The Ex Games

by Jennifer Echols

  They eyed each other and nodded.

  “But has he apologized for calling me a bitch? No. He came to my mother’s yoga class just now, and we argued about that. Then we argued about the fire-crotch business. Now he’s sitting across from me at a booth in Mile-High Pie, waxing poetic about the seventh grade. He’s basically followed me around all day and poked at me, without an apology in sight.” I whacked the back of my head on the pictures of snowboarders in mid-fall.

  Liz gazed at me, wide-eyed and awestruck. “Wow. He’s definitely smitten. He wants to apologize, but he doesn’t know how to approach you because you’re mad, which makes him madder and madder.”

  “You know what I think?” Chloe asked, as if she wasn’t going to tell me whether I wanted to know or not. “I think you’ve both built up enormous amounts of sexual tension since your session in the sauna was cut short last night, and you won’t get along until you let it out. You need to make out with him. Take control.”

  Before I could pursue this astonishing idea with her, three senior girls pushed through the bathroom doorway and squealed when they saw me. “Hayden O’Malley!” one of them said. “I had a huge fight with my boyfriend about you, and we both joined the bet over Poseur tickets. I think every couple in the school has made that bet with each other. You’d better show that boy up.”

  “I heard you and Nick are actually hooking up,” another girl said. “Is that true?”

  Chloe nodded at me encouragingly. Liz motioned with her head toward the door.

  “I’m not sure. Let me get back to you.” I swung open the bathroom door and walked into the restaurant again. This was my evening out: bopping back and forth, away from whichever convo made me the most uncomfortable.

  I walked back to the booth and stood next to Nick. He was leaning forward, listening to what Davis and Gavin were saying. I waited for them to finish. I stood naked beside him—wearing BOY TOY jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a short-sleeved powderroom.net T-shirt over that, but feeling naked nevertheless—for several long seconds.

  When he finally noticed me, he looked up quickly like he’d been waiting on edge for my return. He set down his pizza, crumpled his napkin in his hands, and even slid his half-filled plate toward the center of the table like I was the main course now and he was making room for me. “So, Hoyden.”

  I noticed the Christmas lights glinting in his dark hair again, reflecting in his dark eyes. It took me a moment to remember I had something to tell him. Nick had that effect on me.

  I bent down and cupped my hand around his ear—such an intimate gesture on its own. The coarse strands of his hair brushed my fingers as I whispered, “Chloe and Liz think we need to make out.”

  I jumped away at his sudden movement. He leaped up from the table and grabbed my hand. “I’ll get my coat.”

  “What’s your hurry?” Gavin called after us, but Nick didn’t stop pulling me through the room. Booth after booth of loving couples flashed by, along with the wooden columns that divided the booths, each covered in years of graffiti: ALEX LOVES TAYLOR. CATHY + DAN. SYDNEY S BRANDON. We flew at light speed through the restaurant, going back in time to that magical seventh grade night, and I couldn’t help giggling.

  I did have some misgivings as we approached the door. But Fiona had left the Galaga machine. I never should have felt jealous about her. If Nick went out with her again, that would have been four dates, which was unheard-of for him. And Josh and his posse had left their table. They must have gone down to the movie theater, where they could humiliate middle school girls with the whoopee cushion. I made a mental note to explain to Josh that this would not bring him any closer to a date with Gavin’s sister, either.

  I snagged my coat from the rack while Nick looked for his. Shrugging it on without stopping, I swung open the front door of the restaurant. The frigid night wind blew snow into my eyes.

  “Hayden,” Nick called to me.

  “Close the door,” hollered the couples in the booths nearest us.

  I let go of the door handle, then turned to Nick in the warm room. When he just stood there, staring down at me, I walked back to him.

  “On second thought,” he said, “I don’t know about this.”

  I was not going to get dissed again. I said brightly, “Oh, don’t be scared. It’s easy!” I jerked his puffy parka down from the rack and held it open for him. “Try one arm at a time.”

  Glaring at me, he took the coat and shrugged it on. “Close the door!” shouted the couples around us as we walked outside.

