Chapter Eight
Jade
Lennon’s strong arms pinned me against him, but I felt free and light and super close to blissful. His lips were perfect, and I never knew my heart could burst with electric tingles that directly sparked to each one of my nerve endings.
I’d started the fake-kiss after his stalker had poured the drink on my shirt. I wanted to shut her down, and it looked like Lennon was thinking the same thing with how close his lips had come to mine. Something had stopped him, though, and I figured it was his fear of me not playing along. But I was Jade 2.0 tonight, and a kiss seemed the fastest way to end this stalker’s reign. She was likely plotting my death this very second, but he was the one taking this kiss a step further.
I’m in so much trouble.
I’d taken this chance. To be the girl so wild she’d kiss a friend just to save him. That wasn’t supposed to involve me actually enjoying the kiss. Lennon…I’d never thought of him as anything more than a friend. A rock-star player with the world on a string. But this…this was—
He nipped at my bottom lip, grounding me in the present. He soothed the playful bite with his tongue before kissing me all over again. I gasped, unable to explain to my heart that this was for show. This was a ruse I started to help him.
Stupid of me.
Brilliant of me.
The smell of leather and spice and soap filled my senses—totally erasing the strong sour scent of Lori’s drink—and the feel of his lips on mine made me forget where we were or why we’d started this in the first place. With another expert trace of his tongue over mine, I trembled in his embrace.
He leaned back enough to meet my eyes, and I wondered if he could see heat that was nowhere near fake. His dark eyes flashed with warmth and mischief and something deeper that I couldn’t read, but a slow smile spread along his lips and I couldn’t help but reciprocate it.
After a few seconds, he set me back on my feet, and I turned to grin at Lori, who stood there gaping at us like a science project gone wrong. I laughed, unable to stop the hilarity that was her disbelief. “Sorry we can’t stay longer, Lori,” I said, retaking Lennon’s hand. “We’ve got to go track down some new shirts now.”
Lennon motioned for me to lead the way. “After you, mathlete.”
“Thank you, rock star.” A warm chill raked over my skin with the new faux intimacy our normal nicknames took on, and I couldn’t stop laughing even as we made it back to the parking lot.
“That. Was. Epic.” Lennon scooped me up in a hug and spun me around in a few excited circles. “You were amazing!” He set me on my feet in front of my car. “Seriously. I thought you would’ve lost it on her over the drink thing! And I’ve been trying to make the point to her all year.” He shook his head. “I honestly think she would’ve followed me on tour this summer.”
“Don’t be so sure she still won’t,” I said, wringing out my shirt before I unlocked the car and slid inside.
“No way,” he said, shutting his door. “You saw the look on her face, right?”
“Disgust?” I turned the key in the ignition. “She couldn’t stand the idea of you with a mathlete the likes of me,” I teased.
“What? No!” He furrowed his brow at me. “Defeat. It was totally defeat.”
I snort-laughed.
“She knew she’d been beaten. She knew that I was yours.”
A flutter of wings flapped in my chest at those words, even though my heart knew they weren’t true. “Well,” I said, focusing extremely hard on navigating us onto the road. “It’s my theme of the night, right?”
“What?” he asked.
“Rescuing you.”
He smirked. “I never knew how much trouble I got myself into until you started saving me.”
“If tonight is any indication, I could make a career out of it.” But I’d totally do it for free if it meant I got to keep putting that crazy-awesome smile on Lennon’s face. That look was everything.
Whoa, when did that happen?
Probably the same time his lips made me melt.
“That’s a good idea,” he said. “And you are right. She could show up on tour. You should come along and protect me at every stop.”
I spared him a glance, the laughter in my tone dying.
Is he asking me out?
No, of course not.
He’s playing the game I started back at the impromptu undergrad party.
Right.
“As tempting as that sounds, I think pretending to be your girlfriend could be potentially dangerous. Lori seemed like she was contemplating physical retaliation.” I tried to joke, but my words were getting tangled. I glanced down at my shirt for a moment. “Beyond the death of my clothing.”
Lennon leaned his head back. “True,” he said. “Anyone who gets too close to me would wind up hurt. The life of a rock star, and all that.”
