Between the Boys (The Basin Lake Series Book 1)

by Stephanie Vercier

  “We can try to get out of it I’m sure.”

  He says it without much conviction, so I’m not sure we could wiggle our way out of a lease I might have signed onto without even knowing.

  But when I imagine us parting, Evan moving into his own place and me into mine, I get a queasy feeling in my stomach. It’s only been one night under the same roof, but I start to wonder if this isn’t what I’ve wanted all along.

  “It’s okay,” I say, flustered by the confusing thoughts going through my head. “I understand why you did it, and I know you’d never do anything to purposely make me feel uncomfortable, so… let’s just try it out and see how it goes.”

  Evan tilts his head and studies me. “Really?” He’s looking at me as though he’s gotten off way too easy.

  “Really, Evan.” I find it difficult to look him directly in the eyes, afraid he might see that my feelings on our cohabitation have shifted dramatically in just the last few minutes. “I just want us to be honest with each other, okay? It’s going to make all of this harder if we aren’t.”

  “Agreed.” When I look back up at him, he’s got a big smile on his face and starts waving his hands toward himself. “Come on in for a hug.”

  I don’t stop myself from laughing. “I have more sweat on my body right now than I’ve ever had in my life.”

  “You can’t get out of this one,” he says, drawing me close to him.

  To his credit, he tries to make the hug as innocent as possible, keeping certain body parts separate and easing out of it before it could become anything else.

  “You’re such a total dork,” I say once he releases me.

  “So you’ve said. And maybe that’s why you love me, Paige Kessel.”

  Yeah, it probably is.

  While I’d showered, Evan went out and bought groceries and then made us a huge breakfast. I’d never realized he was such a good cook—it wasn’t something he’d ever mentioned, and I’d been to his house so few times in the last eight years that he didn’t have much of a chance to showcase his culinary skills.

  I thank Evan for the food, help him with the dishes, and have a slight cardiac arrest when it dawns on me that our college orientation is today.

  “It’s not for another hour,” Evan says, cool, calm and collected. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  I relax and then retreat to my room to call home. At least that’s what I tell Evan because I don’t want to see his eyes roll at the mention of Garrett’s name.

  “Hey, babe.” He answers on the first ring.

  “Hey! How are you? Are you missing me yet?” I do my best to sound as though nothing at all is amiss.

  “I’ve been missing you since I found out you were leaving,” he says.

  I’m sad all of a sudden. The last thing I’d ever want is for either of my two best friends to feel alone.

  “So, the college is gorgeous,” I say, easing back into a more positive discussion. “We’ve got an orientation to go to a little later today, and I might be getting a job at this cute little coffee shop downtown.”

  “That’s great,” he says, though I can tell things would be greater for him if we were together and ramping up for WSU. “What’s your dorm like?”

  “Oh, it’s an apartment, like a mile from campus, kind of on the outskirts.” I hope that’s all he’ll ask about it because I’m a terrible liar.

  “Does Evan live close?”

  I pause. “Yeah.”

  Very close.

  “Paige, I don’t trust him. I don’t trust him with you.”

  I close my eyes. This is the last thing I want to talk about. “He’s your best friend,” I remind him. “He wouldn’t do anything to hurt you, Garrett.”

  “I’m not so sure,” he says. “I’d just feel better if… I don’t know…”

  It’s easy enough to discern that he’s grappling with something that I don’t know, something between he and Evan that I’m afraid to ask about.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me,” I say, believing that whatever has gone wrong with Evan and Garrett’s friendship will eventually blow over. “We’re going to be so busy with school and stuff that Christmas break will get here before we know it, and then we can see each other again.”

  “That’s five months away,” he says, without even taking a moment to imagine it’s something to look forward to.

  “I know… it’s tough. Garrett, can I call you back later?” The more we talk, the more time there is for probing questions.

  “I suppose.”

