His gaze slid up my body to my face. His eyes locked with mine and held me there. Would he give in to this battle of wills? Or did he figure that if it led to contact with a girl, he always won?
Yeah, he sure was acting like he had the upper hand. Still holding me in place with his eyes, slowly he stepped down from his bench. He stepped up onto my bench and settled beside me on my towel. And he slid one hand onto the bare skin of my tummy.
I tried not to flinch. I told myself he didn’t mean anything by it—he was just the school’s biggest flirt—so there was no reason to make him unhand me. In fact, I’d found through experience that people who didn’t flinch seemed to fare better with Nick, because he wasn’t sure what to do with them. And I had told him to come over here.
Besides, it was just my tummy, my innocent tummy that I showed to the general public every summer at the pool. But Nick had never touched my bare tummy before, and my body screamed at me to pay attention, this was serious, just as when he’d touched my bare hip in the school hall last Friday. However dark and dangerous I’d considered Nick before, he was about to get a lot worse.
Or better. “The smooth white stone that statues are carved from,” he clarified, brushing his warm fingertips across my skin. “Marble.”
I did my best to keep my tummy absolutely still so he wouldn’t feel how fast I was breathing. This required me to take very small breaths of heavy hot sauna air through my nose. No wonder what I said next sounded strained: “Marble? With black veins? Sounds attractive.”
He smiled a little. “Statues don’t talk.”
“Yeah, I wasn’t buying this sexy rock metaphor anyway.”
His eyebrows went up and his face opened into that who, me? innocent expression of his, even as his pointer finger dipped inside my belly button. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”
“I can tell.” Something needed to be done about this belly button issue. I didn’t push his hand away because … well … I wanted it there. But I couldn’t just leave it there without acknowledging it, either. That would show weakness, telling Nick he could do whatever he wanted with me and I would just sit there and take it. That would be every girl he’d ever dated. Instead, I put my hand on top of his and pressed gently, like I approved.
Which I did.
I think I surprised him. Oooh, I loved this! His nostrils flared a little, and his big hand under my hand spread all the way across my tummy, stroking there slowly. Something was definitely going to happen, and I was going to let it.
But while he was off balance, I needed information from him. Now that I’d gotten over the surprise of seeing him at Chloe’s hotel, it occurred to me just how out of place he was. “What are you doing here?”
“Chloe invited me.”
“She did?” I squeaked. I hoped he didn’t assume I’d put her up to it. I knew I couldn’t trust Chloe and Liz to quit the Cupid business!
For once, being a very bad actress served me well. Nick could see I was floored by this info. He explained, “Chloe asked Gavin to invite me to your victory party. Didn’t they tell you?”
“I didn’t see Gavin,” I said slowly, still puzzling this out. “I only talked to Chloe for a minute. I don’t think they know you’re here.”
“Maybe they don’t,” he admitted. “I came in and saw Davis and Liz making out in the hot tub, and I heard these groans coming from the pantry. What are Gavin and Chloe doing in there anyway?” he asked in his I’m so innocent voice.
I laughed. “Chloe said they were taking inventory.”
Nick chuckled. “Gavin wishes. Last I heard, he had no idea how many boxes of cereal were in that pantry.”
“Oh!” I gave him a little shove that would have been playful if we’d been in the school hall. But here, alone in the sauna, it was my hand on his hard bare chest. I swallowed and tried to pretend I shoved half-naked boys in the sauna every day of the week. “You guys have big mouths.”
“Like Chloe didn’t tell you every move Gavin tried to make on her while they watched basketball on TV at his house last night. Or didn’t watch basketball.”
He had me there.
“So, Gavin and Chloe are otherwise occupied,” Nick mused. “Davis and Liz are in the hot tub. You and I are alone. We might as well make the best of it.”
As if I weren’t hot enough already, I felt the heat rising through me, burning every inch of my skin. I blushed so hard that my face burned at the thought that my fantasies for four years, and specifically my dreams since last Friday in the hall, were about to come true.
