First and Goal (Moving the Chains #1) (25 page)

I continue rubbing her feet while I check over her work. I’m just happy she’s saying words like “please” and letting me touch her.

“What book did you get assigned for Lit?” She asks.

“Moby Dick,” I mumble.

“Ouch. Long and boring.”

“You?” I shove her binder back in front of her. She nailed it. Just like I knew she could.

“The Metamorphosis.”

I wince. “Kafka. Very existential. Good luck with that.”

I expect some kind of wisecrack about how I shouldn’t even know who Kafka is, let alone the basis of the novel. Instead she shrugs. Guess I’ve won that battle. Not a single dumb jock comment leaves her lips.

“Eh, existentialism is my specialty. How’d I do?”

“Got ‘em all right so far. I still can’t figure out why you got a B on that quiz. You know the material.”

“I know,” she sighs and looks up to meet my eyes. “I just don’t like math very much. And like you said before, I get myself all worked up, I guess.”

“Don’t do that this week.”

“It’s not like I’m trying to do poorly on purpose,” she gives me a weak smile.

There’s so much more I want to say. If only I had the balls. If only Eddie hadn’t fucked her over so badly last year. I gotta get outta here before I do something stupid and ruin everything.

“Well, I have to go search for Melville in the library and you’ve gotta get to work.”

“Yeah, you’re right. I have to get going.” She pulls her feet from my lap and grabs her shoes from the floor, slipping them on.

I linger in the doorway to watch her pack up. “You want me to find Kafka for you while I’m at it?”

She looks up and walks towards the doorway, her bag slung over a slender shoulder. “Sure, thanks.”

Maybe this afternoon hasn’t been a total loss after all. I call Evie accepting any offers from me a win. “No problem. See ya tomorrow, Eva.”

She follows me out the door, and I watch as she walks across the library with long, graceful strides. It’s all I can do not to drool on my shirt.

Making my way through the shelves of books in search of Melville is the last thing I want to be doing right now. Honestly, I’d rather be at practice beating up my body in a futile effort to quiet my mind. I’m not really paying attention to my surroundings, instead mapping out my next play for Evie. My feet make contact with something on the floor and the next thing I know, I’m falling forward. Athletic reflexes are the only thing that keep me from face planting. When I turn around to glare at whatever tripped me up, my eyes land on the devastated face of one of my best friends.

I don’t let Jeremy drive over to the diner. His depressed, incoherent babbling seriously scares the shit out of me. He hasn’t shut up since we left the library, except to make fun of me about Evie. Yeah, all my friends love using my cowardice to make themselves feel better about their own problems.

I coax some more information out of him on the drive over. Turns out he only applied to two colleges that don’t require auditions for the music departments and was denied early admission to both. What he neglects to mention in his doom and gloom mood is that he still has auditions for three more of the top music schools in the country. He apparently forgets that I already know this.

He announced to us one night that he doesn’t want to be in a band that tours all over the world, taking him away from his girlfriend, Alyssa, all the time. Instead he wants to land a cushy gig in a symphony or orchestra somewhere.

Jeremy’s so talented that the world is literally his oyster. He only has to choose what he wants, and what he wants is his girl.

For the next ten minutes, I remind him that the moment any of those schools hear him play, he’ll be offered a full ride. Trying to get through to him when he’s in one of his moods is like trying to convince the sun not to rise in the morning. Absolutely certain that these first two rejections are a harbinger of things to come, he’s sure Alyssa will dump him over his perceived failures.

He’s such an idiot sometimes.

Jeremy and Alyssa have been together since freshman year. She’s freaking head over heels for him, which is something I’ve been jealous of for three years. But what really stings is the fact that Alyssa wasn’t his first choice.

Evie was.

Freshman year. Band room. Three weeks into school. After practice when no one else was around. Full on tongue.

This was the story we got from him when he rode his bike over to my house to hang out with me, Alex, Mike, and Rach by the pool one afternoon. It’s all kind of fuzzy in my memory now, probably due to psychological repression. It was a scarring day in my pathetic life.

In true Jeremy fashion, he first told us all the gory details. How she let him invade her mouth with his tongue, how she didn’t make a move to stop him when he copped a feel of her supple, yet small tits. Those were his actual descriptors. Rach laughed at him and called him a liar while Alex drooled, and Mike rolled his eyes. I just kept my mouth shut and blushed. In hindsight, and knowing what I know now, Jeremy was probably embellishing. Just a little.

Next, he told us his mystery vixen’s identity. Here’s where things got a little hairy.

The only person on that deck who knew about my super-secret crush on Evie was Alex. I didn’t dare tell anyone else since I knew nothing would ever happen. My silent adoration was ludicrous, and I knew it all too well. I was a quiet loser. Evie was beyond awesome. Apparently, Jeremy thought so too. Alex did not agree with Jeremy’s choice of romantic interest.

No sooner had Jeremy uttered Evie’s name than Alex tackled him into the pool, fully clothed. No one else moved or said anything for a few minutes. Rach and Mike obviously had no idea why Jeremy going after Evie was anything to get bent about.

After the initial shock wore off, the entire scene went even more haywire. Rachel screamed at the edge of the deck for Alex to stop dunking Jeremy. Alex proceeded with his own version of waterboarding, alternating between questioning Jeremy about the validity of his story and making him promise to never so much as look Evie’s way again.

Mike jumped in, easily prying Jeremy out of Alex’s grip. Then Mike dove into his own inquisition about why Alex had gone off the deep end, assuming that Alex had a thing for Evie and was jealous about Jeremy’s little foray to second base. That assumption only served to piss Mike off more. He took turns trying to drown the both of them. I sat there blinking in shock at the scene unfolding before me. Alex was the only guy I was certain wasn’t trying to make a move on the star of my spank bank.