  “It’s just that I need to go into town and get a few things before orientation.” I don’t want him to think I’m brushing him off for no good reason, even though I kind of am.

  “You walking?”

  “Huh?”

  “Well, you don’t have a car, so is it safe to walk into town by yourself?”

  “I’ll get Evan to drive me,” I say, even though I’d walked and run all over Basin Lake by myself.

  “He’s got a car there too?”

  “Yeah.” I don’t tell him it’s a forty-thousand-dollar BMW, but depending on Evan’s desire to showcase his new ride on Instagram or not, all of Basin Lake may know soon enough.

  “Okay, well, be safe.” It’s easy to hear the tension in his voice.

  “I love you,” I say, not wanting to end our conversation on a sour note. “And I’ll talk to you soon.”

  “Love you too,” he says and then hangs up.

  I’m left with a mix of relief and sadness at the end of our conversation, and I wonder if I’m being a bit disingenuous every time I talk to him and try to convince him that there’s nothing to worry about between Evan and I. Maybe Garrett knows, or thinks he knows, that Evan has feelings for me, but what Garrett can’t know are the feelings I have for Evan, the ones that pushed me to jump at the chance to go to college with him and the ones that will keep me in our shared living arrangement.

  After ending our talk, I change out of the T-shirt and shorts I threw on after my shower and pull out a nice pair of cotton shorts from my luggage, along with a light blue blouse with lace edges on the hem—it’s one of the few things in my suitcase that isn’t wrinkled. Then I pull the pair of heeled sandals I bought at Liza’s out. I’m immediately reminded of the afternoon I bought them and the picnic Garrett and I shared and how we were interrupted by Evan’s call. That call changed my life in more ways than one, and it’s difficult to imagine being back in Basin Lake, working at Pamela’s and going on dates with Garrett until he’d leave for football camp.

  But I’m not in Basin Lake. I’m in Well’s Creek… with Evan.

  And I like it.

  EVAN

  I’m watching a documentary on my phone when Paige joins me in the living room.

  “Anything earth shattering?” she asks, looking at my phone and smiling.

  “It’s about space.” I laugh. “Collapsing stars, supernovas and light being sucked into the middle of a black hole so that they themselves are completely invisible. And here we are, tiny little peons on a tiny little planet.”

  “It sounds daunting.” She sits on the arm of the couch.

  “Very,” I say. “But you don’t want to hear all about black holes, do you?”

  “I don’t mind,” she says. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Sure.” I stop the documentary and hope her question won’t lead into another disagreement.

  She looks sheepish before beginning. “Okay, well, it’s just that you’re such a smart guy, like really smart and inquisitive. You seek out documentaries about the universe while the rest of us go for gossip sites in our free time.”

  “Okay,” I say, feeling my face warm up.

  “So, I know you don’t brag about the fact you could rattle off interesting facts about the universe and history and math, but I’m kind of surprised you’re just going to be doing general studies instead of something more focused, like engineering or research or even medicine?”

  Now I’m burn
ing up and my face is likely beet red. I don’t want to talk about this, don’t want her to know that everything she thinks about me, at least academically, is a lie.

  “I’m not sure what I want to do,” I say, trying not to mumble. “General studies is more rounded… for now.”

  She eyes me like she’s waiting for me to say more.

  “You look nice by the way,” I say in absolutely no relation to her question.

  She smirks, nudges her chin to the side, then says, “So do you.”

  This makes me ease with relief.

  She asks me if I wouldn’t mind driving her to the store before orientation to pick up a few essentials, and I easily agree. In the car, I slide my aviator sunglasses on and catch her looking at me more than once. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say that Paige Kessel was checking me out, a thought that makes me chuckle to myself.

  Once in the store, I make fun of a male enhancement advertisement where the guy who’s trying to get laid is laughing his ass off—it just looks dumb. And Paige seems to enjoy my sense of humor about it.

