it up.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I say, looking over my shoulder to make sure he’s talking to me.

  “Orange.” He hands me my book. “See most people say their favorite color, but that doesn’t really tell you much. But the color that they hate… I mean, that gives some insight.”

  He straightens up, leaning against the side of the locker. The smile on his face is friendly. So I wipe away my confusion and play along.

  “Okay, so why do you hate orange?”

  He shrugs. “I’m not sure, really. Might have had something to do with Oompa Loompas. Those things scared the hell out of me.”

  “Short green-haired men who sang deranged songs while they carted off little children? Why in the world would you be afraid of that?”

  “Now I’m not liking green too much either.” He laughs, and we start making our way to the parking lot. “So how ‘bout you?”

  “I’ve never thought about what color I hate.”

  “Let me guess… pink?”

  “Go with the obvious choice, huh?” I nudge him with my shoulder. “I actually love the color pink.”

  “I would never have pegged you as a pink girl.”

  “I never would’ve guessed you hated orange,” I say, pointedly looking at the orange writing splashed across his graphic tee.

  “Man, we really don’t know each other. Good thing we got out when we did.”

  I put my hand to my chest with dramatic flair. “We’ve saved ourselves so much heartbreak.”

  “Yeah. The pink thing would’ve been a deal breaker.” He smiles, and it’s cute, but comfortable. It doesn’t send zaps anywhere or make me weak in the knees. Suddenly I’m smiling that this breakup seems pretty drama free so far.

  He opens the front doors for me, and we step out into the sun. “Hey, so I know when people break up they say they want to be friends and that’s total shit. But, I don’t really want it to be shit with you.”

  “Eloquently put.” I laugh and hoist my books up in my arms to keep them from tumbling across the pavement. “I’m cool with lack of shit, too.”

  “Awesome.” He pulls his phone out and taps a bunch of things. “I’m sending you details then for the party I’m having. Invite your friends if you want.”

  “Where are you sending it?”

  “Facebook.”

  “Okay, I’ll check it out later. Don’t know if I can come, though. Adam got into an ea
rly program at MIT so we might be doing something for him or with him or something.”

  Jay’s eyes lift from his phone. “Are you… well, are you doing okay with that?”

  The question pulls me back. I know I’m working on opening up, but I’m just not there yet with Jay. Don’t know if I will be anytime soon, and it’s not because he’s my ex-boyfriend. It’s because I still don’t really know him.

  “I’m surviving,” I say, then try for easing the door, but not swinging it wildly open. “He’s my best friend though. So I know it’s not going to be easy to say goodbye.”

  Jay nods, and he puts his phone in his pocket. “Well, it’s cool for him. Sucks that he’s leaving… I mean for you. Let me know if you need to hang out or whatever this summer.”

  “Sounds like a booty call,” I joke. His face turns slightly pink and he puts his hands up.

  “No, no, no. That’s not what I meant. I was just—”

  “I’m kidding,” I interrupt to save him. “And I’ll let you know on the party. But my arms are going to fall off so…” I adjust all my books, and he quickly waves bye so I can head home.

  Adam’s car is pulled to the side by the driver’s ed course. As soon as he spots me, he grabs my Geometry and History books. “What’d they say?” he asks, popping his trunk open.

  “I’ve got some long answer practice tests to do tonight.”

  “You want company?”

  “Always.”

  I slam my backpack into the trunk and plop into the Geo. My hand automatically reaches for his, but I stop mid-hand-hold and stuff it under my thigh so it behaves itself.

  Jay waves at the stoplight right outside the school lot, and I smile back while Adam does a half wave thing like he’s not sure if he should, but he’s too polite not to acknowledge it.

  “Um…” he mutters when Jay turns right and we turn left toward the library. “You guys… okay, then?”

  “I guess. He wants to be friends.”

  “Oh.”

  I stifle a giggle and kick my feet on the dash. “Like real friends, Adam. Not the benefits kind.”

  He shakes his head. “It’s not my business anyway.” And damn it, he’s right. It’s not his business because he doesn’t want it to be. But I don’t like thinking about it so I just nod and look out the window.