The Ex Games(12)
Author: Jennifer Echols

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.

Someone like me. I was terrified of messing this up, too. Which was exactly

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.