The Ex Games (18 page)

“She’s staying with my grandmother in Phoenix.” Nick sat up on his bed with a groan, looking hurt and adorable in a tight T-shirt and track pants, his hair a disaster. “What are you doing here?”

“I just happened to be in the neighborhood, walking my dog …” This was sounding lame. “… several miles from my home, in the middle of the night, in the snow. And I found myself in your backyard.”

His eyes flew wide open. “With the cats?”

“If that’s what you call them.”

“You came over because you feel guilty for yelling at me at the half-pipe.”

I did. He didn’t have to sound so smug about it, though. “I do feel sort of guilty for yelling at you at the half-pipe,” I admitted, “but—”

“But,” he broke in sarcastically.

“But,” I continued over him, “I’ve had good reason in the past to think you’d called me a name like that to your friends.”

“What’s your good reason? That I
didn’t
call you a fire-crotch last week in the lunchroom?”

He had me there, but I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. Nick was just as guilty as I
was. “You’re one to talk. You walked around mad at me for something
I
didn’t mean to do for a whole day, until I persuaded you otherwise.”

“And then
I
apologized,” he pointed out. One side of his mouth cocked up in a mischievous grin. “And then I slipped you the tongue.”

We both cracked up then, with spontaneous exclamations of “the tongue!” I was glad we’d broken the ice. At the same time, it seemed like we were laughing about a relationship we’d had long ago, rather than last night. Maybe we had nothing in common now that the bet was off.

I hoped not. To show him that a sequel to “the tongue” was not out of the question, I crossed his room, shedding layers of outerwear as I went, and sat beside him on the bed. “Seriously, I came over to make sure you’re okay. Did you go to the doctor?”

“I’m not hurt,” he said flatly.

I rolled my eyes in exasperation. “I was there this afternoon, Nick. I saw you fall. You were lying immobile in the snow.”

“Yeah. I didn’t get enough—”

“—rotation in the 540,” we said simultaneously.

We paused, watching each other. All our problems fell away. Just for a moment we were friends, fellow snowboarders, discussing a mistake we’d both made a million times. This was not my imagination. Nick felt it, too. He looked deep into my eyes. His own eyes were impossibly dark with the lights of his room reflecting as little halos.

And then he looked away, flicking his hair out of his face with his pinkie. “So anyway, after I busted ass, I’m lying there in the snow. My life flashed before my eyes.”

“Why?” I asked, horrified, scooting closer.

“Not my whole life, I guess. My personal life. I’ve been kind of down about my parents, and I was mad at you for yelling at me, and then I wondered why we’re doing this stupid comp anyway. Gavin’s been breathing down my neck about winning him Poseur tickets and putting Chloe in her place. All I ever wanted to do this winter break was have fun and board and relax.”

“Amen,” I sighed. Thank God the comp was over. “I was worried about you. I called your cell and rang the bell at the gate. You didn’t hear it?”

“It rings downstairs, and my dad …”
Nick stared into space, and his voice trailed off.

I could have finished this sentence for him.
My dad … is lying on the couch, listening to the middle-aged person’s equivalent of emo songs on his iPod, because my mother left him
. Journey, or something. Duran Duran.

Finally Nick focused on me again. His long, dark lashes blinked slowly. He looked lost. A more accurate end to his sentence:
My dad … is lost himself, and I don’t know whether my parents are coming back
.

I wanted to reach out to him then, to touch his stubbled cheek with my fingertips. We were alone in his bedroom, after all. On his bed. His mom was gone. His dad probably didn’t care what we did. Doofus stretched into a different position on Nick’s carpet, sending a wave of wet dog odor toward us only occasionally. We could have made out.

But maybe Josh actually had a point, and it wasn’t good for Nick and me to keep making out and arguing. Perhaps making out was
not
the answer to all our problems, oddly enough. And I’d come over to check on him, not to seduce him. Shaking my head to clear it, I said, “I know what will make
you feel better.”

“I’m not hurt,” he insisted.

“Obviously you are, or I wouldn’t have walked in on you doing half-assed yoga.” I stretched out on his bed and hung forward over the side, just as I’d found him. “Come on, I’ll do it with you.”

