Page 3 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

She hurried down the hall now and caught up with Kane at his locker. “Hey,” she said. “Can I talk to you?”

He glanced down at her. “Don’t you have a class to get to or something?”

“We both have a class to get to,” she said. “It’s study hall next.” The two of them had the same study hall, and she would have expected him to know that, because even though he’d skipped that period more times than he had attended it this semester, they’d shared it for the past four years.

“Right,” he said, as if he had recalled it only now that she had told him. “Well, I’m not going to that.”

“Will you please come? I need to talk to you.”

It was more direct than she usually was with him. He stared at her. “Talk to me about what?”

It would have helped immensely, she thought, if he wasn’t so good-looking. If she wasn’t so distracted by the way his hair fell into his dark eyes. “About your party,” she said.

“Are you going to tell me not to have it?”

“I can’t tell you what to do,” she said, knowing that he would respond well to that admission. “I just want to have a conversation. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Kane sighed. “Okay,” he agreed. “A conversation. And I guess I can’t persuade you to come to the shed with me instead of class?”

“The shed?”

“You’ve never been?”

She shook her head.

“Okay, you have to come to the shed at least once before you graduate,” he said. “You can skip study hall for one day, right?”

She frowned, uncertain. “I don’t know.”

“You can,” he said. “I’ve skipped a thousand times and no one has ever said anything.”

“But we do need to stay out of trouble,” she said. “If we don’t stay out of trouble, Valencia will let our schools know. I believe she’ll do that.”

“She won’t do anything because you skipped a study hall. Trust me. She wouldn’t mess up your future over that. She’s saying that stuff to try to threaten people out of serious infractions. No one expects seniors in their last few months of school to attend every single study hall. That would be crazy.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Taylor said.

“So you’ll come with me?”

“I guess I will. Promise we won’t get into any trouble?”

“If anyone catches us, I’ll say I peer pressured you into it,” Kane said. “You know they’ll believe that.”

She laughed. “You really think everyone thinks I’m that suggestible?”

“Well, aren’t you?” he teased her.

Maybe she should have been angry with him for the implication, but it did sort of feel good to be teased by Kane. It felt like he was acknowledging the relationship between the two of them. He was telling her that he knew her, even if the version of her that he was talking about now didn’t feel like who she really was. She felt comfortable with the joke he was making. It was all right.

“Okay,” she told him. “You lead the way. Let’s see this shed of yours.”

The shed, it turned out, was one Taylor had seen many times before, but she had never given it much thought. It was a sports equipment shed situated on the far side of the running track. There was a padlock on the door, but it hung open.

“This is never locked during the day,” Kane explained as he eased the door open so that she could go inside. “It’s opened early so that anyone who needs to can get their equipment out. But almost no one comes in during the day. They get their stuff for before school practices, or after school practices, and Coach Carson gets everything he needs in the morning. So it’s a good place to hide out.”

Taylor stared at him. “This is where you go when you cut class? To a musty old shed?”

He laughed. “It’s a good place to get high, or to hook up, if that’s what you’re into.” He gestured to a pile of crash mats. “Have a seat.”

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