Perfect Couple (11 page)

My natural inclination was to smooth over arguments. Kaye had scolded me about this numerous times, and I had smoothed over her scolding. My automatic reaction was hard to turn off, obviously, even when I was smoothing over my crush’s problems with his girlfriend. Stupidly I suggested, “Maybe it’s you, not what you’re saying. You make Grace nervous.”

“Why would I make her nervous?” Brody grumbled.

Say it. Say it. Say it. Tell the truth.
I felt like I was jumping off a cliff as I said it: “Because you’re so attractive. Maybe when you get as close to her as you are to me right now, she forgets what she was talking about.” It was a big, brazen mouthful, and after I’d gotten it out, I felt my cheeks turn bright red in the heat. I stared up at the vaulted ceiling as if it was very interesting.

Something touched my neck. I nearly put up a hand to brush away a bug. But the touch was Brody’s fingertips smoothing along my skin, back
and forth across my collarbone.

I hardly knew how to process that he was touching me. I spent more time listening to my brain than paying attention
to my body. I was all mind, and my body was just a vehicle to get me from home to class and back again, like my bike or Granddad’s car or the public bus. Sure, I put my look together carefully in the morning, and throughout the day I checked the neatness of my clothes and hair. Other than that, I never gave much thought to my body.

Brody reminded me that I was made of bones and skin and muscle. He was connecting my body back to my brain in a way I’d never experienced. I flattened my hand against the rough stucco wall. My palm turned sweaty. His fingertips felt so good stroking me in—let’s face it—a first-date, innocent way.

“Is everything okay, Harper? Now you seem tense again.” As Brody said this, he massaged my shoulder with a pressure so strong that it fell just short of hurting. It was intense enough, and good enough, that I wished he would do that to me everywhere.

But after a few strokes of his hand, his fingers followed the strap of my bikini, trailing fire, down to cup my breast. He wasn’t technically touching me anymore since my bathing suit top separated his skin from mine. But I could feel the pressure of his hand, and the heat of it. Never mind what I’d thought about the innocence of his touch. Electricity arced from his body to mine.

If he felt the same way I did as he slid his thumb back and forth across my breast, he didn’t let on. In the darkness of the pavilion, I couldn’t see the green of his eyes, but the shadows underneath were deep. He looked older than me, and serious.

I giggled.

“What’s so funny?” he whispered.

“Um, where do I start? Most guys, if they were touching a girl’s collarbone and noticed she was acting tense, would take their hands off her before asking after her health, rather than touching her breast.” The last word came out as a sigh. I was pretty proud that I’d produced a joke under the circumstances, but inwardly I cringed as I heard myself. I sounded like I wanted him to stop touching me. I didn’t.

Incredibly, he was unfazed. “Most guys?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “You do this enough to have a test group?”

“It’s all in the name of science,” I said faintly.

“No means no,” he said. “They lecture us about this endlessly in PE. Do you want me to stop?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither.” He moved toward me. He was about to kiss me.

The nearer he came, the more scrambled my brain got. His lips were so close to my ear that his breath feathered across my cheek.

Suddenly he’d backed away from me. No! I wanted him to kiss me. Hadn’t I made that clear?

He nodded toward the nearest arched doorway to the beach. Halfway understanding his message, I jerked my camera bag up by the strap just as Kennedy burst in.

“Harper!” Glancing from me to my camera bag and back to me, he let me hear all the accusation in his voice. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

I smiled. “Sorry. I was right here.”

His angry eyes cut to Brody. A breeze from outside caught his wet ponytail and flopped it forward over his shoulder.

Brody didn’t do much. He gave Kennedy a subtle look down and back up. I wasn’t sure, but I thought this meant,
Come at me, bro, because I can take you.

Amazingly, I might have been right. Kennedy seemed to get the same message. He didn’t engage with Brody. He turned back to me and demanded, “What are you doing?”

I held up my camera bag. “The light’s bad, but we were attempting to get our yearbook Superlatives picture out of the way.”

“Because her deadline is coming up,” Brody chimed in. He said this without a trace of sarcasm. Brody didn’t really do sarcasm. But I heard the private joke in his words: Kennedy
had been on me to meet this deadline. In a roundabout way,
he
was the one who’d convinced us to stand in a shadowy beach pavilion alone together.
So there
.

