Page 54 of Call My Bluff
“So, all of that is true?” she asked.
“Cross my heart,” he assured her.
“Wow... I have no words, just... wow.” She adjusted the thermostat and turned the radio down a little, like that would help her think. “Okay, so my dad was in the military for most of my life, and I’ve lived in six states and three foreign countries.”
He studied her, searching for signs of deceit, but saw nothing obvious. “I’m going to say... true?” he guessed.
She grinned again, and her smile felt like the sun coming out from behind the clouds. Noah did an internal double take. Since when had he started creating poetic similes for the way she looked at him? He obviously hadn’t gotten enough sleep.
“Only four states, not six,” she admitted, “so I win.”
“Now, wait a minute!” Noah protested. He twisted in his seat to see her better. “That seems like a technicality!”
“True is true, and false is false,” Olivia sang. She was far too happy about having slipped another point past him.
“Fine,” he grumbled, “but this game is rigged.”
An hour went by, then part of another, and the open fields of winter wheat gradually gave way to sprawling subdivisions, then blocks of towering apartment buildings, and then the urban sprawl of Clarksville proper. At some point in the drive, they’d transitioned from their game to simply telling stories, and Noah now knew about the time Olivia had accidentally stapled a cartoon drawing of her professor inside a research paper and the day she’d threatened Lexie’s ex-boyfriend with a baseball bat.
“Worst kiss,” she declared, deciding the next topic.
Noah groaned. “One time I got the wrong girl.”
Olivia twisted toward him while she waited for a traffic light to change. “The wrong girl? Okay, that doesn’t justhappen,”she insisted. “What’s the story there?”
Noah scrubbed his palm across his mouth. “Well, this was in high school, and I’d been out with this girl, Anna, a few times,” he explained. “On those dates, she’d neglected to mention—and I somehow hadn’t found out—that she was an identical twin.”
Olivia grimaced.
“So, one day after school, I saw her across the parking lot, and I thought, ‘you know what? You’ve had fun, she likes you, why not walk over there and go for it?’”
Olivia winced again as the light turned green, but Noah went on.
“So, in my infinite teenage wisdom, I did. I walked right up to her, pulled her in and kissed her.”
There was a heavy sort of pause, during which Olivia looked his way. “And...?” she prompted.
“And,” he said dramatically, “she punched me in the face.”
Olivia laughed out loud and made a right turn. “It was the sister, wasn’t it?”
“Itwasthe sister,” Noah confirmed. “The sister I didn’t know existed untilafterI could open my eye again and thought I was seeing double.”
“Did Anna at least know it was an accident? I mean, surely people had gotten them mixed up before,” Olivia asked.
“Oh, no, she absolutely thought I’d done it on purpose,” Noah grumbled, remembering the aftermath.
“No benefit of the doubt?”
“Nope—just threw me straight into the high school rumor mill. Before the week was out, the story had gone from a simple mix-up to a brawl with school security after I tried to force a girl into my car.”
Olivia’s expression immediately shifted from humor to disbelief. “You’rekidding!” she replied. “People really said you did that?”
Noah shrugged and looked out the passenger’s side window. This wasn’t a part of high school he revisited all that often. “Why not? I was new that year, I lived on the wrong side of town, and I was, apparently, capable of anything.” He tried to keep his voice light, but even he could hear the bitterness that lingered in it.
Another quiet moment passed, during which Olivia turned off the highway and onto a narrower road. Then she reached over and wrapped her fingers around his hand where it rested on the leg of his jeans. Noah glanced down at where her skin touched his and was surprised that his hand itself wasn’t glowing orange.
It sure felt like he was on fire.
