The One That I Want (13 page)

It was only when the roving spotlight caught Addison that my mood slipped. She frowned at the stage and even sat down in her seat at one point, which nobody else was doing at this show.

Then the spotlight caught Carter. The light glinted in the blond stubble on his chin and danced in his short blond hair. He really was handsome like a model. I only wished he wasn’t scowling at the stage—not as if he was bored, like Addison, but as if he
disapproved
.

“Hey,” I said to him during a rare slow number. The only way the Dolly Paranoids could perform a love song was to make it ridiculously over the top. I figured Carter didn’t recognize that it was a parody of a prom theme rock ballad, not the real thing. I touched his huge hand, looked up at him, and batted my eyelashes, like Addison. “Having fun?”

He glanced down at me with the same scowl he’d given the girls onstage. Then he squinted in the dim light. His features softened. The scowl faded, and nothing was left but a quiet, cute sixteen-year-old boy on a first date, at a concert he hadn’t picked, who never knew the right thing to say.

He bent toward me very, very slowly, so I could have turned back to the stage if I’d wanted to, but I didn’t want to. He cupped my chin in his hand, and his lips touched mine.

I wasn’t sure what to do. I had never kissed a boy before. I had seen it done in movies, though. I had even seen Addison do it.

Mostly I let him lead the way. When Carter’s tongue slipped past my lips, I had a moment of panic that I shouldn’t let a boy go that far with me. Then I realized I’d gotten that advice in sixth grade. By one week and six days shy of sixteen, an open-mouthed kiss was probably okay.

I showed him my approval by running one hand up his arm to his thick shoulder and behind his neck. I pressed his head closer to mine and stood on tiptoes to reach him. He put both hands around my waist and kissed me harder.

The band reached the climax of their ridiculous faux love song. It would have been easy to imagine that they were making fun of Carter and me. I didn’t mind. After quite a few false starts, Carter and I had finally found something we had in common.

The song ended, and the lights brightened for the next song. Carter let me go, then applauded the band for the first time all night. When the new song started, he put his heavy arm around my shoulders, and I didn’t shrug away.

I didn’t have to. Addison jerked me out from under him, calling, “Gemma, come with me to the bathroom,” as if I had a choice.

Not again. I really did have to pee this time, though, so I let her lead me as she shoved past Max, dragging me after her. I turned around to mouth
sorry
to Max because we’d bumped him, but he wasn’t watching us go. He stared up at the stage, not smiling now, with a stubborn set to his jaw that I hadn’t seen before.

Even with the restroom door closed, the music echoed, so I had to listen closely and watch Addison’s lips as she asked, “Why have you stopped talking? You have got to get Max off me!”

“What do you mean, get him off you?” I hollered back, not even caring that sophisticated college girls reapplying lipstick at the sinks were staring over at us. I thought with alarm that she was saying Max had been pawing her, but I hadn’t seen him touch her.

“He is making all these stupid jokes!” she shouted. “He never shuts up!”

“Oh no, that’s terrible,” I said, one hundred percent confident that the sarcasm would be lost on her. But making fun of her didn’t cheer me up. I felt so sad thinking that Max’s jokes were wasted on her, spilling on the floor, to be mopped up late tonight after the concert was over, like so many cups of Coke and beer. I wished there was a way I could help her out, poor thing, but I didn’t see how.

“And why are you making out with Carter in public?” she yelled. “Everybody is looking at you.”

“Well, they certainly are now!” I yelled back. The college girls closed their lipsticks and escaped the bathroom, which had suddenly become a very uncool place to hang out.

I
had
felt self-conscious about kissing Carter during the concert. So I had snuck peeks through half-closed eyelids, and I had not seen anybody paying us any attention whatsoever, except Addison, who had repeatedly looked over at us and poked Max in the side to show him. “Everybody who?” I asked.

“Just everybody!” she exclaimed, exasperated.

“You made out with Jimmy Farmingdale behind the Dairy Queen,” I reminded her. “I mean, not just kissed him, but
really
made out with him and let him go down your bra.”