A small space had opened between us when I’d shoved him. Now he closed that space again. His long, muscular leg touched my leg inch for inch—stuck to it, in fact, in the shadowy wet room. His long fingers found my bare tummy again and splayed wide across it, with his hot palm centered on my belly button.
“I love saunas, don’t you?” he purred, leaning close to my face. “The heat.” A lock of his dark hair stuck to my wet cheek. “The steam.”
My heart knocked so hard against my chest that I could hardly stand it. “The scent of eucalyptus,” I suggested before I thought about whether this added to the romance of the situation. “Smells like a bottle of my granddaddy’s Old Spice that’s been fermenting in his attic since 1969.” I cringed. I just couldn’t leave it alone and enjoy the moment, could I?
Nick pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. He nodded sagely. “I’ll never think about this scent quite the same way, that’s for sure.” But Nick had a one-track mind, and even my lame jokes couldn’t distract him. One of his hands still moved on my tummy. The other picked up my hand and moved it to his thigh.
Talk about a body like a rock.
I wanted to do this—had wanted it forever—but somehow I had thought there would be more preamble to it, more than fifteen minutes of flirting in the school hall. Even though I’d admittedly accepted every advance he made on me, picking up my hand and putting it on his thigh seemed mighty forward of him. I didn’t take the radical step of removing my hand, but I did open my mouth to act all indignant.
He put two fingers to my lips to stop me from talking. He knew me pretty well. His mouth close to my ear, he growled, “You know, you and I are exes.”
“So?” I asked around his fingers. My skin tingled with excitement, or possibly eucalyptus poisoning.
He leaned so close, I could feel his breath on my cheek, cool compared with the hot air. “If we weren’t exes,” he whispered, “it might be different. But we are. We won’t do anything we haven’t done before. What could it hurt?” His dark eyes looked deep into mine for a few more seconds. Slowly he peeled his fingers away from my lips like he was afraid of what would escape my mouth.
What came to mind: Oooh, yes, please, thank you. But I couldn’t let him know how much I wanted this. Sarcasm, I needed some sarcasm. “What a bunch of bull,” I breathed. “Haven’t you learned anything since the seventh grade?”
“One way to find out,” he purred, moving in. He slipped his hand around the back of my neck, and then—
invert
invert
(in v-rt) n. 1. a handstand on the lip of the half-pipe course 2. Hayden turning the tables on Nick
—I hesitated.
I never hesitated. Hesitating in the slalom could cost me the race. Hesitating in the half-pipe could earn me a concussion. Hesitating on a jump could get me killed—and since I did have a tendency to hesitate there, I did not go off jumps.
And I knew better than to hesitate with Nick. That would show weakness, and he would swoop in and take advantage of me. Better to keep him off guard if I could.
Yet here we were, inches away from each other in the hot shadowy sauna, breathing hard, looking into each other’s eyes, with my hand on his chest to keep him from coming any closer. He glanced to my lips, then focused on my eyes again, genuinely perplexed. Like he wasn’t Nick at all but that boy my age, someone without filthy rich parents, someone unsure and terrified of messing this up.
why I held him off. I wanted to believe he was unsure and vulnerable like me. But those old suspicions about Nick resurfaced. I’d waited too long for this, and I wanted to make sure we were doing it right.
“What’s up?” he prompted me, cluing me in that I’d guessed correctly about him. Not a gentle What’s the matter, dear Hayden? but a sharp What’s up? like a boy growing impatient while bowling a girl over.
“Uh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just don’t get a good vibe about this.”
“You don’t get a good vibe?” Although Nick controlled his emotions carefully, I could tell he was mad. This frightened me a little. I held the dubious honor of being the one person who could make cool, collected Nick lose his temper.
I wanted to be honest with him and give good reasons for balking, so I wouldn’t hurt his feelings just in case he was being straight with me after all. I said slowly, “Well, for starters, from some of the things you said in the hall on Friday, I was thinking you might ask me to the Poseur concert, but you haven’t said another word about it.”
