Don't Kiss the Messenger (Edgelake High School, #1)(11)

After he walked away, Bryn headed over to the iPod dock and turned off the song.

“Ech. Let’s put in something I can actually dance to,” she said, looking over her shoulder at me. “Do you have any Katy Perry?”

I looked up at Bryn. She failed a very important test. I avoided judging people externally, for obvious reasons, so I had devised my own system that had been proven accurate over the years. I judged people based on three important tastes: music, movies, and books. I had cultivated lifelong friendships based on a simple connection to a favorite band, a favorite scene in a movie, or a character in a book. Friendships had severed and fizzled that lacked these crucial similarities. Synchronicity is a powerful bond.

After lifting weights and having to endure an hour of Katy Perry, I needed some serious R&R. I headed into the locker room, grabbed my backpack, and pulled out a copy of Sandman. I ran my hands over the glossy cover. The comic series had become my latest walking material.

In some cities it was illegal to text while crossing the street—or even while walking down the sidewalk. I couldn’t imagine my habit of reading books while walking was any safer with my attention in my characters’ world, spying on their movements and listening in on their conversations. I had fallen off the curb more times than I could count and had collided with street signs, fire hydrants, and the mutually distracted pedestrian. Still, the mishaps hadn’t stopped my habit. The benefit outweighed the risk.

I didn’t read to escape. I didn’t even read to be entertained. It was more elemental, more essential than that. I read because imagination was the only thing that elevated me beyond my own reality. To look at my world as my only plane of existence was so limiting, and a little depressing. I needed the boundless worlds I found in good fiction. I could stare at the characters and obsess over them. But they couldn’t stare back. They couldn’t ask me any questions, or know me. They couldn’t ever love me but they couldn’t judge or reject me, either. They couldn’t react to me. It was kind of like stalking, but a character in a novel can’t get a restraining order.

Bryn walked out of the locker room a few steps behind me. We turned down the maze of cinderblock hallways that combined the locker rooms, weight rooms, and training offices. When we turned the corner, we spotted Emmett with a couple of ropy armed football players walking toward us, helmets in hands. Their eyes traced Bryn as if she was a dessert cart. When they met my eyes, they lifted their chins in acknowledgement. That was possibly the one nice thing about having my face. I didn’t get the ogling. A guy would have to look at me too long for his own comfort.

My stomach knotted when I saw Emmett and I pressed my hand over my abdomen, embarrassed, as if he could see my muscles contract. But he didn’t notice. He was too busy drinking in Bryn, as if he could touch her with his gaze.

…

EMMETT

I sucked in a breath and held it. From a distance, Bryn’s beauty had been obvious and notorious. But up close she was even more stunning. I had to make an effort not to lean closer to her, just like you would lean close to examine a painting or photograph—something that stops and catches you because you feel a pull, a desire to know more, to admire it, to savor it.

Bryn turned and subjected me to the full force of her smile. I looked at the outline of her heart-shaped lips. Oh my God, I was staring. In one look I was caught. One second, that’s all it can take for the axis of your life to shift. My heart was flailing like a fish on a hook, caught between a fight for freedom and an inevitable surrender.

There was more than a physical connection happening. It was an energy, an aura, like she dipped the molecules of oxygen in the air around us in an addictive stimulant.

And that’s when I noticed CeCe standing next to Bryn, watching us watch each other. Her lips curled up in a knowing smile and it made me realize how hard I was staring. Aaron and Scott continued past us. Scott gave my back an encouraging nudge. The concrete corridor echoed their footsteps, lapping away.

A few seconds ticked by and it occurred to me no one was talking. CeCe poked Bryn’s side and it made her jump. She giggled, a nervous giggle. The noise surprised me since she seemed too stoic, too confident in her poise, too suggestive in the way she stood with her breasts and hips aimed in my direction to be something as uncanny as nervous.

“I’m Emmett,” I said to Bryn.

“I know,” she said. I waited for something more, but her eyes were pulled down to the ground. Her teeth tugged at her bottom lip.

“Are you guys eating at McClain tonight?” I asked. I looked directly at Bryn.

She glanced sideways at me and her eyelashes swept over the glint of her blue eyes. That look killed me. I knew I would be fantasizing over that teasing glance for weeks. She looked over at CeCe. “Are you going to be there?” she asked.

CeCe patted the comic book pressed against her chest. “I can’t tonight,” she said. “I have a date with Neil Gaiman. He’s my boyfriend, these days.”

I glanced at the cover of Sandman. I had read the entire series my freshman year. I got heckled for it on the bus, when all the other guys preferred to Snapchat with their girlfriends.

“CeCe, you have a boyfriend?” Bryn said in an unbelieving voice. “Since when?”

CeCe looked up at the ceiling as if she was contemplating this question. “Neil and I have been involved off and on for years, when I can make time for him. He’s very accommodating to my schedule.”