Crash

“Go with me,” he whispered, sucking at my lower lip.

He could have been asking me for my spleen and I would have agreed just as fast. “Okay.” I nodded, sounding as shaky as I felt.

Leaning back, his face was victorious. “So that’s a yes?”

“Jude,” I said in between trying to catch my breath, “that was a hell yes.”

Brushing a quick kiss into my cheek, he headed out into the hall. “It will be one hell of a night, Luce. I’m glad I’ll get to spend it with you.”

Homecoming with Jude Ryder.

There was so much wrong with that, it had to be right.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The rest of the week went surprisingly smooth and a daily pattern emerged. I got to school, Jude was waiting for me. I walked through the metal detectors, Jude walked me to class. I tried to make elementary coursework somewhat stimulating during class, and Jude made the five minutes walking between class over stimulating. I ate lunch with Taylor and her friends after she’d showered me with a hundred and one apologies and excuses, but my attention was focused on Jude, who sometimes spoke more in his silence than through his words.

He hadn’t tried to kiss me again, but I could feel when he wanted to, and I pretty much always wanted to, but he seemed insistent about keeping some distance between us. I wasn’t sure if this was just a show for Southpointe or if he’d decided I was more friend than girlfriend material. I would take Jude whatever way I could have him, but I’d prefer the option where I could kiss him whenever I wanted to.

“Can you believe this weather?” Jude greeted me, after nudging the student next to me off the bleachers. Looking at me, his eyes amplified before he suddenly looked away.

“No,” I chattered. “Could someone please tell the weather it’s still summer?” The rain had started first, then the wind, and then the fifty degree temperatures. In this part of the country, fifty was like below zero.

The crowd roared in anger abruptly, throwing popcorn and empty drink containers at the football field. It was Southpointe’s homecoming game and to say we were losing would be an insult to losers everywhere. We weren’t even on the scoreboard yet and the opposing team’s side of the reader board read forty-two points. And it was only the beginning on the second quarter.

“This sprinkle?” Jude said, wrapping an arm around me and pulling me against him. For some reason, warmth tingled down every part of me. “This is fine weather.”

I glanced up long enough to shoot him a quick glare. “Says the man who doesn’t own a garment unless it’s gray.”

“Are you implying something, Luce?” he asked, rubbing my arm hard.

“Who me?” I fluttered my eyelashes in innocence. “But why gray? Why not black? Isn’t that more your scene—more I-could-kick-your-ass-into-next-week?”

He bit his lip, trying not to laugh most likely. “Black absorbs all color, accepts them, takes them into it and let them define it. Gray isn’t anything but itself. It absorbs nothing but itself.”

This was clearly something he’d thought about. He didn’t wear gray because it was his favorite color; he wore it for a deep seeded philosophical reason. As I’d discovered this week, Jude was every kind of mystery that appealed to a woman and every kind she could never unveil. He was every enigma to which I wanted the answer to.

Then, a gust of wind so nasty it shot needles into my cheek cut my thoughts short. I buried my head into Jude’s chest, cursing the weather under my breath.

“Didn’t you check the weather report?” Jude hollered over the wind.

I laughed. “Does it look like I did?” I was wearing cutoffs, sandals, and a shelf bra cami. A white shelf bra cami . . .

“Good thing I did,” Jude said next to me as an old blanket parachuted around me.

I sighed relief and embarrassment at the same time. I’d been so freaking cold I hadn’t had enough brain cells working to remember I was wearing white in a torrential downpour. Now all the wide grins around me of my male classmates made sense.

“Thank you,” I sighed, snuggling under his arm again as he turned me into a blanketed mummy.

“I could say the same,” he replied, giving me an ear to ear grin.

I elbowed him, weaving out of his embrace. However, the weaving didn’t work; he only held me tighter.

“I’m kidding, Luce,” he said, through his laughter. “But come on, you’re surrounded by a bunch of jerk-offs that have one thing on their minds at all times. Having an eyeful of you like that,” he said, eyeing below my neck, “is not good for our hearts or hormones.”

I don’t know if I’d ever achieved the level of red my face was at present. “And by jerk-offs, are you including or excluding yourself in that category?”

“After seeing you like that,” he said, droplets of water running down his face from his saturated beanie, “definitely including myself in the jerk-off category.”

I tried elbowing through the blanket, but he’d bound me up so tight I couldn’t move. I was powerless beside him.

“Isn’t royalty supposed to be down front?”

I scowled down to where eight guys and seven girls sat in saggy crepe paper decorated chairs, wearing crowns and holding wands or batons or something atrocious. When Taylor had come bouncing up to me after second to announce I’d been voted one of the two homecoming queens for the senior class, I wasn’t sure if shock or mortification was my first response. First, because I was all but certain Jude had threatened loss of limb to everyone who didn’t vote for me, and second, because I was anti all forms of voting the popular kids more popular. Homecoming royalty, prom king and queen, ASB, best looking, most likely to succeed . . . cue the finger in the mouth now. Those types of titles never went to anyone other than the top tier populars whose parents and grandparents and their ancestors had worn the same titles before them.