Page 4 of Oops, I Fell For The Town Bad Boy!

Taylor couldn’t imagine sitting down on them, knowing that this was where people came to hook up. “I’ll stand.”

“Oh, for…” He shrugged out of his jacked and handed it to her. “Here, you can sit on that.”

She nodded and spread it out, crossing her legs to sit down on top of it. It did feel a little less gross, though she was still aware, in the back of her mind, of the fact that a lot of her classmates had probably made use of this space in all kinds of ways. “If you’re going to get high, I’m going to leave,” she told him. “I don’t want to breathe all that. And I definitely don’t want to hook up.”

Immediately, she was embarrassed that she’d said it. It wasn’t like he’d asked her to hook up with him, for God’s sake — what had she been thinking by bringing it up?

Fortunately, he just laughed. “Noted,” he said. “No hookups. Got it. But you’re the one who wanted to come and talk, right? So let’s talk. What’s up?”

She played with her sleeve for a moment. “This party you’re talking about,” she said. “It would be the usual sort of thing? We go out of town onto some of the farmland out there, do a little drinking, maybe some of you guys smoke a little, all that?”

“Sure,” he said. “We’ll get a couple of kegs and a few bottles of something or other. I’ve still got my fake ID, and Bradley has one too.”

“There’s no way Bradley is going to buy,” Taylor said. “I mean, you might get him to throw in money, but he won’t be in charge of actually getting the liquor. Not anymore. He’s way past being willing to do that. And honestly, Kane, he should be. Do you know the kind of trouble the two of you could get into? It’s always been too big a risk. I’ve always thought so. That’s why I never got a fake ID, even last year when Maddie’s brother was making them for everyone who wanted one.”

“I always thought that was a little crazy of you,” Kane said. “You’d be better off having one, even if you never did decide to use it.”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Taylor said firmly. “What if I got pulled over for speeding or something and a cop saw it? It’s a crime to have a fake ID, Kane. I mean, we’ve all played it pretty fast and loose with this stuff for years. It’s felt safe to drink beer in cornfields, and there’s always been a sort of security to the idea that even if we did get caught, there were so many of us out there that nothing too horrible would happen.”

“We’ve had parties get busted before,” Kane said. “Nothing terrible has ever happened.”

“Right,” Taylor agreed. “And the thing is, we need to acknowledge the fact that part of that has been luck, Kane. We’ve been very lucky. We need to stop doing this crap, because we are all about to make it to the next part of our lives.”

“You sound exactly like Bradley.”

“No, listen to me,” she said seriously. “This isn’t about me. This isn’t about me trying to protect my future, okay? Because if it was that, all I’d have to do would be to not show up at your party. Which I don’t plan to, by the way.” Oh, but that was a hard thing to say. She wanted to go to the party. She wanted to spend time with Kane. It wouldn’t be long at all before their lives spun them in different directions, and despite her feelings for him, she knew that she didn’t mean much of anything to him. They’d probably never see each other again once she went off to college — she couldn’t count on it, anyway. Skipping one of the last big opportunities she’d ever have to spend time with him felt crazy.

Crazy, but it had to be done. Going to this party was a bad idea, and she knew it. It wasn’t as if Kane was her boyfriend. It wasn’t as if she was choosing between a future with him and her future off at college. Only one of those things was real, and she had to prioritize it.

But she didn’t want to let him destroy himself.

“I don’t think you should have a party,” she told him.

“Oh, God, not you too. Is this why you brought me out here?”

“Kane, listen, okay? The school I got into — I know everyone made a big deal because I was the first in our group to get an acceptance, and because I’ve been talking about nursing school forever. And I’m not saying it’s not a big deal for me, because it is. But it’s also… it’s a state school.”

He looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”

“I mean it’s not that difficult to get into.”

“Taylor, you know I applied to colleges and got rejected.” She was one of few who did know that, actually, because she’d seen the envelopes fall out of his locker one day and had said you didn’t get in? She had recognized what those small envelopes meant. She had never mentioned it to anyone else, of course, and as far as she knew, neither had he.

“I could help you,” she told him. “If we brought your grades up, if you wrote really good essays — and I could help you with that — and got letters of recommendation from a couple of teachers…”

He laughed wryly. “Which teachers do you think are going to recommend me for anything besides an overnight in county?”

“Kane…” How could she tell him that she knew he was better than the man he was becoming? How could she put into words that she saw so much better for him than he clearly saw for himself? “We could do this,” she said. “We could get you in. We could go to school together. It would be fun.”

The look he gave her was almost pitying. “You’d better get back to study hall,” he said. “I might want to smoke in here after all.”

It was as clear a rejection as Taylor was going to get. A part of her felt embarrassed.

But a part of her knew that Kane was the one who ought to feel bad. She had offered him a second chance… or really, more like a third or fourth chance. So many people had offered to help him so many times, and he had always pushed them away.

Taylor wanted him to be better than this. She wanted him to be the guy she had fallen for.

But if that wasn’t who he wanted to be, she supposed there wasn’t a whole lot she could do about it.

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