Rules and Roses: Untouchable Book One

by Long, Heather

  I worked, sometimes forty hours a week, and he made me tired.

  Still, I peeked to see his broad back rippling as he cut through the water. He made it look so easy—and good. Shaking my head, I sat forward, took another sip of the coke, then set it back down before pushing off and into the water. It was a lot colder against my sun-warmed skin. I blew out a breath and laughed. Bubba glanced at me from the other side of the pool and grinned. Shoving away from the side, I cut through the water, arm over arm.

  I hadn’t gone swimming once this summer. Hell, the closest I’d been to a pool had been here at Bubba’s place and then it had only been to walk outside to get away from the noise to find nearly half the guests were either making out in the water or on the loungers.

  Shoving those discomforting thoughts away—the very vivid reminders of my isolated status and those behind that isolation—I kept swimming. I couldn’t match Bubba in speed, but I didn’t try to. We swam back and forth across the pool, our laps bringing us abreast of each other in the middle only to pass each other again.

  After my tenth, I drifted back over to where I’d left my soda and leaned against the side. Bubba did another ten before he finally swam over to join me.

  “Good idea, yeah?” He wore such an open smile that it required I respond in kind.

  “Not bad,” I admitted. “Been a while since I went swimming.”

  “You’re always welcome,” he told me, laying his head against his folded arms and studying me. The sun was on his side, leaving me to squint, but I shrugged.

  “You know how it goes.”

  “I know you avoided us,” Bubba said carefully. “Avoided all of us, but you came to my birthday party, and you left before I could say thank you.”

  Blowing out a breath, I looked at the soda rather than him. He wasn’t asking me why. He wasn’t even accusing me. He just thanked me for being a friend.

  “Well, I already had your present,” I said, trying to keep it light. “It would have been a shame to waste it.”

  His only response was a soft snort. “You’re the only one who got me music.”

  I frowned.

  “You’re the only one who ever remembers I play guitar.”

  Another shrug. “You spend most of your time working out or playing football, Bubba. You don’t let other people see the instruments.”

  He had three guitars, two classics and his practice one. The classics hung on the wall in his bedroom in cases to keep them safe. The practice guitar, an acoustic, sat next to the bed on its own stand.

  “You still know how to play Godzilla?”

  I groaned. “Sorta, I think. You taught me that in sophomore year. When was the last time we…?”

  He raised his eyebrows as we locked gazes. “We can play today if you want.”

  “I thought we were here to do homework and because you wanted to talk to me away from the others.” I hadn’t missed that. He’d been careful to not include Coop in the quiet request. There’d been tons of time after school yesterday to bring up whatever else was on his mind.

  “Yeah…” he said, his smile fading. He braced his hands on the side of the pool and hoisted himself out. The water droplets glided over him as he left with a bit of a splash. Before I could follow, he stood and bent, one arm extended to me. Clasping his hand, I pushed against the side to climb up, though it proved unnecessary when he all but hauled me out of the pool one armed. When I stumbled, he steadied me, his free arm going around my waist. “I need to talk to you about the college thing that the guys want to do.”

  Removing my hand from his chest, I ignored the sudden leap my pulse. Still dripping, he motioned toward the covered table. I grabbed a chair as he patted himself down. “I’m going to get us more cokes. You hungry?”

  “I could eat, but…”

  “I’ll order a couple of pizzas. You still like pineapple only on yours, right?”

  Bracing a hand over my mouth, elbow on the table, I chuckled. “Yeah I still like pineapple only Mr. Meat Lover.”

  A flash of another smile and he said, “I’ll be right back.”

  My phone was with my backpack, but it was kind of nice to just sit in his backyard and listen to the breeze. In the distance, a dog barked. If I concentrated, I could almost hear the kids playing at the little park down the street. I’d always kind of envied Bubba for growing up in such a nice neighborhood. Mom and I lived in a decent apartment, and there’d been plenty of kids around when I was growing up—like Coop, although I think he and I were the only ones who had lived in that courtyard pretty continuously.

