Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(3)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Tampa Bay has an NHL team,” he reminded me.

“Yeah, but nobody else here plays. The NHL rinks are probably the only ones in the entire metropolitan area. A high school guy playing hockey in Tampa makes as much sense as the Jamaican bobsled team.”

I’d meant it to be funny. But his mouth twitched to one side again, this time like I’d slapped him. Maybe he was considering for the first time that our central Florida high school might not have a varsity hockey team.

I sipped my beer, racking my brain for a way to salvage this conversation, which I’d really been digging. He held his beer in both hands like he was trying to get all the cold out of it without actually drinking it. His eyes roved the corners of the porch, and I wondered whether he was searching for Angelica as a way to escape from me if she and DeMarcus got tired of each other.

Before I could embarrass myself with another gem from my stand-up routine, the porch vibrated with deep whoops of “Sawyer!” The man himself sauntered up the wooden steps to the porch, waving with both hands like the president in his inauguration parade—but only if he’d bought the election. Nobody in their right mind would elect Sawyer to a position of responsibility. The only office he’d ever snagged was school mascot. He would be loping around the football field this year in a giant bird costume.

What didn’t quite make sense about Sawyer De Luca was his platinum hair, darker at the roots and brighter at the sun-bleached tips like a swimmer who never had to come in from the ocean and go to school. The hair didn’t go with his Italian name or his dark father and brother. He must have looked like his mom, but she lived in Georgia and nobody had ever met her. A couple of years ago, she sent him to live with his dad, who was getting out of prison, because she couldn’t handle Sawyer anymore. At least, that’s what Sawyer had told me, and it sounded about right.

After shaking a few hands and embracing DeMarcus, Sawyer sauntered over and stood in front of Will. Not in front of me. He didn’t acknowledge me at all as he stepped into Will’s personal space and said, looking down at him, “You’re in my place.”

“Oh Jesus, Sawyer!” I exclaimed. Why did he have to pick a fight while I was getting to know the new guy? He must have had a bad night. Working with his prick of an older brother, who ran the bar at the Crab Lab, tended to have that effect on him.

I opened my mouth to reassure Will that Sawyer meant no harm. Or, maybe he did, but I wouldn’t let Sawyer get away with it.

Before I could say anything, Will rose. At his full height, he towered over Sawyer. He looked down on Sawyer exactly as Sawyer had looked down on him a moment before. He growled, “This is your place? I don’t think so.”

The other boys around us stopped their joking and said in warning voices, “Sawyer.” Brody put a hand on Sawyer’s chest. Brody really was a football player and could have held Sawyer off Will single-handedly. Sawyer didn’t care. He stared up at Will with murder in his eyes.

I stood too. “Come on, Sawyer. You were the one who told Will about this party in the first place.”

“I didn’t invite him here.” Sawyer pointed at the bench where Will had been sitting.

I knew how Sawyer felt. When I’d looked forward to hooking up with him at a party, I was disappointed and even angry if he shared his night with another girl instead. But that was our long-standing agreement. We used each other when nobody more intriguing was available. Now wasn’t the time to test our pact. I said, “You’re some welcome committee.”

The joke surprised Sawyer out of his dark mood. He relaxed his shoulders and took a half step backward. Brody and the other guys retreated the way they’d come. I wouldn’t have put it past Sawyer to spring at Will now that everyone’s guard was down, but he just poked Will—gently, I thought with relief—on the cursive V emblazoned on his T-shirt. “What’s the V stand for? Virgin?”

“The Minnesota Vikings, moron,” I said. Then I turned to Will. “You will quickly come to understand that Sawyer is full of sh—”

Will spoke over my head to Sawyer. “It stands for ‘vilification.’ ”

“What? Vili . . . What does that mean?” Knitting his brow, Sawyer pulled out his phone and thumbed the keyboard. I had a large vocabulary, and his was even bigger, but we’d both found that playing dumb made life easier.

Will edged around me to peer over Sawyer’s shoulder at the screen. At the same time, he slid his hand around my waist. I hadn’t seen a move that smooth in a while. I liked the way Minnesota guys operated. He told Sawyer, “No, not two L’s. One L.”

Sawyer gave Will another wild-eyed warning. His gaze dropped to Will’s hand on my waist, then rose to my serious-as-a-heart-attack face. He told Will, “Okay, SAT. I’ll take my vocabulary quiz over here.” He retreated to the corner of the porch to talk with a cheerleader.

Relieved, I sat back down on the bench, holding Will’s hand on my side so that he had to sit down with me or get his arm jerked out of its socket. He settled closer to me than before. With his free hand, he drummed his fingers on his knee to the beat of the music filtering onto the porch. The rhythm he tapped out was so complex that I wondered whether he’d been a drummer—not for marching band like me, but for some wild rock band that got into fistfights after the hockey game was over.

As we talked, he looked into my eyes as if I was the only girl at the party, and he grinned at all my jokes. Now that my third beer was kicking in, I let go of some of my anxiety about saying exactly the right thing and just had fun. I asked him if he was part of our senior class. He was. It seemed obvious, but he could have been a freshman built like a running back. Then I explained who the other people at the party were according to the Senior Superlatives titles they were likely to get—Best Car, Most Athletic, that sort of thing.

My predictions were iffy. Each person could hold only one title, preventing a superstar like my friend Kaye from racking up all the honors and turning the high school yearbook into her biography. She might get Most Popular or Most Likely to Succeed. She was head cheerleader, a born leader, and good at everything. Harper, the yearbook photographer, might get Most Artistic or Most Original, since she wore funky clothes and retro glasses and always thought outside the box.

“What about you?” Will asked, tugging playfully at one of my braids.

“Ha! Most Likely to Wake Up on Your Lawn.”