  Now that my eyes were used to the lights indoors, the night was black, except for the streetlights glowing yellow, and the dark blue mountain looming over the downtown buildings. Blinking the snowflakes out of my eyes, I took Nick’s warm bare hand in mine and dragged him along the narrow path down a sidewalk that had been cleared of snow. I turned in at the alley between Mile-High Pie and an antiques store next door, closed for the night. The snow was deep here, and the alley was empty and dark.

  “Hayden,” he said softly. He slumped a bit against the brick wall and—oooh—did the pinkie-flick to his hair. But it wasn’t to get me hot. In fact, he’d cooled quite a bit since I’d first whispered in his ear.

  “Let’s talk.” I reached up to touch his shoulder, showing him I had no hard feelings that he’d lost the mood. “Gavin and Davis told you I didn’t know about your parents when I made those comments last night, right?”

  He nodded shortly. His hair fell back into his eyes. “Right.”

  “But you still haven’t apologized for calling me a bitch and dissing my contest win.”

  “I know, and I’m sorry.”

  Chloe had been right! If I let Nick control our conversation, we followed each other around, throwing insults all night. Yet the second I took control, I finally got the apology I’d needed to forgive him.

  Or so I thought. Then he added, “But what you said to me in the sauna was really mean, considering.”

  I folded my arms across my thick coat. “I understand that, now. But I know, and now you know, that I didn’t understand what was going on at your house when I said that.”

  “Right.”

  I studied his handsome face. Even now, the uneducated observer would say he looked happy. Only I saw his slightly narrowed eyes and heard the edge in his voice. “You’re still mad at me anyway,” I said. “I’m sorry I called you a bitch, but doesn’t count as an apology.”

  He put up one hand to wipe away the tiny snowflakes sticking and melting in the stubble on his chin. “You don’t know how mad I was at you in the first place. I think I’ve done really well to back down as far as I have. Chloe and Liz say I should ask you out. Everybody in school had been telling me that, actually. But when it came down to it, in the hall last Friday, you made that comment about your lawyer. I thought you might say no and rub my face in it.”

  Exactly what I’d thought. If he might lose, he didn’t want to play.

  “My parents argued the whole weekend,” he said. “I was pretty much home for the entire thing, except when I was boarding. It’s been coming on for a while, but I couldn’t help thinking I’d brought it on somehow by making those divorce jokes to you in the hall on Friday.”

  “Oh.” I might believe in a little karma to go with my yoga, but Nick hadn’t done anything to deserve that. I wanted to wrap my arms around him to comfort him. I didn’t touch him, though. I didn’t dare.

  He splayed his hands on his jeans and rubbed his thighs like he could hardly stand to stay in his own skin any longer. “Then, in the sauna, I got a second chance to ask you out,” he went on. “I was really into what we were doing—or, as it turns out, not doing.”

  “You never did ask me out,” I reminded him.

  “I was going to. I thought we would get together. And then, when you said I never take you anywhere, and I take you for granted, and I ignore you except when it’s convenient, you sounded almost exactly like my mother yelling at my father right before she left.”
/>   That hurt. I knew I hadn’t said those things to him. But coming off a whole weekend of listening to his parents bicker, that’s what he must have heard when I’d said he hadn’t asked me to the Poseur concert, he hadn’t congratulated me on winning the boarding contest, and he only wanted to be with me now that our friends were together. I actually grimaced at a pain in my stomach at the thought I’d hurt him so much. “Nick—”

  He waved away what I was about to say. “I’m sorry. I know that’s not what you wanted to hear, and it’s definitely not sexy, but I wanted you to understand what happened. I’d told Gavin and Davis some of what went down with my parents, so I figured you could have known. If you were throwing that back in my face, you were a different person than I thought. I’ve probably never been that angry at anyone in my life. Except my dad.” He bit his lip, looking so unsure and so much younger, for once, than seventeen. “I know that’s not fair to you. I’m going through kind of a tough time right now, and I might not be thinking straight.”