Over the shouting and thrashing in the pool, a couple of things became crystal clear. Jeremy was convinced that Evie being so nice to him meant she wanted to give him his man card on a silver platter. He wasn’t thinking about hand jobs or making it to third base; it was all or nothing in his mind. Mike had apparently been friends with Evie since kindergarten and wasn’t about to let anyone deflower her anytime soon.

By this point, Rachel’s screams had alerted Mom that something was amiss. She came barreling onto the deck, intent on putting a stop to the unusually volatile teenage insanity unfolding in the pool.

Everyone was shouting, the volume level rising as each person struggled to be heard over the cacophony. Until that point, I’d never considered what it might do to me for someone else to have Evie even though I knew I never would. The entire time I sat in my chair in a hazy combination of absolute shock and agony.

Right up until Alex outed my unspoken love for one Eva Papageorgiou. Three sets of eyes trained on me with new information about what a loser I was. Mom and Alex already knew, of course, but the damage was done.

I was mortified.

And that was how all of my closest friends discovered that dorky me had been pining after an unattainable girl for weeks.

At the time, none of us were particularly suave with the ladies. I was by far the worst. My crippling shyness made it physically impossible to utter a word in the presence of anyone I didn’t know well. On the field I was becoming a different person. I could bark out plays like no one’s business. Social situations were another story.

In middle school, Mom actually conned me into taking dance lessons with her, citing that Dad refused, and she’d always wanted to learn. They even ganged up on me with the whole stereotypical, “It’ll help refine your athleticism” bit. My parents didn’t admit until the course was finished that it was an attempt to help me with my girl problems.

Too bad those classes didn’t give me the balls to ask anyone to dance.

If dance lessons weren’t already enough fodder for the guys and Rach, this newest revelation about my secret crush sent my level of loserdom into hyper drive. The next few weeks I endured constant torture and harassment about Evie. But to Jeremy’s credit, he never approached her again.

Within a month, he was trailing after Alyssa like a lovesick puppy.

At first, I felt guilty that Jeremy moved on so quickly from Evie to one of her best friends. I didn’t want her feelings to be hurt. Mike did some quick checking into my suspicions. As it turned out, Evie wasn’t interested in Jeremy, anyway. She was thankful for the diversion of his attention.

I never did ask Mike anything else about Evie. Alex was convinced Mike was the man for information and running interference for me. To my horror, Mike seemed happy to oblige…to an extent. The more they all pushed me to get close to her, the further into my shell I retreated.

That was around the time that Mike met Chelsie, and Alex started dating Bekah. They abandoned my hopeless cause in favor of their own pursuits. Everything returned to the status quo.

Case closed, end of story.

It took Jeremy two solid months of wooing as he called it. Alyssa made him work for it, and he liked the challenge. He never looked at another girl again. She’s been devoted to him ever since.

And now, he’s practically hyperventilating in the passenger seat, already imagining her throwing three years of history and all of their carefully laid plans for a shared future out the window. My multiple examples of how much she obviously loves him fall on deaf ears.

Drummers. Not as cool under pressure as they’d have you believe.

Margie, my favorite hostess, is working up front when we arrive at the diner, and wastes no time trying to coax information out of me about mine and Evie's relationship status. This instantly puts a smug grin on Jeremy’s face as he relates to her all of my bumbling attempts at romancing everyone’s favorite waitress. Hey, whatever it takes to make him feel better.

Margie offers to put in a good word for me. That’s when I cut them off. Jeremy’s mental health aside, even I have a little more pride than that.

Evie seems friendly but distracted when Jeremy and I sit in our usual booth. I try to focus most of my attention on the guy sitting across from me, anyway. We continue to talk things over until I feel slightly better about Jeremy’s frame of mind. The conversation doesn’t stop until Evie brings our food.

As soon as she leaves to take care of another table, he starts in on me.

“You need to grow a pair and lay it on the line, Rob. It’s senior year. How are you gonna feel if you walk away from her this summer, never knowing what might have been?” Jeremy digs into his food.

“Speaking of what might have been, do you know what really happened with her and Hinton last year?” I ask him, scanning the room for her. I’m well aware that the entrance to the kitchen is behind me. If I see her waiting on other customers, then she won’t be sneaking up from behind to overhear our conversation about her.

I spot Evie a few tables down. She’s waiting on a guy who looks to be in his thirties and is sitting alone in a booth. He’s not bad looking for an old dude, with black hair, brown eyes and a square jaw. He’s clean and well dressed. And he distinctly gives me the creeps. I can’t put my finger on why, exactly. I’m not usually one to judge a book by its cover, but there’s something about this guy. The way he looks at her unnerves me completely. Like she’s his sole property. I watch carefully to see if she shows any signs of discomfort. One tense move from her, and I’ll be over there faster than lightning.

Jeremy looks over his shoulder and follows my steady gaze. He smirks at me, probably assuming I’m leering at Evie. “I honestly can’t believe this is the first time you’ve asked me about that. I figured after they broke up last year that you’d be picking my brain for info.”

“I know what Eddie claimed happened which was total bullshit.” I watch as Evie makes her way to a new table that’s just been seated, relieved that she's done with Creepy Guy.

Jeremy laughs. “I still can’t believe what you said at that athletic conference never got back to her.”

“Yeah, yeah. Didn’t Alyssa ever talk to you about it? I thought her and Evie were best friends?”

Jeremy shrugs, taking another mouthful of his burger. “If she ever did talk to Lys about it, Lys didn’t see fit to tell me. Why are you asking about that? That was last year.”

“Yeah, but,” I stop mid-sentence as Evie approaches our table.

“You guys doin’ okay?”