Free The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols Page B

had to salvage my chance with Sean. I’d never gotten as close to him as I had yesterday afternoon in the lake! So I pressed ahead.
    “You and I should pretend to hook up. That’ll show Rachel you’re not putting up with her bullshit. And it’ll show Sean I’m girlfriend material. We’ll drive them mad, I tell you, mad!” I made a joke out of it in case Adam burst into uncontrollable laughter at the idea of even pretending to hook up with me. Then I could say I’d been kidding all along. I knew Adam valued me as a friend. But I offered him a way out in case he thought I was a dog.
    He swallowed, still watching me, alarmed. “You want to hook up with me. To make Rachel jealous, so I can get her back.”
    “Right,” I said, wondering why this was so hard for him to understand. Maybe he didn’t watch as many MTV reality shows as I did.
    “You think that would work? It would make her jealous to see me with another girl?”
    “Sure.” It was looking more and more like my dog theory was correct. “Unless you think I’m the wrong girl for the job. I’m just suggesting you do this with me because I’m trying to hook Sean, too.” Did he think being with me would ruin his chances with Rachel or any other girl at our school forever, as surely as if he’d gone out with Godzilla?
    “Okay,” he said quickly.
    “Okay?” I had thought it would be harder to convince him. I’d missed something. Which, I’ll admit, was not all that unusual.
    “Okay, we’ll pretend to hook up.” He still watched me. His eyes traveled from my eyes to one of my ears, down my neck and further down to my cleavage (thank you sports bra!). He actually leaned back against the fence for better viewing of my legs beneath the micro-miniskirt. Then he met my gaze again. Like he was surveying what he had to pretend to hook up with, and it checked out, with no damage to his rep.
    I should have appreciated this. I passed inspection! But his gaze made me uncomfortable enough that the pesky tingle returned. Worse, he seemed to sense he was causing me to tingle. He made that face with his jaw dropped, trying not to smile. Then he gave up and broke into the broadest grin I’d seen on his face since—well, since yesterday afternoon, when he beat Sean at push-ups.
    A memory flashed into my mind of Adam, age eight, jumping off the roof because Sean dared him to. (Broken ankle.)
    I wondered what I’d gotten myself into.
    Suddenly very nervous, I rubbed my tingling hands together and looked toward the road. “Should we drive to the movie theater parking lot where more people will see us together? We could pretend to k—” I looked back at Adam at that moment, and something stopped me in the way he watched me.
    “Iss,” he said, nodding.
    “And they’ll tell everyone. It’ll get back to Sean and Rachel.”
    Now he was shaking his head no. “That’s not going to work. We can’t stage it so carefully. I’m an awful actor. Something tells me you’ll never win an Oscar, either.”
    “Hey—”
    “So we need to make it look natural. We need to act like we’re into each other all the time, without checking first to see if someone is watching.” His hand was trembling in mine. “Maybe this is the first time we’ve realized we’re into each other. And maybe this is our first kiss.”
    He leaned down. When his face got within a few inches of mine, I giggled. Not the fake giggle of a tomboy raised by wolves, either. A real, girly, high-pitched giggle that originated somewhere in my sinuses and made me want to slap myself. There was hope for me yet.
    “See?” he whispered against my lips. “This is what we’re trying to avoid. We need to act like we want to do this.” And he kissed me.
    There were still a few inches between our bodies. So there was no embrace. Only his lips, soft, warm, on my lips.
    Our fingers, interlaced.
    A tingle so strong, it turned into a vibration.
    A hick driving by on the road, hollering, “Get a room, Vader!