The Ex Games(43)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“What were you and Gavin talking about?”

Nick rolled his eyes and let out a frustrated sigh. “He thinks I’ve wanted to be with you all these years, and his proof is the way I acted when you got hurt today. He says good friends shouldn’t lie to each other. He’s really lording it over me, too. Such an ass.”

“Is he right?” I whispered.

Nick’s dark eyes drilled into me, and the set of his jaw hardened. He slipped one hand onto my waist, underneath the parka.

“Uh,” I protested.

He put his other hand on the opposite side of my waist.

“Nick,” I said.

He slid me toward him across the seat.

“You,” I whispered, looking into his eyes.

He was about to kiss me. His lips brushed mine. He pressed down on me with his chest, bent me backward until I lay down across the seat, and he lay on top of me. He closed his eyes, and the tip of his nose touched mine in an Eskimo kiss. Then he opened his eyes, stared hard at me, and went still. “You want to make out and then have an argument?” he whispered.

“Yes,” I said. It would be worth it.

“You sure?”

I swallowed. “Absolutely.”

“Then tell me what happened when you broke your leg, and why you’re so terrified of heights after all this time.”

I looked up into his dark eyes. I wanted to say something, but his weight was heavy on my chest, and I could hardly breathe.

“I broke my leg.” Suddenly the story gushed out of me. “I was eleven. I loved outdoorsy sports. My parents let me go to adventure camp up in the mountains in Tennessee. My first day there, I fell.”

That moment had flashed through my mind so many times since, it was as much a part of me as my lungs or my heart or my red hair, and I couldn’t describe it to Nick. The long fall, with repeated jerks upward as safety mechanisms caught me and then failed. Realizing I was on the ground. Wondering why I wasn’t hurt. Trying to stand. Seeing all the blood, and then my leg. The slowly growing horror that continued to build over the next few days until I reached my breaking point.

Between our bodies and the seat of the SUV, Nick squeezed my hand.

I gasped. “In Tennessee I was known as the girl who came in a wheelchair to the Valentine’s dance. The girl whose friends had to go out of their way to include her when they went to a concert or the mall. At first, I counted myself lucky to have friends like that. But a couple of times I overheard them arguing about why they always had to invite me when it was such a pain to find the wheelchair ramps everywhere we went. They said it would be so much easier to flirt with boys if they weren’t always worried about me.

“And then, one day when I’d made it out of the wheelchair and onto crutches, I gimped into the room and caught them imitating me. I didn’t see enough of it that I recognized myself, but I could tell from everyone else’s stricken expressions that they thought I had. It was so foreign. I used to be in charge of things, like Chloe. I was president of the fifth grade class. And I used to make good grades like Chloe and Liz. Gosh, it’s hard to think back that far. Fifth grade math must have been a lot easier than eleventh grade math.”

“You think?” Nick’s words were dry, but his tone was gentle.

“I had never been that girl people made fun of. I didn’t want to be that girl. I am not that girl.”

He watched me, wishing he had never asked this question, wondering what possessed him to break up with somebody easy like Fiona.

But no—with tentative fingers, he brushed a strand of my hair away from my forehead.

And for just a moment, I really wasn’t that girl. I had never been that girl. I was that cool teenager again, who moved to a new town and found a new boyfriend. The girl who started over.

I sniffled. “By the time we moved here, I was walking without a limp. People had no idea. I was only the new girl, the red-haired girl, the girl who Nick Krieger made a fool of.”

If Nick hadn’t been holding my hand, I would have slapped it over my mouth. This was what I thought, but it’s not what I’d intended to share with Nick right then.

His eyes widened in shock. Sorrow moved across his face, and then worry. “I wanted to tell you, Hayden. Yes, I had a bet with Gavin in seventh grade, and you wandered into it. But I really liked you. I wished Liz had never told you about the bet, and we could have stayed together.”

“Why didn’t you come clean with me when you figured out you liked me?”

He sighed, a short, disdainful puff through his nose. “I was thirteen.”

I wasn’t buying it. “You had a bet. You couldn’t lose a bet. If you have a choice between me and winning, you’ll choose winning every time. It’s still true.”

The worried expression on his face morphed into anger. He let go of my hand and sat up, his chest heavier on mine just before his weight lifted from me completely. “You are not going to put this on me,” he barked.

“I’m not trying to put anything on you.” I backed across the seat and scooted up to sit against the door.

“You can blame me or your fall or whatever you want for not being able to go off that jump. But the bottom line is, some people are competitors and some people aren’t. There’s no way you’re suddenly going to decide at age seventeen to become a competitor. You don’t have it in you. You’re just scared.”

I would have been mad at Nick for saying this to me at any time. But right now, after I’d spent the night fainting and I desperately needed comfort, I was downright bitter. “Me!” I lashed out. “You’re one to talk. You’re scared to tell your father that you made a mistake, agreeing to this challenge with me. You’re the coward.” I opened the door to a swirl of frigid air, remembered I was still wearing Nick’s parka, and struggled out of it.

“That’s bullshit.” He grabbed the back of the parka, but I got the distinct impression he was not trying to be a gentleman by helping me out of it. He just wanted his parka back. “When you feel cornered, you’ll just fling whatever you’ve got at people, and you don’t care who gets hurt with what.”

“I am not scared.” I slid down from the truck seat into Liz’s stepdad’s galoshes, then turned to face Nick one last time. “I am not scared of boarding or you, and I will prove it to you tomorrow. If you think I’m going easy on you in the comp just because you have a debilitating injury from yesterday—”