Kennedy’s burst of anger seemed to have drained away. We’d managed to talk him down, just as I had in journalism class.

Except this time, he had reason to be jealous. Brody was toying with me.

Kennedy told me quietly, “Come on back.”

“I will.”

He paused a moment more, seemingly weighing the idea of insisting that I come back with him
now
. But he didn’t press it. He walked out of the pavilion.

My feelings were a confused tangle, but Brody and I were casual acquaintances indulging a passing flirtation. I knew how this would play out. We would make a little joke about Kennedy and part ways.

“What did I tell you earlier?” Brody asked. “If you’re going to break rules, you need to make sure you can get away with it.” He stepped toward me. He glanced out the doorway as if to gauge how clearly someone standing outside could see him. Satisfied, he braced one forearm against the wall above my head, exactly how I’d seen Will standing with Tia in the hall at school on Friday. He slid my camera bag strap
off my shoulder and set the bag on the tile floor again. He leaned down.

My body knew what he was doing before my brain did. I was still puzzling through his motives. I’d felt guilty enough about flirting, and letting him touch me inappropriately. This was worse. Actually
kissing
, when I had a boyfriend and he had a girlfriend, was officially cheating. Every bit of this spun through my mind as I closed my eyes and lifted my chin. My lips met his.

His mouth was warm and soft. He kissed me gently, his lips brushing along mine, pressing. When I’d pictured making out with Brody—and I had—he’d come at me forcefully, like an athlete battling to win a game. It surprised me that this tough-guy football player could be so tender.

But admittedly, I didn’t have a lot of knowhow for a senior in high school. I’d kissed Kennedy, of course, and Noah, and Quinn when he wanted us to be seen, and a few guys before that when they’d brought me home from a date. I’d never had a long, intense session of experimenting with a boy’s mouth, though, the kind I’d seen in movies and read about in books, the kind Tia and Kaye had with their boyfriends every weekend.

Afraid I would mess it up and Brody would figure out how naive I was, I let him take the lead. The tip of his tongue
teased my lips apart. He swept inside. For long minutes he held my chin cupped in his hand and kissed me harder, deeper. I kissed him back. Finally he kissed his way across my jawline to the side of my neck. I shivered.

His thumb brushed my nipple again.

That’s when everything changed for me. A current of electricity shot from my breast straight down to my crotch and pulsed there. He’d been toying with me before. I’d teased him back. Now he knew I wanted him, and so did I. In that one slight touch, every longing rushed back to me for boys who didn’t like me as much as I liked them, every regret that other girls had boyfriends who were into them while mine weren’t. Brody supplied me with more heat through the pad of his thumb than I’d experienced in my lifetime.

I set my hands on his hips, which were hard as rocks underneath his bathing suit, and pulled him closer.

“Mm,” he said against my neck. The syllable sent tingles down my arms. He lifted his mouth. His breath felt so good in my ear that I could hardly stand it—and that was before he touched the tip of his tongue to my earlobe. I gasped.

He slid his entire hand across my bikini top to cup my breast. Then one finger slid underneath the fabric. I shuddered.

“Okay,” he said, backing up again and chuckling uncomfortably. “That’s as much as we can get away with here.”

I stood there stunned for a moment, trying to make sense of what he’d said, as if it hadn’t been in English. He was backing off because Kennedy had already checked on me. Since there was no door, we couldn’t lock Kennedy out. If he didn’t catch us, someone else would. It was a public beach. Right.

I just hadn’t thought ahead to how this tryst with Brody would end. We’d fooled around because the school had made us curious about each other. And now he would go back to Grace, and I would go back to Kennedy.

Only, I didn’t want to go back to Kennedy. I wanted to stay here with Brody. He was brilliantly lit now, the sun slanting over the planes of his athletic body. The darkness in the pavilion had lifted. Either my eyes had adjusted or the sun had sunk lower to peek directly into the windows. Or maybe my pupils were dilated, which happened to people who were sexually aroused. My knowledge of eleventh-grade anatomy had returned with a vengeance.