  After she purchases her essentials, we are on our way to Well’s Creek College. Once we’ve checked in, we join a small group of about twenty other students to go on what they call an “intimate” orientation of the school. Both of us are already registered for our classes, and thankfully dear old Dad was able to grease whatever wheels he had to in order to get Paige squeezed into a few of the classes that were already full. After orientation, we’ll be free to poke around and find our classrooms.

  The girl who gives the orientation is named Natalie. She introduces herself as a sophomore, and she tells us she’s one of a dozen or so students who leads these smaller groups in order to get class credit for public speaking. Paige was always one of the taller girls back home, but Natalie’s got a couple inches on her. She’s tan with caramel colored hair. She’s wearing a dress and is undeniably pretty with a Southern accent that’s as authentic as they come. The thing is, even though I notice Natalie, she doesn’t hold a candle to Paige. Nobody does.

  After fifteen minutes of following her around and taking note of the historical facts she’s sharing as well as everything we apparently need to know to succeed at Well’s Creek, I become aware that Natalie’s gaze has landed on me more than anyone else in our group. Paige appears to notice this too, and I wouldn’t deny that the thought of her being jealous inspires me.

  But if that’s truly what Paige is feeling, I want her to know she’s the only girl I want looking at me. I touch the small of her back when she’s in the lead to our next stop, and I make sure to keep my eyes on hers more than Natalie’s. We share a couple of private jokes, not so different from the one at the drugstore, but this time it’s about a statue that seems particularly phallic. And then it’s about a very eager guy in the group who keeps trying to get Natalie’s attention. His interest in her is obvious.

  When our orientation finally ends, a couple of the guys I’ve been talking to in the group invite me to play some Frisbee on the quad.

  “You want to come with me, Paige?” I ask, hoping she’ll say yes.

  That’s when Natalie swoops in. “If I could just have a moment with her?” she says in her Southern drawl, touching me on the shoulder.

  I look to Paige. It’s up to her.

  “I’ll catch up with you later,” she says.

  “We’ll be right out there.” I point to the expanse of grass in the middle of the campus the guys are already headed out to. “I’ll have my phone if you need anything, okay?”

  “See you soon,” she says, seeming to want to talk to Natalie.

  So, I smile at her and take off, missing her the moment I step away.

  PAIGE

  “It’s Paige, right?” Natalie asks.

  “Yeah. Thanks for the orientation. Now I feel like I’ll actually know where I’m going.”

  “Oh, of course.” She waves her hand like it’s nothing. “It’s a good way for me to put names to all the new faces that come through here, especially those from far away places.” She pauses for a moment before saying, “Didn’t your boyfriend say you guys are all the way from Washington?”

  “Yeah, Basin Lake… it’s this tiny little town an hour west of Spokane… and, well, Evan’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Oh, he’s not?” Her eyes flicker with interest. “Are you sure he knows that?” She lets out a small laugh before I catch her straining to see Evan out on the quad. Under the hot summer sun, he’s taken his shirt off, of course.

  “I’ve known him since I was ten,” I say. “We’re just really close friends. My boyfriend is back home.” Part of me wishes I’d just told her he was my boyfriend because I’m not sure I want her getting as close to him as she obviously wants to. But that lie couldn’t last long unless Evan went along with it, and I’m thinking he’d only do that if it were real.

  “Really?” Natalie shakes her head. “And how does your boyfriend feel about you being this close to such a good looking guy?”

  I shrug. I don’t really feel like divulging my romantic life to a nice girl I barely know.

  “Well, doesn’t matter. Your boyfriend is a very lucky guy. I was going to tell you I love what you’ve got going on with your whole look. I used to try to get my hair to that perfect blonde yours is, but my dad got tired of paying the two hundred dollars it took every six weeks to keep it up.”

  Her mention of hair ingratiates me with her, even if I’m still leery of her intentions. “Well, I used to dye it like every color of the rainbow,” I say. “This blonde has only been around since halfway through junior year. Before that, it was all over the place.”

