Shuffle, Repeat (22 page)

I stand on the porch, frozen, as the door slams and Oliver appears, stalking toward me, winding his way through the other cars. I don't need to see his face to know he's pissed. I can tell by the way his body is moving, by the fact that he slammed the behemoth's door. Someone must have texted, or called, or posted a photo of the party online.

Oliver knows about Ainsley and Theo.

I rush to the top of the porch stairs just as Oliver storms up them. He stops when he reaches me. “Hey,” he says, but there's no true greeting in his voice. I'm a blip on the radar, a fork in the road. An obstacle to get through.

“I thought you weren't coming.” It's an attempt to stall him, an accidental echo of what Ainsley said when I arrived.

“Yeah, I thought so, too.” Oliver's whole body is vibrating, angry, tense. “But I got some information that made me think I should be social after all.”

He shoulders past me into the house and it's a full thirty seconds before the commands make their way from my brain to my feet so I can chase after him. More people have come in from the backyard, and now the living room is full and loud. Someone cranked up the music and it's finally starting to look more like a house party in a movie: dancing and drinking and groping. I don't see Oliver, but Shaun is by one of the coffee tables, bopping around with a guy from the theater department. I grab him mid-bounce. “Quick, where's Ainsley?”

Shaun shrugs. “You had her last.”

I shake him—“Oliver's here!”—and see the
Oh, shit
blossom across Shaun's face. He knows what I know: if something starts between Oliver and Theo, it's not going to end well for Oliver. Sure, he's strong and muscly, but he doesn't know how to
fight.
We all saw Itch's face after Oliver hit him and—let's be honest—there wasn't much damage done.

“They might be upstairs,” Shaun tells me. “I'll check.”

“I'll look outside. Meet me back here.” I race down the hallway, careening between pockets of acquaintances who are kissing or smoking or doing something that I think is supposed to be dancing. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately, depending on what path Oliver took), none of them are Ainsley and Theo. I round the corner into the kitchen and see that the body shot thing is still happening and that Oliver is here, waiting his turn to take one. As I arrive, Mark Silver leans over to take a shot glass out of Jeana Katz's cleavage with his teeth. He kicks it back and goes for the lime in her mouth. Major tongue action ensues, leading me to believe that we've passed the sobriety point of the evening.

I rush up to Oliver and grab him by the arm. I ask, “What are you doing?” which is the first thing that comes to my mind.

“Getting a drink.”

“Here?”

He gives me a funny look, which I actually take as a good thing, because at least it's cutting through all the anger and tension he's currently sending out. “Yeah, this is the kitchen.”

I spot a full bottle of tequila on the counter and I snag it. “Gotcha covered,” I tell him in an extra-cheery voice, holding the bottle in front of his eyes. I grab him by the wrist. “Come on, let's go.”

I tug him into the hallway and Oliver goes along with it for a dozen steps before pulling me to a stop. “Wait, what are we doing?”

“You said you wanted a drink. I am in possession of a drink. Thus, we're going to go have a drink.” I wave the tequila. “
This
drink, to be specific.”

Oliver frowns. “I told you I came here to be social.” But then he looks down at my fingers, clasped around his arm, and his expression softens. “What's going on, June? Are you okay?”

“No.” It's not entirely a lie. “Look, can we go hang out somewhere private?” My whisking Oliver away will give Shaun enough time to warn Ainsley and Theo to knock off the PDA. I don't know what I'll say to him once we're alone, but I'm sure I can come up with something about school or our playlist or anything besides “Your ex is hooking up with your besticle.”

There's a pause, during which Oliver scans my face and I suddenly realize we're standing very close together in a place of heat and humidity and hormones. What had been urgency morphs into…awareness. All I can see are Oliver's eyes and all I can hear is my heartbeat in my ears. Oliver's pupils dilate and something swells in my chest. I open my mouth to talk but words don't come out, because he's taking my hand—the one on his wrist—in his own. “June,” he says, but I'll never know what the rest of that sentence would have been, because Theo's voice drowns it out.