I watched him closely as I said this. He watched me too, his dark eyes giving away nothing but anger.
I swallowed. “You’ve said Chloe invited you here for my victory party. I saw you out on your deck during the competition, so I know you remembered it was going on. But you haven’t asked me anything about the contest, either.”
His lips parted. I watched his soft lips (at least, I remembered them from seventh grade as soft) and waited for him to explain himself. But after a moment he closed his mouth again, and his dark eyes glinted harder.
I had desperately wanted to be wrong about Nick. I had wished he honestly liked me. But his silence and his anger were con vincing me otherwise. That made me angry. And when I got angry, I was anything but silent.
“You’ve pretty much ignored me for the past four years, except to insult me or to throw something at me. Then suddenly you want to make out just when our friends get together? You don’t act like you’re very fond of me. You act like I’m convenient. You would have made out with any chick you happened upon in the sauna, from the hotel maid to the lady in room 3B. I’m not sure I do want to end our trial separation. We have irreconcilable differences.” By the time I got all of this out, I was shouting at him. I’d known I was angry at him, but I hadn’t realized I’d been storing up that much resentment for four years.
Apparently, neither had he. His hand suddenly tensed on my tummy, and I suppressed the urge to say oof. Nick and I had been pressing into each other on the bench, our thighs touching. Our heads were coming closer together with every word we uttered. If someone had interrupted us just then (which they wouldn’t, because we would hear the hall door squeak first), they would think we were about to kiss. They would never understand how much tension rode on every word as Nick looked into my eyes and the following words slid out of his mouth and straight into my heart like slivers of glass: “You have a lot of freaking nerve.” He sat back against the wooden wall, sliding his hand off my tummy and his thigh out from under my hand (nooooo!).
Clearly I couldn’t read Nick as well as I’d thought. I hadn’t wanted to make him angry if he really did care about me. I’d only wanted him to get his hands off me if I didn’t mean anything to him. Now that it appeared I did mean something, and I’d hurt his feelings, my goal now was to get his hands back on me. “I’m not trying to make you mad,” I said quickly. “I’m not even saying I’m right. This just seems very sudden, and I wanted to talk about it with you a little mo—”
“Forget it, Hayden.” His skin glowed with sweat in the low light of the sauna, and his dark hair stuck to his forehead in wet black wisps. He breathed hard like the football team had just given him a good workout. Or like I had. And he looked like I’d slapped him.
But even without the hurt expression on his handsome face, I would have known I’d seriously wounded him because he called me Hayden instead of Hoyden. Like my mother using my full name, Hayden Christine O’Malley, it meant I was in big trouble.
He went on, “I can’t believe you would say something like that to me.” He folded his big arms on his bare chest. “I mean, even if you don’t care about me, I can’t believe you would be that much of a bitch to anyone. That’s just cruel.”
The thing to do then was to make a snappy comeback and stomp out of the sauna, never to return. I got called the B-word a lot, undeservedly in my opinion, just because I had red hair and I said what I thought, perhaps a tad too loudly.
But all I could do was sit there on the bench, staring at Nick with my mouth open and tears in my eyes. I couldn’t get over the feeling of seeing him for the first time tonight as younger and vulnerable, more like me. It hurt that I had hurt him. It hurt more that he had hurt me back.
Outside the sauna, the hall door squealed open. Someone was coming.
“Great,” I breathed. Chloe had invited Nick over here tonight because he’d held my hand in the hall and she’d thought there was more to come. Even once I explained to Chloe that we officially hated each other now and that nothing had happened between us, Nick and I would not live down getting caught together in the sauna. All my friends would double their teasing me about Nick, and I would never be able to get him off my mind.
Strangely, Nick didn’t seem the least bit concerned about Gavin catching us and teasing us in class forevermore. He still stared at me like I’d slapped him. Okay, I’d slapped him a lot in class over the years, when he had shot spitballs at me or tried to write his name on my arm. This time he stared at me like I’d slapped him when he didn’t deserve it.
