Page 70 of The Facade

Plus, look what being careful had gotten me earlier tonight. I’d bided my time; I’d waited for a guy I liked to notice me. I’d taken months to plan it out and not hurry and jump into something.

And it had all turned out to be a huge sham. Just a prank where my inexperience with relationships had gotten the better of me and made me look like a fool.

“How about you just let me make my own mistakes then?” I continued. “How about you let me make my own decisions when it comes to guys who may or may not be interested in me? And then if I get hurt, you can tell me ‘I told you so.’”

“Because you already know you’ll get hurt,” Nash said. “Just listen to yourself. You already know you’ll get hurt if you try something with Mack. And you still want to do this?”

I touched his arm. “I don’t need my big brothers interfering with my love life—or lack of a love life,” I said. “How am I supposed to ever have a normal high school relationship if you and Carter keep interfering every step of the way?”

“Are we stopping you from going on dates? Or having a boyfriend?”

“How is any of this not you doing exactly that?” I lifted my hands in the air.

“I’m not stopping you from going on dates.” Nash lowered his voice. “I’m just trying to stop you from getting hurt by Mack and guys with short attention spans like Mack.”

“Well, if that’s the truth, then why didn’t you stop me from getting hurt by Ben?” I asked. “Where were you then?”

“What?” His eyebrows knitted together. “What are you talking about?”

I sighed. “Ben was only pretending to like me because I was on some list he and his friends have of girls who are impossible to get close to.”

“What?” he asked again, like he didn’t understand what I was saying.

So I shrugged and said, “Ben’s friends dared him to kiss me. That’s why I ran out of the haunted house, because my lack of experience made that a huge fail.”

“You kissed Ben?” Nash asked, shock filling his eyes. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I wanted to.” I paused, realizing this probably wasn’t really helping my case any. Then I said, “Anyway, if I’m still okay after that, I think I’ll be okay if I kiss Mack one time and he decides he just wants to be friends afterwards.” I looked up at him. “That is, if he even wants to kiss me. I didn’t exactly get to find out if that’s what he was about to do tonight.”

“Oh, he wants it,” Nash said, like it was obvious.

“You think so?” I asked, my heart doing a somersault in my chest at the thought of it being true.

“Of course he does,” Nash said. “He’s a guy and you’re not exactly the ugly duckling.”

“Well then, that’s good, isn’t it?” I said. “Shouldn’t kissing happen between people who both want it?”

“Yeah, but an innocent peck is not all that Mack would want.”

“It’s a good thing that’s not all I’d want, either,” I said.

Nash stumbled backward. As if he couldn’t believe that his innocent little sister had just said she’d want the same things that a hormonal seventeen-year-old guy would want.

“But you don’t know what it’s really like, Cambrielle,” Nash said. “You’re so inexperienced. It’s different. Once you take things to a certain level, different emotions get involved and it’s harder to stop. Harder to keep the logical part of your brain functioning at full capacity.”

My brother really did think I was so naive that I didn’t know how things worked. But since he really seemed super worried that I was planning to go from zero to one hundred in a single night, I said, “I’m not planning to hook up with Mack, okay?”

“Ew. Gross.” He made a face like I’d just said the most disgusting thing in the world.

“Sorry, you’re the one making it sound like you think that’s what I’m trying to do here,” I said.

“Of course I don’t think you’re going to do that,” Nash said, still looking like he was having a hard time keeping his punch and popcorn down.

“Well, good,” I said.

Nash sighed and leaned against the stone wall behind him, seeming to realize this conversation wasn’t going to go the way he wanted. “It’s just, why does it have to be Mack? Why can’t you go after someone harmless like Harden Sykes?”

Harden Sykes being the guy in my math class who had skipped two grades and therefore still had some time before he fully hit puberty and had enough testosterone pumping through his body to make him interested in dating.

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