Biggest Flirts (Superlatives #1)(50)
Author: Jennifer Echols

A long time and endless explorations later, his warm hand moved into the front of my panties and rubbed me there. He knew what he was doing, and I figured he’d done this plenty of times before. Naïve he was not—not about this. I’d done it before too, but with him, it definitely felt different. Before long, sparkles like points of moonlight on the waves washed down my body. He kissed me deeply as it happened.

Then he placed sweet kisses on the corner of my mouth and chuckled to himself. “I’m the king of the world,” he murmured.

In a sexy, satisfied tone that most chicks would use to reaffirm their love, I said, “You are the king of the dorks.”

He closed his eyes and rubbed the tip of his nose back and forth against mine. He breathed into my mouth, “I’m the king of you.”

“Yes, you are,” I said softly, “but not for long.” I slid my hand onto him. “Your turn.”

15

THE ALARM ON MY CELL phone woke me midmorning on Sunday, and I cursed Will within an inch of his existence. I was justified in doing that now that we were in love. He was the one who’d convinced me to start using an alarm to get myself up in the morning. Now, because I was responsible, the timer had gone awry. After staying up late with him last night, I was up bright and early, rather than sleeping until the last possible second before I had to go in to the antiques shop.

But when I glanced at the screen, I saw it wasn’t the alarm. It was Violet calling. That meant she was in trouble.

Five minutes later I was on the phone with Will. “Can I borrow your car?”

“Yes,” he yawned. “Why?”

“Don’t ask,” I said.

“I’m asking.”

I let out a sigh that lasted for about seven seconds, one for every year my mom had been gone. “Violet wants to come home. She wants my dad to come get her right this moment before her boyfriend shows up, which means she feels threatened. And I can’t wake my dad for this. He has to get a full night’s sleep before he goes to work tonight, or it’s a safety issue. He used to take off work all the time to get Izzy and Sophia out of trouble, and he racked up so many demerits that they were threatening to fire him. He can’t take off work for that shit anymore. I’ll go get her myself.”

“I’ll go with you,” Will said.

“No!” I exploded. If I wasn’t careful, I was going to wake up my dad with my hysterics. I said more quietly, “This is exactly why I shouldn’t have called you, but I thought you would be furious if you found out I called Sawyer.”

“Tia!” he barked right back. He must have been afraid his parents would overhear him, too, because he took a deep breath, then lowered his voice. “Sawyer wouldn’t let you go alone either. No guy in his right mind would let you borrow his car to do something dangerous by yourself.”

“It’s not dangerous, exactly,” I qualified. “Maybe not. Her boyfriend disappeared with his friends for three days and left her at their apartment with no car. The only reason it might be the slightest bit dangerous is that they have a bad habit of coming back.”

“Who is they?”

“My sisters’ boyfriends and f**ked-up husbands,” I explained. “And in all the times my dad has rescued my sisters, a gun has never come out, but I wouldn’t be surprised. I keep up with the news. This is how people get shot.”

“Then why are you going?” Will demanded.

“My dad can’t,” I said. “So I have to.”

“Then so do I,” Will said. “I’ll be there in five.” He hung up.

I cursed him again, not because he’d fallen down on the job this time, but the opposite. I did not want him witnessing the Cruz family’s annual audition for a reality show. But he was right. I should have known there was no way to borrow a guy’s car without the guy attached.

If he was coming with me, though, I was going to use him. After finding something to put on among the piles in my own room, I waded to the laundry room and searched there. When we’d first moved in, I’d been very careful about sorting the clean laundry from the dirty. I knew the clean shirt I wanted was under there somewhere. But we’d had way too much stuff to store in this tiny house, and over the months, the laundry room had become the place to stash things. I excavated the back wall like an archaeological dig. By the time Will knocked softly on the front door, I’d found it.

I pulled him inside the house. “Put this on,” I said, handing him one of my dad’s sleeveless T-shirts that he used to cut grass in, back when he cut the grass. “It’s clean.”

Will held it up and eyed the oil stains dubiously.

“Let me rephrase that,” I said. “It’s been washed. But you know what? You’re right. You have a respectable tan now, and you could just take off your shirt when we get over there.” I stretched the bottom of his T-shirt up above his waistband to make sure there wasn’t a preppie flat front going on, like Aidan would wear. They were cargo shorts, which would do nicely. My eyes moved to his thick arms. Briefly I considered giving him a Sharpie tattoo on his biceps.

“You’ve got your shades?” I asked. “And a baseball cap you can turn around backward?” When he nodded, I said, “Let’s go.”

The apartment was worse than I’d pictured. I knew Violet and Ricky had moved three times in the five months they’d been together. They had a nasty habit of not paying their rent. I figured the apartment had gotten worse each time, but I wasn’t prepared for this: brick buildings that didn’t look so old but hadn’t been taken care of at all, tagged with black graffiti—not even colorful, pretty graffiti—underneath a tangle of palm trees and dehydrated-looking water oaks, surrounded by long grass and trash, all practically underneath the interstate.

Will pulled his car into one of the empty spaces, between a rusted-out truck propped up on concrete blocks and a scary-looking van for plumbers or kidnappers. “Wow,” he said, gazing at the building. “Really?”

“Yes,” I said. “Honk the horn.”

“That’s rude,” he said. “You’ll get us shot.”

“Not for that,” I said. “They’re used to it.” Teenage high school dropouts had their own code. I was a little horrified that I knew it so well.

He hit the horn, two short beeps.

“No, really lay on it,” I said.