He laughed. “I was raised to never put my shoes on the couch, but I’ll take it under advisement.”
He sat down next to me, his back pressed against a yellow throw pillow with a sea horse on it. I’d never questioned that pillow before, but now I couldn’t help but wonder why it was here and what it said about me and my family that we owned it.
“This was supposed to be really romantic,” Brandon blurted, sweeping his hair out of his eyes. “But I realize now that it’s coming off like, uh, really fucking needy and stalkerish and probably the biggest mistake of my life? I’ll just go kill Ben and Trix for not talking me out of it four hundred and eighty miles ago. They obviously don’t know anything because they’re high school sweethearts.”
“What? No!” I moved closer to him, wrapping my arm around his neck and kissing him swiftly. “This is legit romantic.”
“Whew,” he said. “Because I was walking up to the door and realizing that this could be such an invasion of privacy. I got your address from Leigh, and before you left you said a lot of stuff that made me think that you wouldn’t mind if I showed up here. But I’ve been wrong before. I’ve been wrong a lot, actually.” He twirled a piece of my hair around his fingers, examining the curl. “I never should have left the sci-fi section that night. I don’t need you to promise me anything. I want the chance to keep knowing you. That’s all.”
I picked up his free hand, which was roasting hot, even in the air-conditioned living room. But I couldn’t set it down. What if he stopped being real? “I’m sorry I didn’t understand that. I was so caught up in winning and being scared of what happened after I got back here, I forgot to, I don’t know … hope? I’d love to keep knowing you. I don’t want an ending. I just didn’t think I could stop it from happening.”
He leaned forward, his head tipped to one side, and planted a kiss on my cheek before getting to his feet.
“That took an unexpected turn,” I said, watching him run to his backpack. He dragged it over to the couch and, from within its depths, pulled out a hardcover book with an ivory jacket and yellow lettering. He set it in my hands and I let out an involuntary gasp as I recognized the bar code in the top left corner. It was Rayevich College’s copy of Survivor by Octavia Butler.
“What?” I squealed, unsure if I was thrilled or terrified to be holding this. “I can’t steal this!”
He held up his hands, refusing to take the book back. “You aren’t stealing it. First of all, I stole it. Well, I asked Meg to steal it. Second of all, you’re borrowing it until next fall. There’s nothing in the Melee rules that says we can’t apply to Rayevich like normal people do.”
“And if we don’t get in?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said as though maybe he hadn’t considered this. “Then you’re stealing it.”
I hugged the book to my chest. “Thank you.” I kissed him. “Thank you.” I kissed him again. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. He set his thumb between his teeth. “You know, I looked into it, and the military hires more math majors than almost any other industry in the country.”
My heart beat so hard, I had to set the book down for fear of ruining the cover. “Oh yeah?”
He nodded. “Turns out statistics is really important to the armed forces. Who knew?”
“Are you saying that you could see yourself enlisting?”
“How many push-ups do I need to be able to do to make it through boot camp?”
“To make it through? Forty-five. To thrive? Seventy.”
“Let’s start with surviving,” he said. He got down on the ground, raising and lowering himself with relative ease. “One, two, three—”
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted. “That wasn’t quite right. One more time, please?”
He pushed himself back down to the ground with a grunt. “Un. Deux. Trois.”
I pulled him back to his feet and we both laughed until the laughter faded away and we were alone together again.
“If you hear so much as a floorboard creak…” I whispered.
“I’ve been a little brother for seventeen years,” he assured me. “I know all the tricks.”
We kissed like it was the end of the world, and then, after a break for a glass of ice water, like it was the beginning. And during the breaks, it was just us—two normal, eternally grounded teenagers who lived four hundred and eighty miles apart and occasionally stole time together.
After all, wasn’t it Oscar Wilde who said that the very essence of romance is uncertainty?
CAN’T GET ENOUGH OF LILY ANDERSON?
DON’T MISS BEN AND TRIXIE’S STORY IN THE COMPANION NOVEL,
the only thing worse than me is you
AVAILABLE NOW!
* 1 *
Ben West spent summer vacation growing a handlebar mustache.
Seriously.
Hovering over his upper lip—possibly glued there—was a bushy monstrosity that shouted, “Look out, senior class, I’m gonna tie some chicks to the train tracks and then go on safari with my good friend Teddy Roosevelt. Bully!”
I blindly swatted at Harper with my comic book, trying to alert her to the fact that there was a mustachioed moron attempting to blend in with the other people entering campus.
“I know I should have made flash cards for the poems that Cline assigned,” she said, elbowing me back hard, both acknowledging that she wasn’t blind and that she hated when I interrupted her monologues about the summer reading list. “But I found Mrs. Bergman’s sociolinguistics syllabus on the U of O website and I’m sure she’ll use the same one here.”
The mustache twitched an attempt at freedom, edging away from West’s ferrety nose as he tried to shove past a group of nervous freshmen. It might have been looking at me and Harper, but its owner was doing everything possible to ignore us, the planter box we were sitting on, and anything else that might have been east of the wrought iron gate.
“So,” Harper continued, louder than necessary considering we were sitting two inches apart, “I thought I’d get a head start. But now I’m afraid that we were supposed to memorize the poems for Cline. He never responded to my emails.”
