How to Hook a Bookworm (21 page)

Chapter 27

Why can’t I be right at least once in my life?

The sharp corner of a sign that says “You’ll love our nuts!” falls right on my forehead. “Balls!” I curse at the damn thing and swipe at my face.

Adam bends over, stifling a big grin as he picks the sign off the grass and hands it back to me. “I think you mean ‘Nuts.’”

“Haha.” I push his face back a bit with my furry hand. “Am I bleeding? Do I need stitches? I
told
you I should’ve kept the head on.”

“Stop it, you’re fine.” A light touch across my forehead sends healing butterflies to my skin and even if I was bleeding, I could swear Adam has magical powers and he sealed the wound right up. “You keep catching it on your tail. Wanna try it without the costume?”

I shake the sign at him, blinking away at the burning sun that’s also causing the sign twirling issues. Every time I look up, I’m blinded to death. “I guess. But I still think people are going to pass that corner and wonder why the super talented, sign twirling squirrel suddenly can’t even walk without falling on his face.”

“You could always twerk.” An evil smirk plants itself on his lips. “We already know you’re a pro in this costume.”

“You really want me to hurt you, huh?”

He laughs, takes a step closer, and wraps his forefinger and thumb around my forearm. “When you toss it in the air, let go when your hand gets in this position.” He rotates my wrist, back and forth, several times while my pulse beats under his fingers. “Continue the motion for two beats, keeping your eye on the sign. It’ll come back down right where you need it to.”

He drops his hand, takes a step back, and grabs one of the waters we set on his back porch.

“Fine, but if this thing hits me in the face again, we’re going inside so you can kiss it better.”

A wet choking sound spews from his mouth as he coughs up the gulp he just took. I make no effort to cover my laughter while he recovers. Ever since we kissed, and I confessed that I’m totally in love with him, I make little comments like that just to get his adorable reaction. Thing is, if I’m being honest with myself, I keep waiting for him to say he loves me back. Which is fine I guess if he doesn’t…

Actually
no
. I want him to say it. And he hasn’t. It’s driving me absolutely insane.

I shake the thoughts away and send the sign into the air. It wobbles, and the damn sun makes my depth perception go out of whack. Then the cardboard crash lands on my head.

“Nuts!” I say just for him. He growls and shakes my furry shoulders.

“You didn’t do the wrist thing!”

“Oh yeah.” I laugh. “Sorry, I forgot already.”

“Yeah right. You just wanna…” He waggles his eyebrows and makes kissy faces at me. I gasp and jump on him, nearly taking him down with my bulk.

“Are you accusing me of messing up on
purpose
?”

“I know what I saw!” he yells into the costume. Laughter shakes us both until he manages to get me to the ground. I feel like a turtle on its back.

“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.”