Don't Kiss the Messenger (Edgelake High School, #1)(20)

I thought about the way Emmett looked at me tonight. Something knowing, something close to sympathetic, as if he understood how I felt.

I hated the reaction my body had toward him, like a magnetic pull I couldn’t resist. It was more than physical. It was chemical.

It was ridiculous.

The table lamp on my desk bathed the room in a bronze glow. Usually I loved the dark, cavernous walls but tonight I felt suffocated, as if the entire world was pressing down. I picked up my phone and scrolled through missed messages when I noticed the music I had saved from Emmett’s piano solo at the administration building. I turned on the fifteen second piece and listened.

The notes poured out of the speaker and I closed my eyes, concentrating on the keys. I had a hunch I knew the classical piece and I searched for Schubert and found the song, Impromptu in G flat. I turned it on and lay back down on my bed.

The piano music fell around me like rain. It made something tight inside my chest start to unfurl. The notes climbed higher, turning hopeful. Each key sounded like a rain drop rolling off of a leaf, from a high branch, and lightly hitting a stream with the lightest taps, the softest pings.

I opened my eyes and felt all my tension slip away. I felt cleansed. But I felt something even more.

I didn’t allow myself to have crushes. I simply wouldn’t let my mind go there; it was like a program I had mastered. It was a switch I could easily snap off. I had flirted with guys before. I had plenty of guy friends. I had even messed around with a few at parties. But I never let myself want them, not intimately. I never let myself imagine they could want me. It was more likely that I’d be rocketed to space and sent on a six-year expedition to Mars, than end up in a relationship here on earth.

I spent years training my brain to think logically, to be practical. Realistic. Reasonable. I guided and governed decisions as if everything in life could be applied to the scientific method. My heart, on the other hand, was determined to defy all logic, and refused to be limited or defined. The heart, it appears, doesn’t learn its lessons, avoid danger, run from confrontation, or walk away from disaster. The heart is the anarchist of the mind. The naughty child that never grows up. The hopeless romantic. The dreamer. The optimist. The risk taker. The sail that always wants to move. The wings that never want to land.

Our brain asks us: Why should I? And our heart simply replies: Why not?

I pulled my hands through my hair. The music was getting to my head.

A question raked my brain.

Why him?





Chapter Six


CeCe


The campus of Edgelake is home to over five thousand students between the high school and college. This number may intimidate some teenagers, but it created an anonymity that I had always found comforting. You could walk on campus all day without running into a single person you knew. It was also unlikely that, in the off-chance you happened to verbally assault a groupie goblin at a party, the news wouldn’t travel further than a few apartment buildings or campus dorms.

But, when you’re an athlete, your world shrinks.

There were twenty-three high school sports on campus. That squeezed the campus down from several thousand to an intimate few hundred. Which made gossip run its course faster than a kissing disease.

That was why I appreciated the excuse to miss our morning weight and cardio workout the day after the incident, and sit in on a captain meeting.

When I showed up at McClain’s after the meeting, I was careful not to lock eyes with anyone as I grabbed a fruit smoothie and an energy bar. I planned to make a quick detour for my twenty ounce mocha at The Music Room. I was still feeling sorry for myself, and needed a chocolate-caffeine fix. Maybe I’d splurge and get whipped cream.

I pocketed the energy bar, and on my way out I noticed someone waving at me. I made the mistake of looking over at VanBree and Aisha, sitting with a girl I didn’t recognize. They stood up and I blinked hard when I realized the third girl was Bryn. She wore a light blue button-up dress shirt, tucked into a pencil-straight black skirt. Dark rimmed glasses were perched on the bridge of her nose. She looked surprisingly intelligent in the outfit and with her hair swept up in a lose bun above her neck, she could have been mistaken for a tutoring instructor, or a model using the McClain Center as a photo shoot for donning a new business-casual clothesline.

They walked up to me.

“Bryn? Are you in there?” I asked her with surprise.

“Class presentation,” she mumbled with a pout. “Want to hang out for a minute?”

“I’m kind of in a hurry. Coffee calling,” I said and turned toward the exit.

Bryn looped her arm around mine. “I’ll walk out with you.” Bryn noticed someone had left a copy of The Unbearable Lightness of Being on an empty table. She picked it up, just as Emmett walked around the corner.

When he saw her he stopped, mid step. His entire face lit up from her presence, as if he had crossed paths with an angel. A supermodel angel. His eyes looked bluer today, matching his Polo shirt.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey. Uh, hi.” Bryn even stammered with standard greetings. For pity’s sake. She should just forgo any attempts at verbal communication with Emmett. She was fluent in body language and most guys, it appeared, preferred it over talking.

Emmett noticed the book in Bryn’s hands and raised his eyebrows. He looked impressed.

“That’s a great book,” he said.