“Are you taking your camera back to your car?” Brody asked.

“Yes,” I said, kneeling to pick up my expensive, beloved camera that I had completely forgotten about.

“I’ll wait here a minute and walk back on the beach so as not to arouse suspicion.” He said this in imitation of a spy
movie, but he lacked Kennedy’s dry sarcasm. With Brody, I was never sure whether he was kidding.

“Okey-doke,” I said like a dork. “See you around.” Which was worse. I hurried out to the parking lot, unfolding Brody’s shades and slipping them on as I went.

“Hey,” Brody called behind me, but I’d had enough. I needed to get over my obsession with him. Spending time with him wouldn’t help. The more I knew about him, the more I realized he was
not
the guy of my dreams.

He was better.

And he wasn’t mine.

8

I CROSSED THE PARKING LOT, less steamy now that the sun had relented. As I walked, I felt strangely taller, with bigger breasts. I returned my camera to the trunk of Granddad’s car, then pulled out my second cooler full of water bottles and lugged it toward the beach.

Along the path, I stopped short and set the cooler down when I saw Will. He lay with his knees bent on a concrete bench that wasn’t long enough for him. His body was dappled in shade from the palm trees and scraggly vines that liked to grow in sand. Where the sun found a way through the foliage to him, his skin glowed with sweat. The dog lay beside him. Presumably she would have gone for help if she’d smelled death. But Will was so still.

“Are you okay?” I asked, alarmed.

He opened one eye to peer at me over his shades. “Yeah, just hot.” He eased up to sitting, his stomach muscles bunching into hard knots. Like Brody, this boy knew his way around a sit-up.

I refrained from commenting,
I’ll say
.

He asked, “Does your eye feel better?”

“I’d forgotten about my eye,” I said truthfully, “so it must be okay.” Actually, now that he mentioned it, it still stung a little when I blinked.

He asked, “How about the rest of you? Kennedy said he found you and Brody taking your Superlatives picture at the pavilion.”

“Was he mad?” I asked quickly.

“He didn’t sound particularly mad,” Will said. “I just wondered, because you were gone a long time. And I know how being voted something like Perfect Couple can mess with your head.”

With a sigh, I sat down beside him and handed him a thermos of water from the cooler, my head spinning all the while about what to say. I was so confused. My lips still tingled from kissing Brody, and a fresh chill washed over me every time I thought about what had happened. Will had become good enough friends with Brody that he might be able to give me some insight—if I could phrase the question
in a way that didn’t expose me as Brody’s wannabe girlfriend.

I asked, “Did you know Brody got knocked out in football practice?” Brody had said his mom would make him quit if he got another concussion. That was the secret. The fact that he’d gotten hurt in the first place was public knowledge. But
I
hadn’t heard this until he told me, and I felt offended that the public had been keeping me in the dark.

Will was in the process of swallowing half the thermos of water in one long pull. Still drinking, he opened one eye and gave me a small nod. He wiped the wet bottle across his forehead. “Before school started, right?”

“Yes.”

“But he was okay.”

“I guess. Football players may be used to that kind of thing, but as a non–football player, I’m shocked that people get knocked out, the doctor okays them to play, and they’re back at practice the next day. Aren’t you?”

“No,” Will said, “I play hockey. So, you’re worried about Brody?”

“I’m more surprised that the class voted Brody and me Perfect Couple and then nobody thinks to tell me that my phantom boyfriend got knocked unconscious in football practice.”

Will’s brows knit behind his sunglasses. “That happened at least a week before the election.”

“Yeah.” I supposed I was just fishing for Will to confirm some connection between Brody and me that wasn’t even there. “Who did
you
vote for?”

“Nobody,” he said. “The election was the first day of school. I couldn’t remember anybody’s last name except Tia’s. And, of course, Sawyer had made an impression by then too.”

Of course. “Well, knowing us a little better now, would you put Brody and me together?”

“The way you look and act at school, no. But I’ll say this. Brody likes pretty girls. Today, you definitely fit into that category. Not that you weren’t pretty before, but now, wow. I don’t want to get in trouble with my girlfriend, but you look beautiful.”