Page 46 of Crazy for this Girl

I expect his lips curl into a grin that causes my heart to skip a beat. But he’s so solemn as if he’s seriously serious about my fake marriage proposal.

No.

No, he’s just…he’s just being Cal.

“This is the best gift ever,” I coerce through my lips, needing to change the subject and how his hand is now holding mine that he just placed over his beating heart. The pace is thunderous and sprinting against my palm, and…is he nervous?

“Just being the best best friend ever,” he claims. “But you’re gonna have to lie to your mom, though. You know that, right?”

“Honestly”—I give a dismissive shrug because this is going to be a once-in-a-lifetime deal—“I don’t care right now. If I don’t do this, I’ll regret it for therestof my entire existence, and that’s too heavy for me.”

“So…” He squeezes my hand tighter over his heart. “What did you say earlier about how you’d never kiss—”

“Cal!” His mother’s clipped voice bellows out behind him and startles me back into, what is, our parent-invested reality. The ruins of whatever this moment would be called shattered, when Cal rounds my body and doesn’t drop my hand.

“What?” he sighs heavily, alluding that he’s just as disappointed at the intrusion than I am.

“Come here!” I hear Cal sigh again, and he guides us back around the porch overlooking the sparkling lake. It’s only when we’re about to turn the corner that he gently drops my hand.

“What’s up, Mom?”

“You’re going to have a guest joining you this summer.” Her long manicured hands tap along the side of her house phone. “I just got off the line with her mom.”

“A what?” He leans against the wooden railing his mom is still perched on as he peers up at her.

Mrs. Harper’s ruby red lips tug into a wide smile as if she just scored a bunch of shoes at a shoe sale. “Hallie.”

I see Cal immediately tense, gripping one of the white beams while his knuckles quickly match it.

He appears like he’s about to splinter one of the wooden beams holding the porch with his fist. His green eyes bore sharp daggers at his mother for ever answering the phone or making plans that he didn’t agree to.

I’ve never seen him look like that.

Not even when I fibbed and told him I liked girl when we first met. Or the time I wore my Good Charlotte shirt around.

No, this to him, is more serious.

“Call her back and tell her no,” Cal grounds out, low and dangerously deep. “I already told Hallie that she wasn’t going to come—”

“She’s your girlfriend,” his mother sharply retorts, pinning him down with her honey brown eyes. It’s as if she adores this Hallie and doesn't ask her to iron her clothes or how to use the dishwasher. “Do you expect her to wait around all summer for you when your father drags us to this ungodly cabin every year, then takes off for a few weeks for business?”

“I don’t want her here.”

Cal’s mom flicks her focus to me, as if I’m feeding him what to say in my head. In all actuality, I’m just as shocked as he is, except I didn’t know he had a girlfriend until right now. He never mentioned it in his last few letters.

But then again, we were both so excited to see each other that our letters began overlapping each other’s.

Anger instantly filters through my thoughts, but I quickly simmer it down because Cal and I will never ever be anything but just friends—like I keep repeating in my head over and over and over again. We can’t risk it.

I can’t risk it.

If I lost him, I don’t know what I’d do. We’ve talked about living in the same state a million times, where we’d go, and where we’d travel when we were eighteen, but now that he just told me twenty minutes ago that he was going to follow through on his end, it feels different.

The cruel reality is that I can’t and won’t be able to deal with him bringing other girls around, and right now is a perfect example because I automatically hate Hallie. The other girls I’ve felt the same way about, but I’d ignore those parts in his letters. He always broke up with them, or vice versa, before the summer anyway. I never had to worry about feeling guilty for staring at him a little too long or how he’d lay his head in my lap sometimes while we listened to music.

He was all mine.

There were no barriers or having to think about someone else. It was just us. Summers up here were just ours.

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