  Bubba returned with both of our backpacks in one hand and sodas in the other. “Pizza will be here in thirty. I told them to come to the gate.” With the steady breeze, the water, the shade and the bathing suit, I was actually comfortable, so I didn’t complain about staying outside. He opened my can for me without asking, so I drained the dregs of the first one before rising to drop it and his empty in the recycling can tucked next to the fence.

  Back at the table, he’d pulled out his calculus book and dragged his chair around so he could sit next to me. Feet braced against my chair, he pushed his notes to me, and I pulled mine out of my backpack. My phone slipped out and there were a couple of messages on the screen. None from Mom, so I just nudged it aside for now.

  We sat, quiet, for about ten minutes as we reviewed each other’s work and the practice questions.

  “Well…” Bubba said after a minute. “That’s anticlimactic.”

  A snicker escaping, I lifted my drink. “You don’t have any questions.”

  “No, it all makes sense. I can even see why you made the choices you did.” The wonder in his voice had always been a weakness of mine. Bubba never thought of himself as the smart kid. Hell, half the time, he acted like the only reason we kept him around was because he was the football player.

  Nudging his leg with my knee, I smiled. “I told you last year, you have this. Math is just numbers. Music is math. You play music beautifully, so you just have to stop thinking of math as impossible.”

  “It’s hard to not think of it that way,” he admitted. “You remember algebra freshman year.” I’d taken algebra in 8th grade, ahead of the others. “I needed you the whole year.”

  “Because it was a different way of looking at problems. You like concrete things, not abstracts—which is weird, because music is arguably an abstract.”

  “No, it’s not,” he countered. “Music is a feeling. It’s a pulse, and I can follow the notes especially if they are designed to provoke emotions. The only emotion math provokes is ugh.”

  I laughed. “Well, I think you’re fine. We get real homework on Thursday. I’m betting she gives us an ungraded pop quiz tomorrow.”

  He frowned. “Why ungraded?”

  “Cause not everyone takes the ‘do the practice questions’ assignment seriously. Easily half the class blew that off because it’s not for a grade. So tomorrow, when we get to class, she’s going to hand out a pop quiz. Panic ensues. Some people will do fine because they’re good at it, some will freak out and do badly even if they did the practice questions, and then there will be those who can’t quite grasp it or pull it off. The point won’t be whether you can do the work or not…”

  “But whether you’re giving the class attention to detail.” Yes, I had given him this same spiel before. “You know I hate tests.”

  “You panic.” Some people weren’t good test takers. Bubba definitely fell into that category. It was why he studied and wanted me to tutor him. Why we would go over material he knew inside and out over and over again. “That’s why I’m telling you. The test—it’s going to have questions just like these.”

  “You,” he said, putting his hands on the arms of my chair and leaning forward, “are the best.”

  I snorted, but I couldn’t help smiling at his enthusiasm. “So, what was the issue with schools that you wanted to talk about?”

  A knock on the gate interrupted us, and he reached past me for
his wallet. “Hold that thought.” The brush of his warm arm against mine sent tingles through me. Casual touching had always been a thing with the guys—an arm around my shoulder, legs pressed together, bumping, tickling or playing. It never meant anything, no matter how they touched me, not even if I enjoyed it more than I’d cared to admit.

  I was their study buddy. One of the guys.

  I was also apparently the object of their ‘protection.’ Shaking that off, I packed away the calculus materials, his and mine. A slip of paper fell out of his book. Amanda Winston’s name was on it along with a phone number.

  She wasn’t in our AP class, and I knew the name, sorta, but couldn’t place the face. Bubba set the pizzas on the table as I held the slip up. “Sorry, fell out of your book.”

  “Eh,” he said, crumpling it in his fist and then dropping the wadded-up ball in his backpack with his book. “She handed me that on my way from 1st to 2nd. I forgot I had it.”

  “Is she nice?”

  He gave me a blank look as he flipped open the pizza boxes and pushed the pineapple covered one toward me. We were still sitting side by side, so we had to rearrange our backpacks to give us more room. “Is who nice?”

