Maybe This Time(66)

I quickly shoved the camera back in my backpack and zipped it up. “Don’t tell him.”

“Which part am I not telling him about?” Micah asked with an innocent smile. “That?” She pointed to the bag. “Or that?” She pointed to my face, and I could feel my blush.

“Please,” I said, and grabbed a mascara tube from Micah’s makeup stash and turned toward the mirror.

“Come in,” Micah sang out.

Andrew poked his head around the door. “I was told this was where the party was.”

I laughed, even though his statement wasn’t funny at all. Crap. Micah wouldn’t have to say a word about anything—I was going to give myself away all on my own.

He couldn’t know I liked him yet. Not with him leaving in six weeks and me having no idea at all how he felt about me.

His eyes flickered to me. “Sophie Evans,” he said. “My maze partner. Nice shirt.”

I looked down at my long-sleeved tee, which was navy blue with little bumblebees all over it. Then I said, “I can get you one.”

He stepped all the way into the room. “Does it come in turtleneck form? I only wear my tight shirts in that style.” He sat on the edge of the bed.

“Don’t tempt me,” I said.

He shrugged. “You’re the one who offered.”

I studied him from where I sat. Andrew Hart was handsome. It wasn’t like I hadn’t noticed that before. I mean, I had noticed it the first day I met him. But personality always played a bigger role for me, and the more I got to know him, the more his looks had faded. But somewhere in the last couple of months—maybe it was sitting watching fireworks through a hole in the roof during July Fourth, or eating ambrosia salad off his fork at a funeral, or finding our way through a corn maze together—he had turned a corner and I could now objectively say he was very, very handsome. It was a combination of a lot of things—the way he carried himself with ease and confidence, his thick brown hair, his playful blue eyes, his contagious smile.

“What?” he asked.

He’d caught me staring. I tried to play it off and started applying mascara.

“So is this what you’ve been doing for the past however many Thanksgivings?” I asked, facing the mirror with Micah.

“Coming to Micah’s house? No, we just met at the beginning of the year.”

Micah laughed and swatted at his leg.

I rolled my eyes. “I meant spending it with the family of the business your dad is mentoring or whatever.”

“Actually, we usually cater on Thanksgiving,” Andrew said.

“What?” I asked, meeting his eyes in the mirror. “Really?”

“Really.”

“You poor, overworked white boy,” Micah said.

“I know. It’s a true sob story,” he said.

Micah held her hand out for the mascara and I placed it in her upturned palm. “It is kind of sad, actually,” she said.

“Sad, pathetic? Or sad, you now want to take care of me?”

“A little of both,” Micah said.

“I’ll take care of you,” I said, then my ears went hot. It was supposed to come out as a joke but it sounded extra flirty.

Andrew’s brow furrowed in confusion.

“Well, that’s the best offer you’re getting all day,” Micah said. “Although my mother might make a similar offer.”

“Um …” he said.

“That sounded inappropriate,” Micah said. “It wasn’t meant to. I just meant, she really likes to mother people. All of us will be taken care of by my mother today. I’m going to shut up now.”

I laughed, grateful she had hijacked the awkwardness because I had been on a one-way street to There’s No Turning Back From Here.

Micah capped her mascara and threw it into her makeup bag. “There. I am now even more beautiful.”

I smiled at her. She already had naturally long lashes and didn’t even need mascara at all. “Should we join the others?” I asked.

“Well, unless someone else wanted to borrow any makeup.” Micah winked at Andrew.

“I have always wondered what I’d look like with eyeliner.”

“You’d look amazing,” Micah said, then stood and pointed to the carpet where she’d been sitting. “Come. It is time for your wondering to be over.”

“I was joking,” he said.

“Joking has consequences, my friend. And this is yours.” She dug through her makeup bag for her eyeliner. “Andrew. Now.”

He rolled his eyes and sat on the carpet next to me.

“Sophie is better at applying eyeliner than I am. It’s her steady artist hand,” Micah said. She extended the eyeliner that she’d freed from her bag to me.

I held her gaze. She raised her eyebrows in a challenge, as if asking me what I was going to do about my newly discovered feelings.

“I am pretty good at applying eyeliner.” I swiped the pencil from her hand and turned to face Andrew. I uncapped the pencil, then examined the point.

“These are dire consequences for a joke,” Andrew said. “Letting you near my eyes with such a sharp object.”

“You don’t trust me?” I asked.

He raised one side of his mouth into a half smile and said, “No.” But he also lowered himself off his knees and turned to face me. My heart was racing and I tried to ignore it.