Grumbling, Nick bent over the side with me. We hung that way for about ten seconds of quiet before he said, “It’s not working.”

“That’s your problem, like I told you yesterday. You don’t hold the stretch long enough, and besides, you do it while listening to”—I felt behind me on the bed for his MP3 player and peered at the screen—“alt metal.” I tossed it across the room into a leather armchair. “Try this with me. Inhale through your nose, and let your legs melt into the bed. Exhale through your mouth, and let your body and your arms fall toward the floor.” I led him through a few more long breaths that way, until I could see from the corner of my eye that he’d relaxed, like when we’d made out last night.

I reminded myself yet again that this was not the time for making out. I was making up with Nick for exploding at him
in public about the fire-crotch comment. As he stretched with his eyes closed, he looked so young and vulnerable, so
normal
, that I ached to reach out and feel around on his back for the bruise where he’d fallen, or to change my voice from soothing to sexy. But I’d come here on a mission to make Nick feel better. And I was pretty sure making out with me was not what Nick needed right now. I took him through a whole series of easy poses, moving from the bed to the floor.

Finally we sat up. Nick slouched glassy-eyed against his leather armchair. I relaxed in the Lotus Pose, invigorated from the stretches.

“I feel better,” he said languidly.

“I’m glad.”

“No, really better,” he said like he couldn’t believe it now that he was waking up a little.

“Keep stretching every day and take it seriously, and you won’t be as likely to get hurt boarding. Now I’d better go.” I nodded at the clock on his bedside table. “I told my mom I was taking Doofus for a walk. We could have walked to Leadville by now.”

He stood up unsteadily, leaning on the
chair. “I’ll drive you home.”

I wasn’t sure this was a good idea. I had a lot of anxiety about him being polite to me. It would probably be best to give him more time to cool off after I’d yelled at him at the half-pipe.

On the other hand, I
really
did not want to walk back home through the freezing night or make Doofus do it, either. He’d been through enough. “Is your SUV parked outside, or is it in the garage?” I asked hopefully. “Doofus and I would rather not face your attack cats again.”

“There’s a cat door in the back of the house. They can come inside any time they want. Don’t worry. I’ll protect you.” He slid a machine gun from his dresser—a red-and-blue plastic water gun.

“My hero,” I breathed as he pointed his gun into the hall and looked both ways before stealthily motioning for me and Doofus to follow, like he was the star of an action-adventure flick. With me giggling at him and him shushing me as if I really were his airheaded heroine, we made it downstairs and stepped from an enormous, gleaming kitchen into a three-car garage.

His SUV, so familiar to me from seeing
it parked every day at school since he’d gotten his license last year, looked out of place in the vast space next to a Porsche. The SUV seemed so … normal. Like Nick: normal but not. He didn’t mind an Irish setter dripping melted snow on his bedroom carpet or hopping into the back of his SUV. Yet his SUV was parked in the garage of a mansion.

You know what else was perfectly normal? The missing third car. His parents had separated, just like Liz’s parents had divorced three years before. The Krieger Meats and Meat Products fortune did not solve everything. I tried not to stare back at the empty space on the other side of the Porsche as the garage door tipped out of the way and the SUV pulled into the light snow.

Snowflakes zoomed around in the headlight beams, defining them far out in front of us, almost all the way down the hill to the gate. Nick turned on the windshield wipers, but he hardly needed them. The snowflakes weren’t substantial. The breeze of the wipers shooed them away like fireflies during a Tennessee summer.

He pushed another button, and the gate majestically opened for us before we even reached it. He didn’t mean anything by
this motion, I reminded myself. He drove through the gate a few times a day. He didn’t give it a second thought. He had no idea that, to me, he seemed to be rubbing in how rich he was and how powerful his parents were. This was what had separated us in the seventh grade, when he’d half-believed Gavin that a girl wouldn’t date him without his family status behind him. This was what separated us still.