“Got your sloppy seconds right out in public?” And there's Theo, hulking from a door that I think leads to the basement.

“Shut up,” I tell Theo, because for God's sake, that's not even what “sloppy seconds”
means,
but then two manicured hands are sliding around his waist from behind, and Ainsley's face emerges from the darkness below. When she sees us, she gasps and jerks away from Theo, but it's too late. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what's going on. What's
been
going on.

“Oliver!” she says, coming all the way up into the hallway and closing the door behind her. “Theo and I had to get some beer from the—”

“You weren't getting beer,” says Oliver.

“Are you calling her a liar?” asks Theo.

Oliver turns to face him, and since I'm so close, I can see his jaw tightening. I grab his arm but he shakes me off. “You said it,” he informs Theo. “And by the way, what are you doing with my ex-girlfriend?”

“Same thing you're doing with
her,
I guess.” Theo makes a suggestive gesture in my direction and Oliver grabs him by the shirt and slams him into the wall. It's fast, it's violent, and it makes someone scream. A second later, I realize it was me.

In the living room, the music stops and, from the kitchen, we hear Kaylie's voice. “No fighting! No fighting in the house!”

“Stop!” No one listens to Ainsley's command.

Oliver and Theo are glaring full fury at each other, their faces an inch apart. People pour into the hallway, and since apparently everyone is drunk, no one does a damn thing to stop them, so I grab Oliver's arm while Ainsley grabs Theo's.

“Oliver, don't!” My tone is pleading. “Please stop.”

There's a beat, during which they keep staring at each other, and then Oliver's muscles relax under my fingers. He takes a step backward and slowly lowers his fist. Theo does the same.

“Thank you,” I whisper as Ainsley tugs Theo toward the kitchen. She and I make eye contact, and a flash of something—understanding, clarity, grace—goes between us, and then they're gone and I'm pulling Oliver out of the party and into the night air on the porch. “Come on.” I lead him down the steps as music blares back to life behind us.

“Where?” Oliver asks, and I don't know how to answer. I only know I need to get him away from this house, away from Theo, away from everything dangerous. It's only when we've arrived that I realize I've taken him to the behemoth. Oliver realizes it at the same time as me and digs in his heels. “I'm not leaving.”

“We don't have to leave. We'll just…be here.”

There's a long pause and then Oliver sighs. “I'm only saying yes because you're the reason I didn't hit Theo.”

“Thanks for that.” I reach for the passenger door handle, but Oliver blocks me.

“We've spent too much time inside this car already.”

“Then where?”

He places his hands on my waist and lifts me onto the hood like I weigh nothing at all. He swings up—because apparently that's the easiest thing in the world to do if you're Oliver—and looks at me. “Is that yours?”

I realize what's been in my hand the entire time: the bottle of tequila. “No,” I tell him, and he laughs.

“At least we got something out of this party.”

But he doesn't take the tequila. Instead, he clasps his hands beneath his head and leans back against the windshield, looking up at the night sky. He's as beautiful as always, because it's not like starlight makes people
less
attractive, for crying out loud. I scoot over and recline against the windshield beside him.

“I know Theo deserved it, but I'm glad you didn't punch him. It wouldn't make you feel any better about Ainsley.”

There's a rustle beside me. Oliver has propped himself up on his elbow and is facing me. “Wait, you think I wanted to hit Theo…why?”

“Because he's…whatever he is…with Ainsley?”

I think it's a
duh,
but Oliver looks bewildered. “June, what the hell.” He shakes his head. “It was because of what he did to
you.
That thing he did. The gesture.”

I stare at him, because of course that doesn't make any sense whatsoever. “Theo always does stuff like that to me.”

“I know. I've tried to get him to stop. I'm sick of it.”

“Wait.” I peel off the windshield and sit cross-legged on the hood of the behemoth. “Isn't that why you came here? Because you found out about Theo and Ainsley?”

“No.” Oliver sits up also. He faces me on the hood of his car. “I needed to get out.”

