by Nikki Godwin
“Okay, this is my last one for the night,” he says. “Half it with me?”
Seriously? If I wasn’t the envy of every Saturnite in the world just by sitting across the table from him, I’m definitely the envy of them now because Milo Grayson wants to half his precious Oreo with me. And the thing that sucks the most is that no one knows about it to be jealous of me!
He holds the cookie up and waits for a response.
“Yeah, we can half it,” I say.
I reach across the table for it, but he jerks his arm back. The sleeve of his T-shirt hugs his bicep tightly, and oh how I wish to be that fabric.
“Not so fast,” he says. “Let’s make it interesting.”
Could this be any more interesting? Hello – you’re gorgeous and famous and sharing cookies with me! Any more ‘interest’ and I might burst like a firework.
“If you get the side with the cream, I’ll give you my honest male opinion about your checkout line drama today,” he says. “But if I get the cream side, you have to tell me, honestly, who you think the best looking guy is in Spaceships Around Saturn.”
Oh God. He’s for real. Does he know? He totally knows. He knows I’m lusting for him from behind this glass of milk and tattoo magazine. He knows that his eyes make me melt and that I clearly watch him on Twitter because I know all about amazzzzzing. Now he wants to make me ‘fess up.
“Deal.” I say it before I can chicken out.
I can always lie and say Benji’s name. He’s the fan favorite anyway. Benji Baccarini is Spaceships Around Saturn for so many girls.
Milo leans forward, positions himself over the table, and holds up that fated Oreo. I push my glass of milk aside because the last thing I want is to knock it over with my quivering nerves. Then I lean toward him, grip the cookie with my fingers, and inhale every bit of his body wash that I can while I twist my half of the Oreo away from his half.
“Damn,” he mutters.
I’ve never been so thankful for the cream in an Oreo before now. I instantly burst into fangirlish giggles, straight from Planet Emery. I can save my dignity for another day, and I didn’t even have to lie to the beautiful boy. All of my anxiety wafts away into some unknown part of the universe where silly nervousness goes to die.
“I really thought I was going to get an ego boost out of this,” he says, as if it’s a terrible defeat that he lost the cream side of the cookie.
“Apparently you don’t need it since you clearly assume that I was going to say your name,” I say.
Milo laughs. “I figured I was your type. I guess I’ll never know, eh?”
I submerge my half-Oreo into my milk and bite into it. I can’t even look at him now. Those butterflies in my stomach probably flew back just to look at him. If I were a butterfly of nerves, I’d definitely risk the anxiety to fly back and look at him.
“But a deal is a deal,” he says. He sighs, all defeated again. “I think you’re better off without that guy. He’s immature, has no dignity, and needs to be knocked down from his pedestal. You can do much better than a guy who clucks Benji’s last name across the grocery store’s parking lot.”
He swigs the last bit of his milk and pulls the soggy Oreo from the bottom of the glass. He pops it into his mouth, walks over to the sink to wash out the glass, and places it in Mom’s extra sink where she asked them to put dirty dishes. He’s so freaking well-mannered.
He walks back over to the table, pushes his chair in, and runs his tongue over his teeth.
“Well, Ms. Branson, it’s been a pleasure, but I need my beauty sleep or else I may end up looking like Jules, and that would be a shame for all of us,” he says. “We should do this again sometime. Good night.”
He heads toward the stairs but stops and looks back. “And from what Emery says, you’re too pretty for that jerk anyway.”
Chapter Five
The doorbell rings the instant my bare feet touch the hardwood floor of the foyer. Perfect timing. I don’t bother to wait for Godfrey. It’s probably government agents or someone Dad sent here to check on things. I peek through the glass, but the muscle man in the black V-neck is definitely not an agent.
“Good morning,” Tank says as soon as I open the door. “I’ve been asked to personally delivery this to Milo.” He holds up a guitar case.
“C’mon in,” I say, motioning him with my arm.
I haven’t been up long enough to know where Milo is, and really, after last night, I’m not ready to see him. It took hours and a lot of sleep deprivation for those butterflies to settle down. Now that they’re finally asleep, I don’t want to wake them.
