Free The Lonesome Young by Lucy Connors

Victoria Whitfield wasn’t as indifferent to me as she pretended.
    “Remember outside the school office where you said we’d start over? What happened to that?” I persisted.
    “That was before you were such a jerk when you kissed me. Now keep your voice down,” she whispered.
    “I will if you promise to talk to me after class.”
    “I can’t.”
    “You can’t?”
    “I won’t.”
    “Then I won’t keep my voice down,” I said loudly.
    Mr. Gerard turned to peer at me over the top of his glasses. “Yes, Mr. Rhodale? You have something to add?”
    “No, sorry. I just get so excited about the Civil War,” I said, straight-faced.
    When he turned around, I turned in my seat and faced Victoria. “Well?”
    “Leave me alone,” she demanded. Ice cubes would have been a few degrees warmer than her voice, and something inside me snapped.
    “I don’t think so, Princess,” I drawled, being sure to put a lot of Kentucky-hills accent in there. “I need to talk to you, so I can quit wondering what in the hell I did to offend you.”
    She opened her mouth to say something, probably something really rude, and I deliberately cut her off.
    “Or are you just afraid I’ll Hulk out and beat you up?”
    Heat turned her cheeks pink again. “I’m not afraid of you.”
    “Good. After class?”
    The bell rang before she could reply, and I followed her out of the room. I was determined to figure out what was going on, and why the only girl I’d been interested in for a long time was shutting me down before I’d even had a chance to get to know her.
    Usually it took me a while longer to piss people off.
    I knew that at least a couple of the guys watching me in the hall were probably Ethan’s thugs. The last thing I needed was for him to hear that I was chasing after a Whitfield down the school hallway. I realized I was clenching my fists at the thought, and I deliberately forced my fingers to relax. I would not impress Victoria by getting into a fight with these idiots.
    As I watched Victoria disappear around the corner, though, the flash of blue skirt flaring out behind her was enough to make me realize that I didn’t give a shit about Ethan and his flunkies, anyway.
    I went after her.
    I caught up to her and grabbed her arm just before she got to her math class. She looked down at my hand and then up at me, and slowly her eyebrows rose.
    “I have to go to class,” she said.
    I glanced inside the room. “It’s a substitute. Substitutes never know anything about calculus, or so Derek tells me, so you won’t be missing anything.”
    “It doesn’t matter. I need—”
    “Please.” I couldn’t believe I’d said it, even as the word came out of my mouth. I was practically begging a girl to spend time with me. A Whitfield girl.
    Great. Now I sounded like Ethan.
    But apparently Mama hadn’t called it the magic word for nothing, because Victoria was nodding. I froze, not wanting to act too eager or do anything else that would make her quit speaking to me again.
    “Okay,” she said, biting her lip. “I agree that we should talk. Let’s go now, before the sub sees me.”
    Before she could change her mind, I grabbed her hand and practically dragged her down the hall toward the staircase that nobody was allowed to use until the cracked handrail was fixed. I had forty-eight minutes until lunch, and I intended to use them to get to know Victoria Whitfield.

CHAPTER 9
    Victoria
    I took long, slow yoga breaths as I followed Mickey down the hall, trying not to hyperventilate orstare at his wavy black hair or his muscular back and shoulders, and especially not at his butt in those well-worn jeans.
    It’s just . . . it was a really, really great butt.
    He pulled me into the stairway through the door with the ABSOLUTELY NO ENTRANCE sign posted on it, and we sat on the steps and looked at each other. Now that we were here, I was chickening out and wanted to escape back to class.
    “You wanted to talk, so talk,” I said