Attraction

CHAPTER 6 Chemical Kinetics

"Foolish, absurd, brainless, crazy, preposterous, ridiculous, silly, stupid...," I muttered.

"What are you doing?"

I slid my eyes to my right where surly faced Sam sat, flipping through her political science textbook pretending to study.

"You know what I'm doing,"I whispered.

"It's the synonym game, isn't it?" she whispered back, turning just slightly in her seat and dipping her head close to mine. "What's the word?"

"Foolish."

"Oh. How many do you have so far?"

"Uh, seven I think, maybe eight."

"Well...you need more than that." Sam turned and glanced over her shoulder.

I had the window seat. She had the aisle seat. Therefore, the boys were behind her. I'd achieved maximum willpower and hadn't looked at Martin for the last forty-five minutes. If this were a video game, I'd be on level one thousand,about to face the final boss, and my palms would be sweating with the anticipation.

My palms were sweating now.

Not looking at Martin every thirteen seconds was torture. He was so...lookable. And lookable wasn't even a word. It should have been, because he was definitely it.Easy-on-the-eyes was the closest phrase I could come up with that would be synonymous with the non-word lookable. Maybe mesmerizing?

Mesmerizing, hypnotic, irresistible,alluring, seductive... Hmm...

"Did you know that deductive and seductive are only one letter away from being the same word?" I asked.

Sam turned back to me and gave me a slight stink eye. "And conducive is conductive, but without a T."

"Huh." I nodded. That was interesting. I wondered how many -ductive words I could identify.

Sam continued on a whisper, "Are you ready to talk about it yet?"

"Talk about what?" I removed my eyes from her and stared at the vacant seat in front of mine. Since we were on Martin's dad's private plane, we had tons of space. Two seats were on each side of the aisle, and the plane had six rows with an open seating area in the back that included a bar,couches, and a big screen TV. In the front cabin, every other row faced backward which resulted in four seats facing each other.

When we boarded the plane,Sam insisted she and I needed all four of our seats and that neither Martin nor any of his boy-entourage were allowed to sit across from us. Since finding Martin hovering over me earlier in our dorm room, with clear intent-to-kiss posturing, Sam had been doing a lot of insisting.

Sam leveled me with a narrowed glare. "Don't play dumb, Kaitlyn Parker. Why are we on this plane?"

I folded my arms on my knees and buried my head in my arms.

I felt her tugging on my hair, not hard, just trying to get me to sit up. I didn't. A moment later she was leaning over me, whispering in my ear, "When I walked in on you this morning you were about to do something imprudent. Is that one on your list of synonyms for foolish?"

"No. I'll add it to the list." My response was muffled because I was hiding.

"Parker, why are we on this plane?"

I stared at the fabric of the jeans covering my legs within the dim cavern created by my head, arms, and hair. Blowing out a long, measured breath, I sat up slowly, straightening until my back was resting against the seat cushion again and my eyes were level with surly facedSam.