“Why?” The second it comes out of my mouth, I realize I already know the answer.

“It's been weird at my house. Like all the air has been sucked out and the three of us are rattling around in this big, empty vacuum, but I haven't known
why.
” I nod, dreading what he's going to say next. “Tonight, I found out. My dad is cheating on my mom.”

“He
is
?” Like, he's still doing it?

“Is, was, I don't know. He definitely did it—more than once—and he admits to it. I guess he and Mom are trying to work it out, but today they had a big fight. I came downstairs as he was driving away and she was pouring his most expensive bottle of scotch down the kitchen sink.”

Sounds about right.

“Then what happened?” I ask him.

“Mom told me about the cheating.” Oliver shoots me a wry look. “I think she was drinking some of the scotch before she dumped it.”

I swallow hard. “Did she say anything else?”

“Just highlights from the divorce chapter of the parent handbook. It's not my fault and everything will be okay.” He shakes his head. “Dad always seemed so in love with her. I can't believe he did it. I thought…”

His voice trails off and I finish the sentence for him. “You thought he was better than that.”

Oliver nods. Our knees are touching and I want to slide my hand over to hold his, but I don't. I can't.

I'm scared.

Oliver's gaze slides to the bottle leaning against the windshield. He picks it up and scans the label. “You stole Kaylie's tequila.”

“I don't know about
stole,
” I tell him. “Borrowed, maybe. I borrowed Kaylie's tequila.”

“There are people in there who are going to be really mad if they don't get to do their body shots,” Oliver says. “You're disappointing the masses.”

“The masses already saw me do one.” I immediately wish I hadn't said that, as something passes over his face—something I can't quite pinpoint.

“Who did you do it with?” His voice is careful, deliberately casual.

“Shaun,” I tell him, and watch his body relax.

“I didn't get a chance to do one.” The way Oliver says it makes the night air hang hot and thick and still around us. My eyes go to the tequila bottle in his hands, then back up to his face.

“Really?”

“Really.”

It's only one word, but it carries all kinds of meaning. A question. A wish. A promise. I stare at Oliver's shadowed eyes, and the smooth heat of the car beneath me increases, radiating up through my thighs and into my abdomen. Something between us has changed, become charged. He lifts the bottle and his posture shifts so his knees bump against mine. My normal reaction would be to scoot backward, to give him space, to put a barrier between us.

Instead, I lean forward just a little. My knees press into his.

Oliver smiles.

I smile back.

“We don't have a lime.” It's a last feeble effort at self-protection, at preventing what I know is about to happen. What I
want
to happen.

“Remember when we were in my basement?” Oliver asks me. “When we pretended we were in the car?”

“Yes.” It comes out in a whisper.

He cocks his head, just a little, and I realize that even though I haven't made a conscious decision to do it, I'm tilting my head in the opposite direction. I'm lining myself up for him.

“Where should I put the salt?” His gaze dances down my face, skims over my torso.

I raise my hand, because that's what I did with Shaun, but then it's moving of its own accord and my index finger is pointing to a spot on my collarbone.

“Good choice,” Oliver says, not in his usual joking manner. He slides his own finger over the place where I touched. “Lime.” He lifts the imaginary slice, lightly touching the corners of my mouth when he places it there. I part my lips to accept what doesn't exist. Then Oliver shakes his hand over that spot at the base of my neck. “Salt.”

He moves even closer and now he's looking straight into my eyes.

“Yes,” I say again, answering what he hasn't asked out loud. He dips his head. I feel the tip of his tongue touch my collarbone and trace an inch along it. Even though his mouth is warm, even though it's hot outside, I shiver.

Oliver lifts his head. “Still okay?” This time I don't have the voice to answer him, so I only nod. He tips the tequila up to his mouth, pretending to drink from the unopened bottle, then sets it back on the hood of the behemoth. He looks at my mouth. “I'm supposed to have the lime now.”

Slowly, I reach up and take the pretend lime out of my mouth and wave it at him. “It's right here.” I mime setting it back where it was.