Page 6 of Choosing Her
I turned to Tino, who shrugged helplessly and said, “She answered the ad. I just assumed she wasn’t dating anyone.”
I took a deep breath and pressed my hands against my eyes, telling myself that I absolutely could not strangle my friends.It will be traced back to you. Everyone saw them come out rightbehind you. If all three of them turn up dead, it will be highly suspicious.
“I told you not to make an ad,” I said through gritted teeth.
“How else was I going to find a thousand girls for you to go on blind dates with?” Tino asked. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to find a single girl who's interested in you?”
He was just asking for me to punch him. I dropped my hands and glared at him. He just smiled back, in the same way he always did. I’d been friends with Tino for more than three years now and I’ve never seen him upset. It was like some physical impossibility.
“Tino, you know almost everybody in the whole school,” I said. He was the most social guy on the hockey team and one of the most desired, too. Though, like me, he didn’t go on many dates, because he only had eyes for one girl.
“Yeah but I can’t go up to a girl and break her heart by asking if she wants to go out with myfriend,” he said. “The ad sets up the right expectations.”
I groaned again and spun around, stomping back toward the boarding school campus. When I looked back, Mako and Tino had their arms thrown around each other's shoulders and were taking giant wide steps, looking like they were knocking into each other with every pace. Bear looked like he wanted to be literally anywhere else, which was understandable because so did I, especially once Mako and Tino started singing "Piano Man" at the top of their lungs.
I turned around again and tried to walk faster, hoping that nobody would think that I was with them. I turned off the main path and cut across the basketball court behind the dorms to get to the boys’ dorm quicker. But maybe that was a bad plan, because the lights that normally illuminated the space were off, leaving me in darkness—and if I hadn’t decided to cut throughthe dark area, then I wouldn't have run headlong into a girl doing the same.
CHAPTER 4
crossy
As a hockey player,I was used to face-planting. It was a part of the sport and something I could deal with easily. What Iwasn’tused to was a girl grabbing the front of my shirt in her fist and pulling me down with her as she fell backwards.
My shirt tore. I scraped my hands and arms on the cement. But worst of all, I landed on top of her—and I’m pretty sure I accidentally grabbed her in a way that was wildly inappropriate.
She groaned as I pushed myself off her as quickly as I could, trying not to hurt her anymore than I already had. As she sat up slowly, I held a hand out to help her up.
“Sorry,” I said. “Couldn’t see in the dark.”
Her hand had started reaching up to grab mine until she heard my voice, but then she froze, her fingers hovering just inches from mine. As I was about to ask if she was okay, she said, “Crossy?”
And I would recognize that voice anywhere.
Suddenly, I wanted to close the gap between our hands, knowing exactly what it would feel like—the sparks that would run up my arm, her skin that was always softer than anyone else’s, the way her nails would graze my skin.
But I didn't close the gap and neither did she. She let her hand drop back down to the ground and pulled herself up on her own, stepping into the moonlight and letting me see her in full.
I’d seen Rebecca Saylor in a variety of outfits. There was the mini-skirt on the night we met. The variety of bikinis across the summer. Our school uniform that she wore better than any girl here. And my all-time favorite, her horseback riding clothes that hugged her body in all the right places. But tonight was the first time I ever saw her in pajamas.
They weren’t anything crazy, just a pair of flannel pants and a tiny top, but the second my eyes landed on her outfit, I couldn’t pull them away. There was just something about Saylor that pulled me in, made me unable to think or breathe in her presence. It was exactly why I needed to move on from her—but when she stood there looking like that, it seemed impossible.
“What are you doing here?” Saylor asked flatly. That was the only way she spoke to me nowadays, like she wanted to keep some emotional distance between us. I wished I could say I didn’t understand why, but unfortunately, I understood why she needed to keep the space. She wanted to make sure I couldn’t do anything to hurt her again. If only she knew that I never meant to hurt her in the first place.
“The guys and I were just out for dinner,” I said. A piece of the truth, even if it wasn’t the full thing. But how was I supposed to tell her that I was on a date? Even though our history was long over—started and ended all within a twelve-hour period—I didn’t know if she would take it well to hear that I was going out with someone new. Not only for her own sake but for her sister’s too. Not that Naomi hadn’t moved on, but I’d always gotten the sense that girls had this established pact to hate the ex-boyfriends for moving on, no matter the situation.
I ran my eyes over her again, looking for a clue of what she was doing out here. Her long brown hair fell around her face,completely un-styled, which wasn’t her usual look, and she was wearing ratty flip-flops that showed off the purple nail polish on her toes. I grinned to myself as I wondered whether she’d picked that color in support of Hartwell during one of our recent games—not hockey, I was sure, since she hated it with a passion. She didn’t look like she was dressed to be going out anywhere, which only left the explanation that she was going from one dorm to the other. The thought of her spending time in some boy’s dorm, dressed in only her pajamas like she was, made my heart ache in a way it had no right to.I’m not supposed to care about her like that anymore.
“Nice outfit,” I said. She put her hands on her hips, drawing my attention to the small strip of skin between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her pajama pants. The skin was paler than the rest of her, like she hadn’t managed to tan it during the summer. My eyes drifted back up to the tan lines over her shoulders, remembering all those moments in the summer I’d seen her laying in the backyard in that blue bikini she seemed to love so much.
At the time, I’d told myself I wasn’t looking, but with how clearly I could see it in my mind’s eye now, I knew I had been.
“Better than yours,” Saylor said, looking pointedly at my chest. I glanced down and saw the way the black fabric had torn where she grabbed it.
“It looked better before you tried to pull it off me,” I said. “You know, if you wanted to see me shirtless, you could have just asked.”
Saylor narrowed her eyes. “No thanks. I’ve seen it before and it wasn’t all that impressive.”
I put a hand to my heart and staggered back likeI’d been stabbed. “You wound me, Rebecca.”