And yet, in a strange way, I’d never felt closer to him. The SUV crunched through gravel onto the main road, where it swished through slushy snow. But inside it was warm, and a rock ballad from the Poseur CD whispered about true love lost. This should have been a date. Instead of him taking me home after I came to check on him and got run inside by killer cats, he should have been taking me back to my house after we’d watched a movie together at his. He would come inside. My parents would go to bed, and Josh would take a hint and abandon video-bowling to go upstairs and read a book. (I could dream, couldn’t I?) Nick and I would be alone with the smoldering embers of a fire. And then we would—

“—get out?” he was asking me.

I blinked at him across the dark SUV. “I beg your pardon?” I hoped to God I hadn’t been discussing any of this out loud.

“Are. You. Going. To. Get. Out?” he asked more distinctly. We’d already parked in front of my house, with the SUV’s heater still bathing us in warmth against the snowy night outside. “You haven’t said a word the whole five-minute drive here. Are you sick?” He reached across the cab and put his hot hand on my forehead.

I laughed and pulled his hand down. But I didn’t let it go. I kept it there in both my hands, on my knee. And he didn’t pull it away. We watched each other for a quiet moment.

“I’m glad this happened,” he said softly.

He was so handsome in the soft and snowy moonlight. I wanted him to be talking about our relationship: He was glad we’d finally gotten together. But after everything that had passed between us this week, doubts still lurked at the back of my mind about whether he seriously liked me, or he intended to date me twice and dump me like all his other girlfriends, or the whole thing was just a joke to him. I hoped it was for real, and I didn’t want to talk about it
too much and ruin the lovely illusion that we were a couple. So I said noncommittally, “Me too.”

“Because I’ve been trying to get you back since the seventh grade.”

I must have given him a very skeptical look.

He laughed at my expression. “Yeah, I have a funny way of showing it. I know. But you’re always on my mind. You’re in the front of my mind, on the tip of my tongue. So if someone breaks a beaker in chemistry class, I raise my hand and tell Ms. Abernathy you did it. If somebody brings a copy of
Playboy
to class, I stuff it in your locker.”

“Oh!” I thought back to the January issue. “I wondered where that came from.”

“And if Everett Walsh tells the lunch table what a wicked kisser you are and how far he would have gotten with you if his mother hadn’t come in—”

I stamped my foot on the floorboard of the SUV. “That is so not true! He’d already gotten as far as he was going. He’s not
that
cute, and I had to go home and study for algebra.”

“—it drives me insane to the point that
I tell him to shut up or I’ll make him shut up right there in front of everybody. Because
I
am supposed to be your boyfriend, and
my
mother is supposed to hate you, and you’re supposed to be making out with
me
.”

Twisted as this declaration was, it was the sweetest thing a boy had ever said to me. I dwelled on the soft lips that had formed the statement, and on the meaning of his words. “Okay.” I scooted across the seat and nibbled the very edge of his superhero chin.

“Ah,” he gasped, moving both hands from the steering wheel to the seat to brace himself. “I didn’t mean
now
. I meant in general. Your dad will come out of your house and kill me.”

“He won’t,” I murmured against Nick’s neck. “He came home while I was gone and went to bed early because he’s so pooped.” I glanced at my watch to make sure. “Yeah. He teaches four Pilates classes on Thursdays.” Then, just to be mean, I did a real number on Nick’s neck, like I would want
him
to move his mouth on
my
neck. I had to be careful or I would give him a hickey. Served him right for playing hard to get.

“Damn it,” he grunted in frustration. He put his hand in my hair and pulled my head
back. Our eyes met for a second. I saw how frustrated he was, and how hot for me, and something else between his dark brows.

And then
he
kissed
me
. His mouth was on mine, covering mine and making me feel small. His tongue swept inside. He pulled my nape with his big hand to adjust me to exactly where he wanted me. The air in the SUV flashed too hot and then cold as he kissed me. His other hand slid up my thigh.

I would never have admitted this to anyone, and I would only put up with it for so long. But this was the part of a relationship with Nick I’d dreamed about and longed for: Nick in control of me.

He
murmured against
my
neck, “See? We can’t do this in an SUV on your street in the open.” His tone was triumphant, as if he’d conquered me.
Yeah!

“You win,” I sighed. Then I opened my eyes.

He gazed down at me, wearing the most beautiful smile. Nick Krieger was not putting on a brave face for the public. He was not faking. He was genuinely happy.