Page 60 of Head Over Heels

“Only if by that you mean there will be nothing left afterward to suggest anything happened.”

I have barely gotten the words out when a vast quantity of honey hair—enough to merit its own zip code—suddenly appears in my peripheral vision.

“Liv! This is the best party ever! And can I please, please, please,pleasehave the recipe for the pesto salad?”

It’s Eve. “You see?” I say to Chase. “Theylovethe salads.”

He rolls his eyes and drifts away as I start listing the ingredients in my salad to Eve.

As soon as he’s gone, she grabs my arm. “Liv! What’s going on with you two?”

“What do you mean?”

She rolls her eyes at the transparency of my evasion. “You can’t fool me.”

Eve waits patiently, until I can’t stand the silence and say, “Okay. Yes. Things have…um, happened. And it’s—” I grope for words and fail. I close my eyes, swoon-style.

She raises one perfectly curved, salon-tweezed eyebrow. “Really.”

“Yeah. But it’s just that. Friends with benefits. We talked about it. We agreed. It’s really not a big deal. Riding the coaster.”

Eve raises her eyebrows. “Mmm-hmm.”

I punch her arm. “Itis.Speaking of which,Brooks?”

She looks in his direction. He looks back, smiling, one eyebrow raised.

“I might take that for a spin later,” she says, grinning at him and then at me. “But we’re not talking about me. We’re talking about you. So, just sex and barbecues? And then you go to Denver, and that’s it?”

“We’re going camping this weekend, and then, yeah, I leave.”

“Camping?”

I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but her eyebrows creep even higher.

“Eve, quit it. It’s not like that.”

“But maybe itcouldbe,” she says quietly.

“He’s so not that guy.”

“What guy?” Eve asks. She touches my shoulder, her eyes gentle.

I shake my head.

“The kind who could tell you he wants you forever, and actually mean it?”

All I can do is nod. I’m too choked up to talk.

“Are yousure?”

Chapter 32

Chase

Late in the party, I escape to the edge of the yard and stand, nursing my beer. I’m tired of doing the polite host gig, and all the small talk, and I just want to watch for a few minutes. So I do. I watch Katie, playing some elaborate make-believe game with her friend Cho, and it already feels hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t in my life every day. I watch Brooks chat up Eve, the two of them leaning in toward each other, faces bright. I watch Rodro say something to his girlfriend that makes her blush. There’s a lot of sex in the air. You can feel the charge. Or maybe it’s just me. This week, I feel like I’m constantly on simmer.

Mostly, though, I’m watching Liv. She’s wearing a red dress covered with daisies and those yellow daisy-things with black centers and black sandals with straps that criss-and-cross her ankles and make me want to peel them away.

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