  “It’s okay.” I shuffled forward through the snow to hug him, whether he wanted to be hugged or not. As Chloe had said, Nick needed my support. As a friend. All our arguments seemed silly now, compared with what he’d been going through at home.

  To my surprise, he put both his arms around me and hugged me closer, until I had to step toward him on the icy pavement. His body curved around me. I felt his hot breath in my hair, and I shivered.

  “Are you cold? Here.” He unzipped his jacket, then unzipped mine—my heart was doing flips as his hands passed down my chest, unzipping me—and he pulled me even farther forward, into his body heat.

  I’d been shivering from the feelings he stirred in me every time he looked at me, not from the cold. But I certainly was not going to clue him in if he wanted to share bodily warmth. Sometimes it was best to leave well enough alone. His 98.6-degree body was an 80-degree contrast to the cold night all around me. My heart sped up, pumping my confused blood so hard through my veins that I could hear it in my ears.

  “So Chloe and Liz think we should make out.” He spoke just above a whisper. The low notes of his voice made my insides quiver.

  I looked way up at him, into his dark eyes. “Well, last night we didn’t finish what we started.” I put my hands in his hair and drew his face down toward mine, enjoying every second of anticipation, feeling the aura of heat around him. I kissed his neck, just below his chin.

  In yoga class, I could see when people started to let go of their busy schedules and relax into the stretches. Now I could feel Nick leave Mile-High Pie behind, and the snowy street, and the cold mountain, and relax into this little cloud of warmth with me. “God, Hayden,” he breathed.

  I kissed my way across his neck. He blindly fumbled under my jacket until his hot hand slid inside my T-shirt. He took my chin in his other hand and turned my face toward his, looking me all over, my eyes, my hair, my lips. I thought for a moment he was going to tell me to stop.

  And then he kissed me, softly at first, then more firmly and deeply. He was not going to tell me to stop. His second thoughts were gone. He was fully committed, at least to this make-out session. His tongue swept deep inside my mouth. He gathered fistfuls of my T-shirt on either side of my waist and held me tight. For long minutes, as the cold wind teased us outside our cocoon of coats, we warmed each other and breathed each other.

  It went on for thirty minutes, I would say. I’m really not sure. Time flew when I was having fun, but my brain recorded every tiny detail of his mouth on mine like we were moving in slow motion in the hot air. Like I was falling off a cliff.

  Finally, when I was absorbed in the sensations of my own body and his, and I’d totally forgotten anything but the two of us in this hot moment, he brought me back. He took his hands away, broke the kiss, and stood up straight. Snow squeaked under his boots as he shifted his weight. “Do you realize we’ve been standing here making out in the snow and the fifteen-degree weather for five minutes?”

  “Five?” I asked in a daze, touching my tingling lips and staring dumbly up at him.

  “Can we go to your house?” he purred in a sexy voice.

  Boy, could we! I couldn’t wait to get him into my warm living room. I wasn’t ready for the tingles to end, and Nick’s lips on mine plus climate control sounded too good to be true. But I wanted to get one thing straight first. “Does this mean we’re calling off the bet?”

  He frowned down at me. “Of course we’re not calling off the bet. You owe me a Poseur ticket. Did you only come out here to get me to call off the bet?”

  I sighed and looked up at the stars in exasperation. But I stopped short of walking away from him, just in case he came to his senses and decided to kiss me again. I found one of his hands and held it, gently stroking his palm with my thumb, toying with his signet ring. Feeling a little like Fiona or some other girl from my school whose voice seemed to pitch an octave higher whenever she wanted something from a boy, I asked, “Why do you want to be with me if you think so little of me?”

  “I’m not sure I do want to be with you.” He slid his hand out of mine. Devastating as that was, he floored me with what he did next. He faced me again and gave me the brilliant smile with the movie-star expression he always wore around school. As if none of this had happened at all. He walked by me, away from the wall, through the deep snow to the sidewalk, and disappeared around the corner of the building.

  I stared into the space where he’d been, an alley entrance filled with tiny snowflakes. My tummy still swirled with tingles like the snowflakes in the air. How could Nick and I be over as suddenly as we’d started? Sure, I’d wanted him to call off the bet now that we were together. I’d expected him to. But that’s not why I’d come out here with him. Truly wheedling something out of a boy, Fiona-style, required planning and organizational skills that I did not possess.