  “The girl who gave you her number? Amanda?”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “She’s in my lit class—don’t know why I got stuck with that first period. I should have taken AP to hang with you and Coop, but I don’t read books like you, Jake, and now apparently, Coop do.”

  I rubbed his shoulder sympathetically. “You got Ms. Young though, right?”

  “Yeah, she’s funny. Which helps.” He took a big bite and chewed. It took him two full slices of pizza before he circled back to my earlier question. I ate my slice slower, even though a part of me just wanted to fall on the whole medium and eat it at speed. It was really good, but if I ate that many calories, I’d have a food baby the size of a mini Volkswagen, and I still needed to fit back in my clothes.

  “Jake and I are gonna start getting scouted. I mean Jake’s already gotten a couple of offers,” Bubba said, surprising me. Jake hadn’t mentioned those. Again, we all hadn’t really been talking, but if he’d already gotten scouted—that would have been last year, right?

  “That’s great. A full-ride football scholarship can save a lot of money.”

  “Maybe,” he admitted. “Harvard doesn’t offer athletic scholarships. They have a good financial aid department and stuff, but straight up? Harvard’s expensive, Frankie.”

  “I know. But I like Boston—okay, I like the idea of Boston. I like the idea of seasons. I like the idea of an older academic institution with a lot of history to it and maybe a little prestige. I also like their journalism department.” It was actually high on my list.

  “I get that,” he said. “And I know they’d be idiots to turn you down, but I was thinking, if football wouldn’t pay the way, then I need to concentrate on something else.”

  “Well you were going to study music at one point.” He’d confessed that way back in the summer between freshman and sophomore years when he taught me how to play Godzilla. “You wanted to master some other instruments, maybe even kick off a band.”

  His ears went red. “Mom and Dad used to pay for music lessons, but I let them lapse. Sports—they take a lot of time and… I don’t know if just liking something is enough to make it a career.”

  “Talent is one thing—which you have, don’t get me wrong—but drive is the other. You have to know that. You wouldn’t be as good as you are at football if you didn’t have it.”

  With a snort, he eyed me. “How do you know if I’m any good? You don’t even like the game.”

  “I hear things. I have ears. People talk about how good you are. They talk about how many points you scored.”

  “But it doesn’t really mean anything to you.”

  I gave a little shrug and hid behind a slice of pizza as I murmured, “It means people admire you, so you have to be doing something right.”

  “Well, I try… Anyway, here’s the thing—Harvard has a joint degree program with the New England Conservatory, which is in Boston, too. If I can get into that program—there might be some financial aid for it—and it means I could concentrate on music.” He gave me a little side-eye. “You know, music fulltime rather than playing sports for admission then studying music on the side.”

  “That’s great.” It would certain remove him from the risk of injury on the playing field. “Jake wants to study engineering.”

  “Yeah, he and Archie would be great at MIT, also in Boston,” he pointed out. “So, with Coop, even if we weren’t at the same school, we could still get a place together.” I let that slide for now. “But…to get into the program I have to get accepted at the school and submit a blind audition for a spot in the music program.”

  “Okay,” I said blowing out a breath. “Early admission deadline is November 1st. Standard admission is January 1st. We need to know the deadlines for the audition. We should probably look at auditioning at all the schools if we plan to apply at all of them.”

  Bubba’s smile grew. “Well yes, but that’s not what I actually need your help with. I mean I do, but… will you help me make the audition tape? I need to pick out a piece, practice it, and record it. It can be a duet, so you can sing on it, too, if we pick an arrangement that works well.”

  Horror crawled through me. “Sing?”

  “You have a gorgeous voice, Frankie-I-pretend-to-lip-sync-when-the-music-is-playing, but we had karaoke at Archie’s party way back when, remember?”

  Ugh. I made a face. I hated performing in front of people. I’d only gotten up there because of a dare, and after I’d actually had my very first shot of whiskey. It had gone right to my head, so I’d belted out a Pink song like I knew what I was doing.