“I knew I heard your voice!” Benji sprints past me and attacks Tank in a massive hug. “What are you doing here?”
Tank pushes the blonde superstar off of him with one arm and holds up the guitar case with his other hand. Benji bombards him with a million questions about the investigation and when they’ll be free and about what people are saying on the outside, but Tank doesn’t provide many answers. He almost sounds rehearsed when he tells Benji that the United States government is “working on this night and day.”
I glance outside. A black SUV sits in our wraparound driveway. I wonder if Tank is wearing a wire. I wouldn’t put it past them. They could’ve sent an agent to deliver Milo’s guitar, but they sent Tank to ease the guys’ nerves and give them a familiar face. It’s one of the more obvious tricks. Dad’s told us that before.
“Sorry, my man, I gotta jet,” Tank says much too quickly for Benji’s liking. “They got me on lockdown too.”
Tank pulls back on the V of his shirt and points to the wire. Seriously? What the hell do they think we’re doing in here? I’m scared to sign online or use my own cell phone now. They’re probably watching everything that happens in our house. I may be showering in the dark from now on. At least until the lockdown is over.
Benji takes Milo’s guitar, and I motion him back before letting Tank walk outside. They’ll know that Benji talked to him, but for Benji’s sake, I don’t want the agents to get a glimpse of him. They’ll assume we let him peek outside all the time.
The SUV circles around the drive and exits through the gate. There’s no way they can keep a watch on this entire place. We live in a freaking mansion with more guest rooms than a bed and breakfast. They should trust my dad more than that. He’s taught us well. We may not like lockdown, but we sure as hell don’t argue.
I stroll into the dining room behind Benji. Noah sips on strawberry milk while Emery talks about painting coffee cans for Mom to plant flowers in. Aralie and Jules sit at the other end of the table. Aralie plays on her phone while Jules stares at her as if he could burn holes into her skin with his eyes.
No sign of Tate or Milo aka the bromance of Tito aka the lamest bromance name I’ve ever heard. Maybe Milo is actually sleeping. Maybe he’ll sleep all day, and I can avoid him.
Jules looks away from Aralie long enough to notice the guitar case.
“Who brought that?” he asks.
“Tank,” Benji says. “He wasn’t himself, though. Agents brought him. They made him wear a wire. This is some bullshit.”
Emery’s eyes pop from their sockets, and Benji takes instant notice.
“Sorry, Emery,” he says. “I’m going to have to get you some in-ears, like what we wear when we’re on stage. Then you can sing to yourself and block out all the other noise, like my cursing.”
Emery slips off of her chair next to Noah and walks around to where Benji and I stand. She’s wearing her serious face, and she clutches that friendship bracelet with the blue frayed ribbon in her hand.
“You can’t say that word or my mom will get mad because I told her you were my best friend, and best friends can’t say bad words,” she says, all matter-of-fact.
Then she laughs. Oh God, why does she have to laugh? She never had this crazy hyena thing in her eyes until Spaceships Around Saturn showed up, and now she looks demonic and clown-like every time she laughs or smiles.
> “But I won’t tell Mommy you said a bad word if you wear my friendship bracelet,” she says in a sing-song voice.
It takes about five seconds for Benji to get that blue and green bracelet tied around his wrist. He tells her he’ll keep it forever and promises to wear it during their first show back on tour. She asks him if he’ll post a picture of it on Twitter, and she then tells me to retweet it when he does.
Jules rocks back in his chair as Benji, Emery, and I find a seat at the table.
“So, Emery, where’s my friendship bracelet?” the bad boy asks.
Aralie sets her phone on the table. “You don’t get one because no one wants to be your friend,” she tells him.
His chair rocks back and forth. If he loses his footing, it’d be the ultimate win for Aralie.
“I have fans all over the world. A lot of people want to be my friend,” Jules argues.
Aralie laughs. “Oh, right, your 6.9 million Twitter followers. You do realize that Benji has 11.3 million, right? Those are real time numbers. I just checked.”