  “Oh, yeah?” She looks at me like I’ve just told her I’m secretly a prostitute. “So what’s with going natural?”

  “I got it all out of my system,” I say. And I think I have. Part of dyeing my hair brown or red or blue was always about retaining an identity to me, being that girl who had the blue streak in her hair on my first day of school in Basin Lake, and damn if I was going to let Britt Morgan or Lexi DeNero make me feel like I had to conform to their standards of beauty. But now I feel like the only person I need to conform to is myself. “But it’s not totally natural,” I add. “It’s still a shade or two lighter than that.”

  Natalie laughs. “Well, we’d all be screwed if there was a zombie apocalypse, right? I mean, if I can’t shave my legs, then it’s game over.”

  I laugh along with her, but I think she might be exaggerating how bad she’d look if she didn’t have a razor handy. “Hey, I was kind of hoping to find these last few classrooms,” I say, looking down at the class list I’d printed out before I left Basin Lake.

  “Oh sure. I can show you if you want? We could just let your friend Evan know first?”

  “Sure.” Natalie seems sincere enough, but I’m wondering if her pulling me aside is all about Evan and that I’m just going to be a conduit for her being able to get close to him.

  We hit the quad together as Evan and his new friends are tossing a couple of Frisbees between each other. Half of them have their shirts off, but none of them look as good as he does.

  “Hey, Evan,” I call out, waving at him with Natalie right next to me.

  “What’s up?” He puts his hand up toward the guys, like he’s tapping out before jogging toward me.

  “I’m just going to check out a few of the classrooms,” I say loudly enough so that he can hear me as I walk to him. I hadn’t wanted to pull him from his game.

  “You want me to come with you?” He stops in front of us, relaxed, hands on his hips.

  Natalie looks like she wants to eat him.

  “No, that’s cool,” I answer before she can say anything to the contrary.

  Natalie puts her hand out toward Evan. “I’m Natalie in case you forgot.”

  “I didn’t.” Evan shakes her hand and has a look on his face I can’t quite read.

  “Paige here tells me she left her boyfriend back home,” Natalie says once th
ey retract their hands from one another.

  “Oh, yeah?” Evan’s laugh is either a nervous one or an uncomfortable one—I’m not sure which.

  “So that makes you single, doesn’t it?” The way Natalie says it doesn’t even come out like it’s some kind of pick up line—it just sounds like she’s vaguely interested in his answer. She’s definitely had practice with guys.

  “I guess,” Evan says and then raises his eyebrows at me.

  “Anyway,” I say, “We’ll be back, but just text me if you’re not going to be here, okay?”

  “Sure thing, Paige.” Then he nods his head at Natalie. “Natalie.” He turns and jogs away, back toward his new friends as Natalie watches.

  “He’s got a great ass,” she says and winks at me.

  Quite thankfully, Natalie doesn’t say much else about Evan as she guides me to where my classes will be. She imparts information about the school and professors and which are the best and the worst, where to get the best Thai food, the best drink—without getting ID’d of course—and even the best women’s health center to go to. When we’re finished and she’s answered the few questions I’d had left over for her, she offers me her number.

  “We’re both majoring in secondary education, so we should totally study and hang out,” she says, typing her number into my phone.

  It feels like such a rouse just to get close to Evan, but I have to admit that Natalie is actually pretty nice. I’ve never had a super close female friend, unless I count Emma Chambers from my pre-Basin Lake days, but she and I sadly lost touch years ago.

  “Sounds good,” I say. “See you around.” And I hope I will.

  “That was a nice little intro to Well’s Creek,” Evan says on the drive back. He’s just as sweaty as I was after my morning run from playing Frisbee for close to an hour in the hot sun.

  “Yeah,” I say, “and that Natalie girl is pretty nice. She wants to hang out.”

  I try to gauge his reaction to her name, and when he says, “Cool,” without any added interest, I breathe a sigh of relief.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  PAIGE

  College Begins — July