“That’s terribly cliché.”
“Ouch!”
“Well,” I said, “it is. You tell me not to group myself into the stereotypes of being a math nerd, but you’re doing the same exact thing. There are ways to be a rock star and be happy and still be you.”
“I know that,” he said. “I just haven’t figured out how to make everyone else happy.”
I spared him a glance. “That’s not your problem.”
“Isn’t it? I have to keep the band happy, the audience happy, and my parents…”
“Lennon,” I said when he didn’t continue. “Your parents support your dream. They know you’re going to be a huge success. They’re just worried about what you’ll miss while you’re doing that.” I shrugged. “Or, at least your dad does. I don’t know your mom well enough to speak for her.”
“You have this way about you,” he said, and I could practically hear the words “awkward” or “weird” coming next. “This unique ability to take something I’ve been chewing on for weeks and flipping it so that it’s smoothed out and doesn’t look nearly as messy as it did. Like it’s not an issue. It’s really…”
“Annoying?” I filled in for him.
“Incredible.”
I swallowed hard, unable to not notice how much my mouth tasted like him. The sensation curled around my insides, twisting me up with a craving for…more.
That can’t happen. This is Lennon! Different-girl-a-month Lennon.
He said that wasn’t true…
“And as for my mom,” he added, cutting off my internal debate, “the whole missing-out-on-life-experience-at-college thing is the one subject my parents actually agree on. Everything else, big fight.”
“That has to be rough,” I said. My parents rarely fought. It was always Mom and me butting heads and Dad playing referee.
“It was in the beginning.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “Not so much anymore. It just is what it is.” He sighed. “Though, to give them a tiny bit of credit, they are getting better. More civil even. If you could call barely speaking when put in the same room together civil. I’ll take that over arguing stupid, insignificant details—like my sister’s B minus on her Spanish final—any day. But it doesn’t make a difference. Some people aren’t meant to be together.”
Like us.
Even though we’d just been pretending, for those few moments when Lennon kissed me…it had felt real. More than that, it had felt right. Like if he’d ever been anything other than a player and I’d been anything other than someone who would never date a player…we could’ve been great. Brilliant, even.
But now it was way too late.
And he never picked girls like me anyway.
“Anyway,” he said. “You stoked about UCLA?”
“Totally,” I said, happy to switch gears. “Like I was telling your dad earlier, I wish school started tomorrow.”
“You so ready for more work? Class schedules and projects?”
“No,” I said. “I’m ready to get out of here.”
“What are you majoring in?”
I arched an eyebrow at him as we pulled up to a red light.
“What?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I said, shrugging. “Just usually when people ask me that, they preface it by asking which mathematics degree I’ll be studying.”
“I’m not everyone.” He smirked. “And I know there’s more to you than your ability to crunch numbers in your sleep.”
I stared at him. How could he possibly know that? Braylen didn’t even know.
“Light is green,” he said without breaking our gaze.
I jolted in my seat and hit the gas.
“You’re right,” I said after a few seconds. “Though I don’t know how you would know that. No one else does.”
“I’m an observer.”
“You mean you’ve been watching me? Like your stalker watches you?” I teased.
He cleared his throat. “No. I’m not a creeper.”
“I know, I was joking.”
“But I do know you better than you think,” he hurried on. “And if you ever need someone to talk to about it—or anything. You know I’m here.”
I furrowed my brow, the mystery in his words too much to take. I checked my mirrors to make sure there were no cars around us and pulled into the parking lot of a gas station up on our right.
“You have a hankering for a Slurpee?” he asked, his smile all tease.
I threw the car into park and turned to face him. “Reach under your seat. Past your laptop.”
Something bright flashed behind his eyes as he lowered his hand. “I’m not like, going to lose my hand, am I? I do very important things with this hand.” He waggled his eyebrows, and the memory of how good his hands felt holding me against him made my entire body flush. “You know,” he continued. “Like play guitar.”
I chuckled, but the laughter died instantly when he sat back up with my sketchbook in his hand. A grin stretched across his face as he smoothed his fingers over the cover before flipping it open.