  “If you don’t remember…” Bubba reached for his phone.

  “Don’t you dare,” I said, pointing at him. “Just—don’t.”

  They’d recorded me, the asses. The only saving grace was no one put it on YouTube, but the guys had trotted that thing out a dozen different times.

  “I won’t,” he said immediately, then leaned toward me. “But will you help me, Frankie? I can’t ask the guys. You know how they get.” I did know. “You’ve always been supportive of my music.”

  “So you have the essay covered?” I asked. My dry tone probably gave away my opinion as I tossed his audition idea around in my head.

  “Well…” He grinned. “I won’t say no to help there.”

  “I’ll help you by reading your practice essays and giving you feedback.” Then I groaned. “And yes, I’ll help you with your auditions.” His eyes lit up and then I was engulfed in a well-toned and definitely muscled hug as he all but lifted me out of the chair.

  “You really are the best,” he said, standing and spinning us around. I read his intentions a split second before he started moving.

  “Don’t you—” I didn’t get to finish as we were suddenly airborne and then splashing into the pool together.

  We came up spluttering, but instead of letting me go, his hands lingered on my sides before he swung me around in the pool.

  “Ass,” I said with a smack to his shoulder but all he did was grin.

  Why did I say yes? Even as I asked myself the question, I couldn’t look away from the pure delight and relief on his face.

  I knew why I’d said yes.

  Because I was Frankie.

  I was his bud.

  “When do you want to start?” Like I didn’t already know the answer.

  “How about tonight? We can swim, finish eating—do you have any other homework? I can help or you know, hang out then I can pull the guitar out and see what we can figure out?”

  Yep.

  I should have known.

  “Okay,” I said, turning to swim toward the side. He gave me a squeeze before finally letting me go. “I gotta let my mom know I’m going to be late.”

  “Yes!” Bubba fist pump
ed before he splashed backwards in the pool.

  Dork fit him, too.

  Big. Sweet. Adorable. Dork.

  Chapter Seven

  Permissions

  Wednesday and Thursday flew by thanks to established routines. Every morning, I drove Coop to school. I sat next to Archie in AP Government and Economics. I sat next to Bubba in AP Calculus. I spent AP French exchanging smiles with Mathieu and we shared two more conversations as he walked me halfway to AP Lit each day. Coop still sat next to me in AP Lit, but his relaxed manner seemed to be absent, much as he was himself at lunch on both Wednesday and Thursday.

  An absence that didn’t go unnoticed by the others. Archie, in particular, seemed annoyed, maybe even more than necessary. Not that they asked me, other than was he coming? In truth, I was pretty sure he was off having lunch with Laura but after Tuesday, I hadn’t seen him returning with her or her for that matter.

  No, I didn’t look. Wasn’t even tempted. Well, not really anyway.

  Study hall and my TA period gave me plenty of time to get most of my own homework done—which was good, because as I’d figured, they started laying it on thick Wednesday. Bubba scored an A on the pop quiz, even though it was ungraded. He’d also given me a thumbs up after he turned it in. We ate on campus Wednesday and off campus on Thursday, mostly because Archie had zero interest in the food and managed to intercept me before I got to the food court.

  Likely another reason he was annoyed with Coop. I got the feeling Coop was supposed to corral me for lunch and he hadn’t since Monday. Maybe I should thank him? Though I doubted his reasons were altruistic. Lunch on Thursday was oversized subs and big, fat bags of salt and vinegar chips. We took Jake’s SUV, only this time it was Archie and me in the back and I wasn’t squished in the middle. On the way back to school, Jake booted Bubba to the back and I got to ride shotgun.

  Last class of the day, AP European History, proved to be more enjoyable each day that passed. We made a habit of watching the history buff channel, focusing on European history wherever we could. I’d also started making flash cards using dates while Jake elected to make the flash cards using names. We tried to stump each other—oh, and he finished the dummies guide and we were both of the opinion that author rocked. It also gave us great context clues to use.