Page 9 of Yours and Mine (Friends with Benefits)

I felt my nose wrinkle up. Nick only shrugged, obviously confused by Daisy’s request.

“It’s time for cake, anyways,” I said. “Let’s go.” I jumped off the beam, right down onto the stage below.

“Jo, are you crazy?” Nick yelled out.

“What?”

“You could have broken a leg.”

“It’s not that high.”

“But I’d get in trouble. I don’t want your father to think that I wasn’t looking out for you.”

“He wouldn’t.”

He shook his head in disapproval, as if he were my father. Sometimes I didn’t understand boys, but other times I wanted to, a lot.

Nick’s mom was baking us special cakes, the way she did every year. We gathered our knapsacks and hurried through the woods. Miraculously, Daisy’s sprained ankle was feeling much better. I bet she didn’t want her perfect hair to get wet, and so she managed to hurry along with us.

Once we hit the road, the thunderstorm had passed to the south. The few drops that caught us were barely a teasing sprinkle, and I wished it had rained more so that I could have seen Daisy’s hairdo frizzle up. Her curls and rain didn’t exactly mesh.

On the way back home, Nick draped his arm around me. No one else, except for Daisy and Carter, seemed to notice or care, yet the gesture still made me feel very special. For the first time since we left our house, I felt like we were ourselves again, or at least I was. I just didn’t feel complete without Nick. He was my best friend and my partner in crime. We stayed a few good feet behind the group, and I knew that they were out of earshot.

“So, how does it feel to be thirteen?”

“The same way as it felt to be twelve.” I shrugged his arm off my shoulder.

“You’re upset.”

“Am not.”

“Why are you upset?”

“I always thought that having our birthdays together was special. This was supposed to be our day, and Daisy ruined it. But you know what the worst part is? That you didn’t do anything to stop it.”

“Jo, I have no clue what you’re talking about.”

“At the movies. Why didn’t you ask her to move? She clearly wanted to separate us.”

“Because it would have been rude?”

“So it was better to be rude to me?”

“How was I rude to you?”

“You didn’t sit beside me.”

I wasn’t sure why that made me so angry today. We often went out with our friends, and I never cared who Nick talked to or sat beside at the movies. But today was different, and I was pretty sure that I would have preferred to have gone to the movies just with him.

“Jo, it wasn’t my fault. And I thought you were rude too, but I didn’t want to ruin your birthday by mentioning it.”

“What did I do?”

“You couldn’t stop talking to Carter about the movie.”

“So?”

“So, we always talk about it together, on the rooftop.”

---