Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(40)
Author: Jennifer Echols

“Kidding!” I exclaimed. “Sarcasm! Tonight I have to work, and tomorrow I’m going out with Will.”

She gazed up at him climbing the stairs with his drum. Then she raised one eyebrow at me. “I thought he was dating Angelica.”

I grinned brilliantly. “That was yesterday.”

***

“If you were really dating Will, of course you and I wouldn’t hook up,” Sawyer said, eyeing me from across the cab of his truck. He faced forward again as he drove past the HOME OF THE PELICANS sign and turned onto the road by the school. “We’re philanderers, but we’re not cheaters.”

I wasn’t sure of the difference. I resisted the urge to ask Sawyer to look up “philanderers” for me using the definition app on his phone, because he was driving. He aced standardized tests, but only the verbal part, never the math, and definitely not the logic.

He was doing a great impression of a logical person, though, backing me into a corner. “If you’re only fake-dating Will,” he reasoned, “why can’t we still hook up?”

“He asked me not to,” I said. “I understand where he’s coming from. He’s trying to make Angelica jealous. If he and I are supposed to be dating, but you and I have something on the side, it won’t look like Will and I are serious.”

“What if we were careful?” Sawyer said in the voice of a lecherous old man, sliding his hand under the leg of my shorts and up to the top of my thigh.

“I don’t think so.” Laughing, I tossed his hand away. “You are the opposite of careful.”

“This sounds like the opposite of faking,” he pointed out. “Will really cares what you and I are up to. You’re genuinely concerned about what he thinks. There’s nothing fake about that. Why don’t you give in and date him?”

I shrugged to the live oaks passing by the window. “I don’t want a boyfriend,” I said for the millionth time in my teenage life. “But for once, somebody’s come along who’s making it hard to keep that promise to myself.”

I turned to look at Sawyer, so handsome in an offbeat way. His white-blond hair, even when it was damp from his shower, was a color I’d only seen before on small children, and his preppie clothes looked like something his mom would have picked out for him in elementary school. But his strong hands lay on the wheel, his sinewy forearms tensed as he steered downtown, and something dark behind his eyes reminded me he was more experienced than he should have been at seventeen.

“You’ve never come across a girl like that?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said like he didn’t have to think about it.

Suddenly I burst out, “Sawyer, you can tell me if you’re g*y.”

“Gay!” He gaped across the cab at me, then jerked the steering wheel to straighten the truck and avoid hitting the curb. “After what we did Sunday night?”

“Sunday night was good,” I admitted sheepishly.

“I thought you enjoyed it,” he said as though I hadn’t spoken. Turning onto the main drag through town, he grumbled, “You’ve just got g*y on the brain because you work for Bob and Roger.”

“No.” Well, maybe. “It was just an explanation for why you never commit, even to the point of asking the same girl out twice in a row.”

He pulled the truck into a space near the antiques store, killed the engine, and looked over at me. “What’s your excuse?”

He had me there. Backed against the door of his truck already, I had nowhere to go. I didn’t want to talk about this. He knew it. And in his challenge, I heard all the regret I felt myself when I expected to hang with him at a party but he went home with another girl.

Seeming to realize he’d gone too far, he took a deep breath, popped his neck, and settled his shoulders back against the driver’s seat. “I like somebody who would never fall for me,” he admitted. Then he gave me his sternest glare. “A girl-type person.”

“Is it me?” I asked.

He blinked. In that pause, I was afraid the answer was yes, and I was the one who’d gone too far. I wished I could take it back.

“No!” he exploded. “Are you insane?” He started laughing uncontrollably.

I talked over him. “That makes me feel like a million bucks, Sawyer.”

Still grinning, he pulled himself together. “Look, Tia, I will just flat-out tell you. I really enjoy getting drunk with you. That’s generally the highlight of my week, besides when you give me a hand job.”

“I’m so glad.” Yeah, I was beginning to regret Sunday night now.

“But you and me, together, we would be the death of each other. I’d be like, ‘I know a guy who has some crack. Go with?’ And you’d be like, ‘Sure!’ Somebody has to be the voice of reason in a relationship, Tia, and our voice of reason has had a tracheotomy. If we really dated, in half an hour we’d be facedown in a ditch on the south side of Tampa.”

I glared across the truck at him. I wasn’t sure whether he was making a reference to my mom doing drugs or not.

The next second, I decided he wasn’t, at least not on purpose. He seemed to make the connection only afterward, and he looked sidelong at me with a guilty expression. By way of apology, he said, “I know I can tell you anything. If I wanted to come out, you would be the first person I would tell. I’m not g*y. I honestly like this girl.”

“Really?” I honestly like this girl was no statement of undying love. But I’d never heard Sawyer express even that lukewarm level of affection for anyone in his life, except me.

He nodded sadly. “It’s not going to work out. There’s nothing I can do. Talking about it won’t change that.”

“Are you sure?” I coaxed him. Despite all these confessions in the last fifteen minutes, Sawyer and I weren’t the kind of friends to discuss our problems with each other at length. We both avoided saying anything serious if we could possibly help it. I was dying of curiosity about who this girl might be, though.

“This is weird,” he said, “but I want to keep it private. I’m kind of enjoying, for once in my life, thinking something that doesn’t immediately come out my mouth.”

That made me laugh. “Let me know how it goes. I’ve never experienced that myself.”

“I know.” He extended his hand across the cab. “Come here.”

With a glance around to make sure we weren’t being watched by innocent tourists on the sidewalk, I scooted closer to him.