“That was
last year
. God!” Now that the other girls had left, Addison stepped up to the mirror and reapplied her own lipstick. “And I can’t get Max to touch me.”

I folded my arms. “You
want
him to touch you?”

“Well, yeah! If you and Carter can do it, why can’t I?”

“I don’t know. You were just saying that you wanted me to talk to Max so you wouldn’t have to.”

“That’s talking,” she said. “That’s different. I would totally make out with him. He is
so hot
.” She pulled down on the middle of her shirt, exposing more of her cleavage.

I stared at her reflection in the mirror until she stuck out her tongue at me and banged into a stall. Was she
trying
to imitate my relationship with Carter? Did she realize kissing Carter was a lot easier for me than talking to him, and now she was throwing that back in my face?

I shook my head. Of course she wasn’t. She did not have any insight into what made me tick. That was a completely different friend. Max.

But what she’d said about talking versus kissing made me think, whether she’d meant it to or not. I wasn’t sure if I’d been wrong to kiss Carter when I didn’t really like him. I needed some guidance. When we went back into the theater, I half expected the band to be playing a song about hypocrisy. It was a song about black-eyed peas and collard greens. I listened very hard, but I could not detect any message at all. Sometimes a country speed-metal song was just a country speed-metal song.

The concert ended then. Max and Addison led the way back to the car, but he didn’t offer her a piggyback ride this time. Carter and I held hands.

Inside the car, the first thing Carter said was, “Turn the radio down, Max, would you?” I wondered whether Carter and I were going to have our own conversation. But the four of us just talked together on the way back to Carter’s truck.

I tried to enjoy the drive. All I could think about, though, was Carter’s hand on my hand. We weren’t sitting close on the wide backseat—we both wore our seat belts, which strapped us to opposite ends—but we were attached there in the middle. If he wanted to hold my hand all the way back, he probably planned to kiss me again once we got to his truck, right? I hadn’t minded before. In fact, I’d enjoyed it.

So why did I feel vaguely nauseated at the thought?

Max pulled into the shopping center parking lot and stopped the car next to Carter’s truck. It was after hours and the lot had cleared out, so there was nobody to see what Carter and I did next, except Max and Addison.

They bailed out of the car, met in front of it, and laughed about something. I could hear them through the windshield and see her fingers touch a Japanese character on his T-shirt, over his heart.

I looked at Carter. He was watching me. And he would watch me for the rest of the night if I let him, just like he could maintain stony silence for hours on end if I didn’t say something. My queasiness grew. So did my frustration.

I unfastened my seat belt, slid across the seat, and kissed him.

He made a soft noise, something between a groan and the word
no
. I paused, wondering if I’d heard wrong. I definitely didn’t want to kiss him if he didn’t want to kiss me. I must have misheard him, because he put his hands in my hair and kissed me back.

But only for a few seconds. The kiss didn’t come to a natural end. He stopped in mid-kiss like he’d suddenly remembered something. He pulled back against the door and looked me in the eye. “Same time next week?”

I had pledged at the restaurant that I would not go out with this group again. I would extricate myself from this strange, silent boy and his gorgeous friend. Addison could find her own way to convince her mother to let her out of the house. People would stop talking about me in band, and I would sink back into the hole I’d crawled out of.

As I looked into Carter’s blue eyes, I knew that was not going to happen. My heart was beating ninety to nothing. That had not happened since . . . every conversation I’d had with Max. And before that, majorette tryouts.

I was not willing to let that rush go.

“Yep,” I said. “See you next week.”

Carter should have given me one last peck on the cheek then, because he liked me and we’d bonded. But he just took off his seat belt and backed out of the car. I got out on my side to move to the front seat for the ride home.

Max and Addison still stood in front of the car.
He
gave
her
a peck on the cheek, and they laughed and parted. Max followed her over to Carter’s truck. He patted Carter on the back guy-style, then punched him on the shoulder, hard enough to hurt from the looks of it. Carter glared at him.

Max folded himself into the driver’s seat and watched as Carter’s truck sped across the empty parking spaces.