  “Hoyden,” Nick called from around the corner.

  I shuffled after him through the snow. He had one hand on the door of Mile-High Pie, prepared to open it for me.

  “I’m going home,” I told him. No way was I sitting at a booth in Mile-High Pie again tonight. When I got home I would call Chloe and then Liz. They would ask if Nick and I had gotten together. I would say that for a second there, I thought we were going to, but … then I asked him to forfeit a challenge. I could explain all this to them on the phone, but I did not want to rehash it at the table, or in the bathroom. Mile-High Pie was a dangerous place.

  “Got a ride?” he asked in exactly the polite but distant tone he would use on some ninth grader he hardly knew.

  “Bus.” I gestured toward the familiar squeaks as the bus lumbered around the corner several blocks down.

  “Okay, then. See you around, Hoyden.” He pulled the door open.

  “Close the door!” called the couples as he stepped inside.

  I watched him through the glass door as he hung up his puffy parka, then wove between the tables and slipped into the booth where we’d been sitting. He nodded at something Gavin said to him. But Nick’s shoulders were hunched, and he looked so defeated that I wanted to hug him again. I wished I didn’t feel so strongly that he shouldn’t have challenged me to this comp. I wished he would run back out to me, tell me it was all a joke, and make out with me against the wall like he was supposed to.

  Watching Nick’s defeated pose, I realized that wasn’t going to happen. Nick might have enjoyed making out with me. He might even want to be with me. But more than anything, Nick wanted to win. And winning me over wasn’t enough.

  “Hayden! Yoo-hoo, Hayden O’Malley! Are you and Nick Krieger finally hooking up?”

  “How are these people recognizing me?” I muttered to Liz beside me. We’d just slid away from the top of a ski lift, one I could stand to ride because it never rose too far from the ground, when we were overtaken by sophomores. It was snowing—not a pleasant light shower with the sun occasionally breaking through the clouds, either, but a heavy, constant dump from overcast skies that
made visibility almost nil. Without admitting it, I’d had an eye out for Nick all day, and I figured Liz had been looking for Davis, but we’d never recognized them in the thick white air. Yet these sophomores were the fifth group of boarders from our school to pick me out that afternoon. My hair must glow in the dark.

  “Dish, Hayden,” exclaimed a gossip-seeking girl who skied directly into my path. “It would be sooooo cute if you and Nick got together after he sealed your backpack inside that plaster of Paris volcano last year.”

  Liz giggled and elbowed me. “I’d forgotten all about that one!”

  “But my friends say no way,” the girl went on. “Nick hates you. Which is it?”

  I shrugged. “I guess you’ll have to ask Nick.” And if she found out, I hoped she’d pass that info along to me.

  “Practice hard,” said another girl shooting past on her board. She called backward to me, “I’ve got a Poseur ticket riding on you.”

  “Me, too!” said another girl accelerating down the white slopes. “Me, too! Me, too!” more of them called, until the air was as thick with pressure as it was with snowflakes.

  Liz knew what I was thinking. “Let it go,” she advised me. “We’re taking the afternoon off, remember?”

  We’d worked hard all morning at getting me to go off the jump, with no success, despite the “help” of Josh and his posse. On the bright side, if I never became a professional snowboarder and never opened that door for Josh, he already had a whole album’s worth of raps about me, my boarding, and my gastrointestinal issues. Maybe he could sign a record contract.

  But Liz and I had made a pact that no matter what happened this morning, we would let loose this afternoon and have fun on the mountain. Much as I loved Chloe, she was a pain to board with, because I was forever slowing down so she could keep up, or helping her right herself and innocent bystanders after she crashed into the ski-lift line. To be honest, I was relieved she’d said she couldn’t board with us today because she had “a pressing matter to attend to,” even though her tone of voice made me suspicious she was meddling in my business again. Liz was a different story completely. On her skis, Liz kept up with me.