Free Crushed by Lauren Layne Page B

goddamn many.
    Chloe’s eyes flick to me briefly before they flick back to the road.
    “You really like Kristin?” she asks.
    I jerk my mind back to the present. “What?”
    “Well, the way I see it,” she says, even though I didn’t ask, “is that there’s no possible way you’re helping me lose my baby fat just because you’re a good guy. There’s got to be an ulterior motive. I figure my sister’s it.”
    She’s got that part right. I am absolutely not a good guy.
    “And I’ve seen the way you look at her. You and every other guy,” she finishes quietly.
    Despite my determination to ignore her—to keep her out of my head—I can’t help but turn and study her profile.
    It’s strange, but I’d never really given much thought to what it must be like to be the sister to someone like Kristin. I knew Chloe had a thing for Devon, obviously, but aside from that, I’d never really thought much about the two of them as sisters.
    “Does that bother you?” I ask, turning the tables on her.
    “Does what bother me?”
    “The fact that everybody’s got a boner for your sister.” I don’t bother to mince my words. Why should I? She never does.
    “It doesn’t bother me that everybody does,” she says, her voice uncharacteristically quiet. “Just that some people do.”
    “Like Devon,” I say, because this much is obvious.
    She’s silent for several moments. “Sure. Like Devon.”
    Somehow I think that’s not the whole story, but it’s an opening, so I take it.
    “Tell me about Devon.”
    She cuts me a glance. “Curious about the competition?”
    More than you can possibly imagine . “Sure.”
    Chloe lets out a dreamy little sigh. “Devon Patterson is . . . perfect.”
    I groan. “Never mind. Forget it. Invitation to share officially withdrawn.”
    “Too late!” she says in a singsong voice. “So, let me take you back to elementary school. . . .”
    My eyes glance at the speedometer before moving to the door handle. I wonder if I could jump and survive. . . .
    “So I was, like, a big nerd back then,” she says as she punches on the child-safety lock to trap me in.
    I give up on escape as I reach around to rummage through her bag of snacks. “This is all very surprising so far. . . .”
    I open a bag of chips and hold it out to her, hiding a smile at the skeptical look she gives me.
    “Go ahead,” I urge. “Vacations are cheat days.”
    Chloe digs in, popping a sour-cream-and-onion chip in her mouth with a little sigh of pleasure before continuing her story. “Okay, so back then I was even nerdier than I am now.” She glances at me. “Better?”
    I nod and help myself to a chip.
    “Okay, so I was a nerd, but a friendly one, and so was Devon.”
    I pause in my chewing. “Really?”
    “Totally. A little pudgy, bookworm, super shy . . . And that was just in grade school. By middle school, we’re talking braces, pimples—”
    “Damn,” I say, torn between sympathy for the dude and perverse pleasure that my half brother was a total dork.
    “Right?” she says. “He and I banded together out of sheer necessity, even though he was a year ahead of me. We’d have reading parties—”
    I groan. “Chloe. No.”
    “Oh, yes. Every time a new Harry Potter book came out, we’d go wait in line together—”
    “It just keeps getting better,” I mutter.
    “In costume,” she finishes.
    I choke on a chip.
    “Anyway, you get the idea,” she says, her voice a little wistful. “We were friends. Real friends, you know? He didn’t care that I was fat, and I didn’t care that he had cystic acne and sometimes got Oreos in his braces.”
    I drop the chip I was about to eat back in the bag.
    “Where was Kristin in all of this?” I ask.
    “She was pretty much a mini version of what you see now. Tiny, refined, athletic.”
    “Did Devon have a thing for her?”
    She reaches her hand into the chip bag, pulls out a too-big handful, and munches. “Not at first. But by eighth grade or so, it