We sat there in silence for longer than was comfortable, way longer than was normal for Max. I wondered what he was thinking. He was angry with Carter for something, obviously.

Finally I broke the silence. “The band was amazing.”

He turned to me with a grin. “They were, weren’t they?”

“Thanks for planning the whole thing. I’m glad we went.”

“Me too.” He bit his lip. “Addison didn’t like them very much.”

“Carter didn’t either.” I paused. “Sometimes I feel like Carter doesn’t like
me
very much.”

I expected Max to reassure me and tell me I was wrong. Instead, he started the car. We were all the way across the parking lot and turning onto the road before he said, “That didn’t seem to matter too much to you when the two of you were going at it.”

His eyes met mine. He looked like a stranger now, much older than me, his goatee rugged.

“Going at it?” I croaked.

“You and Carter hardly ever say anything to each other. I can’t imagine how you’ve gotten close. But every time I looked over at you during the concert, or in the backseat, you were letting him put his hands all over you.”

“If it bothers you, don’t look,” I snapped. Then I processed what he’d said. “He had his hands all over me, Max? You’re exaggerating a little. We kissed at the concert, and we kissed in the car. Carter was my date. Isn’t that what we were supposed to do?”

“That’s just it. I don’t think you’re
supposed
to do any particular thing, but you seem to think so. You think girls let their dates maul them, so that’s what you do. Have you ever dated anyone before?”

I glared at him. “Why do you ask? You think bigger girls never date?”

His lips parted, and he glanced over at me before turning his head to the road again. “You’re not bigger.”

“I
was
bigger.”

He settled back in his seat then, relaxing, retreating out of the attack mode he’d been in since Carter and Addison had left the car. “I asked because you’re fifteen years old—”

“Excuse me, Mr. Sixteen, but you’re not that much older than me!”

“—and because you’re acting like you just got released from a girls-only reform school in Antarctica.”

We were on a darker winding road. I puzzled through what he’d said. He had no reason to insult me about kissing Carter unless he was jealous. If he wanted me for himself, he would not go out with Addison instead. Maybe my fantasy had come true, and he’d realized he’d asked out the wrong girl.

Testing this theory, I said, “You have the opposite problem. Addison says you hardly touch her. But that must be because you’ve dated before, and you have limitless experience. You know how this works.” My words came out more bitter than I’d intended. I hadn’t meant to attack
him
. I was fishing for information, dying to know why he hadn’t made a move on Addison, even when she was wearing that shirt.

I was disappointed when all Max said was, “Exactly.” He carefully turned the long car into my driveway.

I hadn’t noticed we were so close to home. I didn’t want to get out of the car. I wasn’t sure where this conversation was going, but I felt like we had something else to say to each other.

He must have felt that way too, because he rolled down his window to let the warm, humid night inside, and turned off the engine.

He scooted his back against the driver’s-side door, facing me. The spotlights on the corners of my house slanted weirdly across his smooth face and his goatee. “There’s a reason why you and Carter hardly spoke all night, but you were perfectly okay with sucking face with him. I have a theory.”

“Oh
no
,” I said. This was not how I’d wanted to finish our conversation. “You know how you make girls mad? You’re about to do it again. I can feel it.”

Max leaned in and looked straight into my eyes. He concentrated on me like he was trying to see into my mind.

My heart raced and my cheeks burned like we were sharing a long look for another reason. Because we were in love.

“You’ve said Addison didn’t want you to lose weight,” he said, shattering my little romantic dream. Max was deconstructing me. “Your other friends didn’t want you to lose weight either. Even your mom didn’t. That means your relationships with all of them were affected by what you looked like. If you lost weight, your relationships would change, and you knew it.”

He paused. Maybe it was just that my eyes had adjusted to the spotlight on my house shining into the car, but Max’s face seemed harsher than before, the lines more angular. This time I looked away.

“Sure enough,” he said, “you and Addison are at each other’s throats, in your own quiet way. Neither of you verbalizes it, but I can feel the tension coming off the two of you. Your friendship is hard now. Before, it might not have been good, but it was easy. All your relationships were easy. You knew your place with everybody. And that was important to you.”