Free Biggest Flirts by Jennifer Echols Page B

in their huge TV and hooked up their dance-competition video game. Dorks who didn’t mind embarrassing themselves in public (including me) participated in the dance throwdown (which Chelsea won). Will and Angelica sat to one side, near a fan, close and still like a mature couple too lost in each other to have fun with anybody else—another reason never to have a boyfriend. I didn’t envy Angelica if dating Will meant acting like they were already in the nursing home.
    Yet despite everything else going on, I went over and over that scene in my mind, Will lying behind Angelica on the beach, her body folded into the sheltering curve of his body, his hand on her bare skin, and wondered what that had felt like.
    Thank God they stayed until the end of the party. I suspected he took her straight home afterward.
    Because Friday was a school day! And that was the second thing that shook me out of my comfort zone with Will. Homeroom was combined with first period, which for me was calculus, through no fault of my own. Years ago the principal and the teachers had conspired to keep me in the college-track classes no matter what I said or how little homework I turned in. At the back of the class sat Will, also not too much of a surprise now that I knew more about him. And just as on the first day of band camp, he looked completely different from the previous night. I walked through the door, headed for the desks, and actually exclaimed to the already half-full classroom, “Your eyes are blue!”
    “And your eyes are a lovely shade of shit brown,” DeMarcus told Aidan, not missing a beat in their conversation.
    “Shut up,” I told them as I passed them in the row.
    Will watched me as I approached, waiting for me to explain what was so astonishing about the color of his eyes. I’d never noticed in the five days I’d known him. His Minnesota Vikings baseball hat and aviator shades seemed like a part of him. But when I saw that devastatingly handsome guy with intense blue eyes staring back at me—that’s when I realized what I’d been missing.
    I slid into the desk behind him, then shrugged helplessly. “I’ve only seen you from a distance, or wearing your sunglasses, or in the dark.”
    “In the dark, huh?” asked Brody, across the row from me. “Yeah, that’s what I heard happened after my party.”
    “Do you mind?” I asked him.
    But when I turned back to Will, he gave me a small smile like the interruption didn’t faze him. He leaned over the desktop between us and squinted at me. I’d thought from the beginning how adorable he was when he squinted. Coupled with the blue eyes, the look made my heart flutter. He said, “Your eyes are so dark, I can’t see your pupils. Do you even have pupils?”
    “Yes, or I wouldn’t be able to see,” I said, because when I was under pressure, I was nothing but romantic. In my defense, his own comment about my invisible pupils was the kind of pickup line you’d hear at a sci-fi convention. Or possibly he wasn’t trying to sound romantic, because he had a girlfriend .
    As if sent to remind us of this fact, Chelsea walked in, calling, “Uh-uh, not during school. Break it up, you two. Keep it classy.”
    We both straightened the slightest bit—knowing she was right, but not wanting to give in to her teasing, either. And I wasn’t done with Will. “Your hair,” I said quietly, reaching out to finger the back of it, which was gone. All the bad-ass length of it had been cut short. Yet he retained that look of dangerous energy, possibly because there was no hiding his earring now. He watched me with such an intense expression that I hardly dared touch him. But of course I did, running my fingers up his shorn nape. “Oh my God, you weren’t kidding on the field,” I said. “You were hot!”
    “Let me tell you something, Tia,” he deadpanned. “I’m still hot.”
    I threw back my head and cackled at that, not really caring who heard me, because now it was close to time for