Jules slams his chair onto the floor.
“That’s 6.9 million people who love me and would gladly do my laundry,” he says. “You’re the envy of 6.9 million people, and you can’t even appreciate it.”
Noah smirks behind his strawberry milk. I guess the rumors are true about how he doesn’t speak until after he’s had his strawberry milk each morning. Weird.
I decide to speak up in Aralie’s defense.
“Actually, you’re wrong,” I say. “I’m one of those 6.9 million people, and I can’t say that I love you, and I definitely don’t want to do your laundry.”
Luckily, for everyone’s sake, Mom enters the room just in time to intervene and end what could’ve been round two of Aralie vs. Jules. She loads the dishwasher before coming back over to the table. She has the sympathetic Mom-face on.
“Girls, it’s probably a good idea for you guys to skip Lauren’s party tonight,” she says. She holds up her hand to stop Aralie before she bursts into objections. “I know you’ve had this planned for a while, but your dad called this morning and said he’d just feel a lot better if you guys stayed here tonight. There’ll be other parties.”
Really, there won’t be. These are my post-graduation parties that’ll only happen once because I’ll only graduate high school once. It sucks, yeah, and I don’t like it, but I think Aralie is more upset than I am – and she doesn’t graduate for another year.
My sister jumps up from the table and follows Mom back into the depths of the kitchen.
“What are we supposed to say?” Aralie asks. “It’s not like I can say, ‘Sorry Lauren, I’m hiding a boyband in my house’ or something like that.”
Mom sighs. “Tell her Emery is sick with some flu virus, and it’s contagious. You and Chloe have been exposed, and your parents won’t let you leave the house. Blame Dad and me.”
I lean past Benji to glance into the kitchen. Aralie leans back against the fridge.
“It’s not fair that I have to miss out on my life because someone wants to shoot Jules. Really, I can’t blame them!” Aralie yells before pushing off the fridge and running upstairs.
Two hours later, I’ve sent all the appropriate ‘Sorry, Emery is sick, and we’re contagious’ texts. I got roped into it after Aralie’s tantrum. I have yet to see Milo today, although I know he’s downstairs. He and Tate didn’t bother getting out of bed until long after I was back in the safety of my bedroom. I’m tempted to go downstairs just to see what he’s wearing. Probably a T-shirt. But those T-shirts hug his body like I wish I could.
Yeah, definitely not going downstairs after a thought like that.
But that doesn’t stop Emery from coming upstairs. Her footsteps are fast and swishy, so I know it’s her. I race to my door and pull it open before she has a chance to bang on it.
“You’re getting faster,” she says. She smiles a normal smile, thankfully, and looks around the hallway. “Are you gonna watch the premiere with us?”
I rack my brain for whatever premiere she’s talking about, but I’ve got nothing. She knows it too because she opens her mouth immediately.
“For ‘Music Up, Windows Down!’” she shouts in my face.
“Oh! Their new song!” I’m almost as excited as she is when it clicks.
I can totally play this cool. I can pretend I’m watching it because Emery made a big deal out of it and begged me to. It’ll be a good way to break the ice again after last night. Thank God for my little Saturnite.
“Yeah, I guess,” I say, practicing the whole ‘play it cool’ thing.
Emery hugs me and tells me that she’s going to ask Aralie. I doubt she’ll have much luck with the middle sister, but it gives me a chance to slip downstairs and blame baby sister for making me watch the premiere.
The guys are in our second living room – the one with the huge sectional, flat screen TV, and Dad’s surround-sound system. Dad has the Xbox and all of his boy toys in here. I only use it for the flat screen. We just refer to it as Dad’s game room.
Jules has his arm draped over Benji’s shoulder glancing through another tattoo magazine with him. I wish I’d grabbed my cell phone. That’d be an awesome shot for those goofy Jenji memes. Tate curls up to himself in the corner of the sectional.
Noah waves me over. “Wanna squeeze in with us?”