Pushing my comic aside, I braced my hands against the brick ledge. The mustache was daring me to say something. Harper could hear it, too, as evidenced by her staring up at the sun and muttering, “Or you could, you know, not do this.”
“Hey, West,” I called, ignoring the clucks of protest coming from my left. “I’m pretty sure your milk mustache curdled. Do you need a napkin?”
Ben West lurched to a stop, one foot inside of the gate. Even on the first day of school, he hadn’t managed to find a clean uniform. His polo was a series of baggy wrinkles, half-tucked into a pair of dingy khakis. He turned his head. If the mustache had been able to give me the finger, it would have. Instead, it watched me with its curlicue fists raised on either side of West’s thin mouth.
“Hey, Harper,” he said. He cut his eyes at me and grumbled, “Trixie.”
I leaned back, offering the slowest of slow claps. “Great job, West. You have correctly named us. I, however, may need to change your mantle. Do you prefer Yosemite Sam or Doc Holliday? I definitely think it should be cowboy related.”
“Isn’t it inhumane to make the freshmen walk past you?” he asked me, pushing the ratty brown hair out of his eyes. “Or is it some kind of ritual hazing?”
“Gotta scare them straight.” I gestured to my blond associate. “Besides, I’ve got Harper to soften the blow. It’s like good cop, bad cop.”
“It is nothing like good cop, bad cop. We’re waiting for Meg,” Harper said, flushing under the smattering of freckles across her cheeks as she turned back to the parking lot, undoubtedly trying to escape to the special place in her head where pop quizzes—and student council vice presidents—lived. She removed her headband and then pushed it back in place until she once again looked like Sleeping Beauty in pink glasses and khakis. Whereas I continued to look like I’d slept on my ponyt
ail.
Which I had because it is cruel to start school on a Wednesday.
“Is it heavy?” I asked Ben, waving at his mustache. “Like weight training for your face? Or are you trying to compensate for your narrow shoulders?”
He gave a halfhearted leer at my polo. “I could ask the same thing of your bra.”
My arms flew automatically to cover my chest, but I seemed to be able to conjure only the consonants of the curses I wanted to hurl at him. In his usual show of bad form, West took this as some sort of victory.
“As you were,” he said, jumping back into the line of uniforms on their way to the main building. He passed too close to Kenneth Pollack, who shoved him hard into the main gate, growling, “Watch it, nerd.”
“School for geniuses, Kenneth,” Harper called. “We’re all nerds.”
Kenneth flipped her off absentmindedly as West righted himself and darted past Mike Shepherd into the main building.
“Brute,” Harper said under her breath.
I scuffed the planter box with the heels of my mandatory Mary Janes. “I’m off my game. My brain is still on summer vacation. I totally left myself open to that cheap trick.”
“I was referring to Kenneth, not Ben.” She frowned. “But, yes, you should have known better. Ben’s been using that bra line since fourth grade.”
As a rule, I refused to admit when Harper was right before eight in the morning. It would lead to a full day of her gloating. I hopped off the planter and scooped up my messenger bag, shoving my comic inside.
“Come on. I’m over waiting for Meg. She’s undoubtedly choosing hair care over punctuality. Again.”
Harper slid bonelessly to her feet, sighing with enough force to slump her shoulders as she followed me through the front gate and up the stairs. The sunlight refracted against her pale hair every time her neck swiveled to look behind us. Without my massive aviator sunglasses, I was sure I would have been blinded by the glare.
“What’s with you?” I asked, kicking a stray pebble out of the way.
“What? Nothing.” Her head snapped back to attention, knocking her glasses askew. She quickly straightened them with two trembling hands. “Nothing. I was just thinking that maybe senior year might be a good time for you to end your war with Ben. You’d have more time to study and read comics and…”
Unlike the tardy Meg, Harper was tall enough that I could look at her without craning my neck downward. It made it easier to level her with a droll stare. Sometimes, it’s better to save one’s wit and just let the stupidity of a thought do the talking.
She rolled her eyes and clucked again, breezing past me to open the door.
“Or not,” she said, swinging the door open and letting me slip past her. “Year ten of Watson v. West starts now. But if one of you brings up the day he pushed you off the monkey bars, I am taking custody of Meg and we are going to sit with the yearbook staff during lunch.”
“I accept those terms.” I grinned. “Now help me think of historical figures with mustaches. Hitler and Stalin are entirely too obvious. I need to brainstorm before we get homework.”
ALSO BY LILY ANDERSON
THE ONLY THING WORSE THAN ME IS YOU
about the author
LILY ANDERSON is an elementary school librarian and Melvil Dewey fangirl with an ever-growing collection of musical theater tattoos and Harry Potter ephemera. She lives in Northern California. She is also the author of The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You. Visit her at www.mslilyanderson.com or @ms_lilyanderson. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraphs
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Excerpt: The Only Thing Worse Than Me Is You
Also by Lily Anderson
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
NOT NOW, NOT EVER. Copyright © 2017 by Lily Anderson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Lesley Worrell
Cover photographs: girl © Djomas Shutterstock.com; boy © Marko Tomicic Shutterstock.com
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-14210-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-25014817-9 (ebook)
eISBN 9781250148179
Our ebooks may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by email at [email protected].
First Edition: November 2017
Not Now, Not Ever Page 27