The sauna door swung open. “There you are,” Chloe exclaimed at me with her fists on her hips. Her eyes slid to Nick.
Gavin appeared over her shoulder. “And there you are,” he called to Nick. His eyes slid to me.
Liz and Davis crowded the doorway, too. All four of them now wore bathing suits, which meant they’d intended to join us in the sauna. Suddenly it was way too hot and I couldn’t breathe.
“God, it’s like a sauna in here,” I muttered at the same time Nick mumbled, “I was just leaving. This place is full of hot air.” Too late I realized we were pushing through our friends in the doorway at the same time. We couldn’t have acted more guilty.
I reached the hallway free and clear. Someone big padded behind me—Nick, I assumed—but I didn’t look back. I burst through the squealing door, slipped into the women’s locker room, and rushed under a cold shower with my bikini still on. “Eek!” Maybe if I stood there long enough, the lingering lust I felt for Nick would wash away, along with the regret that we hadn’t kissed in the sauna.
The cold water bouncing off my skull only gave me a headache. I’d rejected Nick, yes. But the more I thought about it, the more his reaction seemed completely uncalled-for. I got called a bitch a lot. That didn’t mean I had to take it.
I turned off the water and pushed through the door on the opposite side of the locker room, into the cold night. I dashed for the heated pool, jumping in without looking first to see who I’d be sharing it with. Of course, Nick sat alone on the submerged stairs with his elbows behind him on the wall, watching me as I came up for air. Everyone else must be inside and coming soon.
He didn’t take the opportunity to leap across the pool and push me under, as he usually would have. He just stared me down, frowning, and flicked his wet hair out of his eyes with his pinkie. When I was little I’d spent a lot of time at the Tennessee Aquarium in Chattanooga. Now it was like Nick and I were separated by one of those foot-thick walls of specially tempered glass. We could see each other. We could even long for each other. But even if we both had put our hands up to the glass, we could never have touched. The glass between us was smooth and cold.
“Congratulations to you,” the voices of the others sang from behind the slowly moving door. Gavin held it open for Chloe, who paraded out with the cake, an
d Liz, who carried paper plates and forks and napkins. As soon as everyone was clear of the door, Gavin and Davis made a run for the pool and jumped in to avoid the frigid air just like I had, but the girls sang on. “Congratulations dear Hayden, congratulations to you!”
Liz’s dark hair had kinked into tight curls from the hot tub, and Chloe had carefully pinned up her long blond hair to keep it from getting wet in the pool. Chloe and Liz looked so adorable in their own ways, and so happy to be celebrating my victory, that I remembered for the first time in an hour this night was for me, not them, and definitely not Nick. I should enjoy it. Like Josh had warned me, my little baby snowboarding career might end in a stupendous crash when I took my first lesson with Daisy Delaney and she discovered I was afraid of heights. This night was all I knew I had.
“Thank y’all so much,” I said, meaning it. I ignored Gavin echoing y’all, making fun of my Tennessee accent. I also ignored the fact that Nick was not echoing y’all like he usually would.
“You’re-hur-hur welcome,” Chloe said, teeth chattering as she set down the cake at the edge of the pool. Liz set down the plates, too. They waded into the pool, cut the cake from there, and passed around big slices. White cake with white icing, a pure sugar rush—not something I normally would have included in my health-conscious diet, but exactly what I needed when, frankly, this strange episode with Nick had gotten me down.
Liz handed me a plate, careful not to drip pool water on it. I was just taking my first bite when Nick spoke to me in a voice so kind, I knew something ugly was coming. “So, Hayden. What was your time on the slalom?”
“A minute seventeen,” I told him, stuffing the next bite of cake into my mouth while watching him warily.
“That’s funny,” he said between bites. “Didn’t you come in first in the girls’ division? Because that’s three seconds slower than the third-place time for the boys’ division in your age group.”
The Ex Games Page 5