By ‘us,’ he means himself and Milo. Hell freaking yes, I want to squeeze in. Noah makes this way too easy for me. He slides away from his beautiful band mate and allows me to squeeze into the space between them.
“Nice seeing you here,” Milo says.
My cheeks blush, and I pray they’re not as flaming as they feel. I glance around for the remote control to flip on the TV. Milo grabs my arm and pulls me back when I reach for it on the coffee table ahead of us.
“Emery wants us to wait for her,” he says. He slips his arm around my shoulders and leans in to speak more quietly. “So you’re stuck in awkward silence with us.”
Noah leans in on my other side. “Is it awkward yet?” he whispers.
The two of them burst into laughter, as if this were planned before I even walked into the room. I push both of them away with my elbows.
“I think I’ll go sit between Jenji,” I say.
I grab onto Noah’s knee to push myself up from the sectional because God knows I would nervously slip and grab something I shouldn’t if I were to even touch Milo. But this was a stupid idea because I still have to step over the limbs known as Milo’s legs to even get close to the Jules Rossi-Benji Baccarini bromance.
“Good job,” Noah says. “You made her leave, Milo.”
I’m one step in between Milo’s legs when he purposely trips me and purposely catches me. His arms feel as strong and warm and perfect as I imagined they would. I could seriously melt into his skin and become one with him right now.
He spins me to his right, slides over next to Noah, and pulls me into the spot between himself and the corner of the sectional.
“You can’t sit with Jenji. Emery won’t allow that,” Milo says. He looks at Noah then back at me. “I’m not used to girls running from me like that. It sort of hurts my feelings, ya know.”
He pouts his lip, just like Emery would, and Noah does the whole fake-comfort thing. Milo buries his face into Noah’s shoulder to fake-cry. So much for maturity.
I’m saved by my sisters, who rush into the room and make Milo look up from his pout fest. Aralie whispers something to Tate, and he slides down to give her the corner spot. She pulls him back toward her and cuddles up next to him like they’re the best of friends. I think I’m missing something, but I don’t have time to worry about Aralie and her boyband crushes. I have to deal with my own. Right now he’s sitting next to me with this perfect smirky smile on his face, and I’m sort of dying here.
Emery picks up the remote, turns the TV on, and flips directly to the music channel for the premiere. As the beautiful boy next to me predicted, she invites he
rself to divide Jenji in half and inserts herself into the equation.
Ten seconds later, Emery stands up.
“I can’t sit by you, Jules,” she says.
She gravitates in our direction and crawls into the gap between Tate and Noah.
Then she makes her announcement. “Jules smells like crushed ladybugs.”
Any tension that may have been in the room instantly falters with our laughter. I half-expected Jules to fly off the sectional cursing and screaming. Instead, he laughs.
“It’s his cigarettes,” Benji clarifies. He leans over to his bromance brother and sniffs. “Sorry dude, Emery is right.”
Jules pushes him back, but a smile stays on his face – for once – and I’m relieved.
Emery turns up the volume, and the TV silences the room. I engage my attention with the shampoo commercial on the screen so I won’t allow myself to sneak glances at Milo. Really, I don’t want to glance at any of them because they have to watch their premiere in our mini-theatre instead of being in NYC debuting this video in front of thousands of screaming fans.
Two boys over, I hear Emery inhale sharply when the girl on TV says something about the moment everyone’s been waiting for. Milo leans forward and places his elbows on his knees. This would’ve been their first appearance after their NYC show less than forty-eight hours ago. Instead, no one knows where they are.
“As you all know,” the pixilated girl says. “Shots were fired at the Spaceships Around Saturn show Saturday night, and the guys couldn’t be here with us today. But there has been a lot of speculation as to where they may be hiding out. We’re going to go to our audience and see where they think these Canadian hotties might be!”
“What!?” Emery jumps up, standing like a ninja on the sectional. “Someone shot at you!”
So much for sheltering her. Tate motions for her to sit back down and says something about crazy people trying to break the speakers. Noah agrees and says those idiots hate Spaceships Around Saturn’s music and wanted to ruin their show. So now they have to hide out until our dad catches them.