I waited for shock or disbelief or hell, even embarrassing laughter, but the only thing that crossed his features was wonder.
“Why do you look like you’ve seen this before?” I asked, my heart in my throat. I’d never shown anyone my sketchbook on purpose—my mom found it accidentally, but other than that no one else had ever peeked inside. The fact that I was willing to show him…I didn’t even want to puzzle out what that meant.
He tapped his finger on the fourth page, hitting a tattoo on one of my main characters. The same one I had sworn I’d seen on his own notebook back at his house.
“This is my favorite.” He smiled. “I had no idea you were writing a graphic novel, though.”
I gaped at him. “Come clean.”
He flashed me an apologetic look. “I may have seen some of your drawings before.”
“How?”
“My dad brings tests home to grade, you know?”
I buried my face in my palm. Of course he knew which test was mine—and which doodles—because my name was on it.
Idiot.
Wait, did he say his favorite?
“You like them?”
“I think they’re awesome,” he said, flipping through the pages, his dark eyes lingering on pieces that sometimes took me weeks to sketch. “You have serious talent, Jade. I can see why you’re struggling to choose a major.”
“I want to do this,” I said, and it felt so effin’ good admitting it to someone other than my mother. And the fact that it was Lennon was like an added bonus.
“Then you should.”
“It’s not that easy.” I sank against my seat.
“Sure it is,” he said, holding the book up to get a closer look at the tinkering workshop of one of my main characters.
“Not everyone has parents who support their passion,” I said. “My mom thinks I’ll be throwing my life away pursuing art. She wants me to use the logical side of my brain—the one that runs on numbers.”
He nodded. “They’re two drastically different talents,” he said and smiled at me. “Maybe that’s why you’re so unique. Not everyone is so lucky to have two things they shine so bright in. It’s not a curse. You simply have to choose the talent that makes you want to get out of bed in the morning.”
I eyed him, and he shut the book.
“Like, take me,” he said. “Practice is hard. I’ve worked my entire life to master instruments, vocal techniques, stage performance. All that is grueling. What makes me keep at it? The feeling I get on stage. The mic in my hand and the crowd at my feet. The pleasure in knowing that, for those couple of hours, I’m taking them on a journey. One they can’t find anywhere else.”
“Your choice was made for you a long time ago,” I said. “You were born a rock star.”
“So? You were born with the ability to do both—numbers and novels. Which one sets your blood on fire?”
I licked my lips, shifting in my seat under his gaze.
Right now he is the one heating my skin with every other word out of his mouth.
“If it isn’t clear, then you haven’t decided yet,” he said when I didn’t answer him.
I placed my hand on the closed sketchbook sitting on his knees. “This.”
He grinned. “I knew it.” He glanced down at the book. “You can tell. The way you draw…the scenes and the world you’ve created? It’s something.”
“You think?”
“I know.”
A thrill rushed through me, the confidence in his declaration filling my soul with hope.
“Now.” He put his hand on the door. “Since we’re here, we may as well get a drink. And see if we can score you a fresh shirt. Then we’ll get back to my party before I actually have to go on stage. Hopefully.”
“We can just go,” I said, reaching for the gearshift. “My shirt is already drying. Not a big deal. And I wanted you to see that—”
He set his hand over mine, stopping me from reversing. “And I’m wicked-honored you chose me to show it to. Thanks to your mad break-in skills, we have the flash drive,” he teased. “And my laptop. A few more minutes away won’t kill us.” He motioned toward the gas station. “Come on. I’m jonesing for a Red Bull.”
Releasing my hand, he got out of the car, and it was a few seconds before I could follow him. I didn’t know if it was him seeing my sketchbook, or the way he spoke about my drawings, or the fake kiss we’d shared back at the shop, but all at once I felt this was the best night of my life and at the same time I cursed that I’d wasted four years not seeing him as anything more than a player…a friend.
Because he was more than that. He knew me in a way no one ever had. And I didn’t know if that was just because Lennon had a knack for seeing beneath the surface with people, or if it was unique to me.
Either way, he’d managed to make me insanely happy and terrifyingly anxious at the same time. And for once, I didn’t care how scared that feeling made me, I just wanted more. Of him.