Babysitter or Boyfriend?

Chapter 16

Chapter Sixteen

Only an hour or so after Alex left to go to dinner with Brooke, I heard the front door slam hard enough to make the windows rattle. Seconds later, there was a furious knock at my bedroom door. What on earth...?

Concerned, I hurried to the door and opened it to find a Brooke glaring at me through a veil of tears. "I hope you're very pleased with yourself, Avery," she spat. "Alex is all yours now."

"What?" I was flabbergasted, but her angry, accusing tone was making me prickle with irritated defensiveness. "Brooke, I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Ha!" Brooke burst forth. "Right, I'm sure you don't. Alex broke up with me, Avery, and it's all thanks to his ridiculous feelings for you. Then again, it was probably your intention all along, to seduce him when I wasn't around. To make him think it's you he wants, and not me."

I'd had enough. "Okay, Brooke, listen," I snapped coldly. "I never told Alex to break up with you, and I never tried to seduce him. We're friends, and I don't know anything about Alex's 'ridiculous feelings' for me. Believe it or not, I don't control him. And believe it or not, not every guy on earth wants you."

And with that, I slammed the door in her face. She screamed a profanity through the door separating us, then retreated.

Stunned, and still a little angry, I plopped onto the chair tucked beneath my desk. What gave Brooke the right to blame me for Alex's decision to break up with her? And why would she just assume it was because he had feelings for me?

Better yet...did he have feelings for me?

I didn't have time to dwell on the question, or the seeming absurdity of it, because suddenly my phone buzzed on the desk, startling me. It was a message from Alex: Come outside. Please?

Without hesitation, I jammed my feet into a pair of flip-flops and hurried from the room. Alex was standing on the front porch, and heavens, he looked good. He had sort of a sexy, rueful smile on his face, and his eyes lit up noticeably when I joined him.

"Hi," he said, pulling me into a brief hug. "Mm, I've missed being around you these past few days. You smell good."

I laughed, nudging his stomach playfully. "You're silly," I murmured. Then I tilted my head back to look him in the eye. "You broke up with Brooke? Why?"

Alex shrugged, looking sheepish. "I think we both know it was a long time coming," he replied. "Brooke may be beautiful, but it's in sort of a superficial way, you know? She was always worrying about whether what we ate would make her fat, or how her pants made her butt look."

I laughed again. "Can't say I'm really surprised," I admitted. "I overheard some pretty shallow conversations between her and my other roommates."

He nodded, then tugged gently at my arm. "Let's take a walk," he suggested.

A moment of comfortable silence passed, and although I thought about telling him what Brooke said only moments before he texted me, I didn't want to make things tense and awkward. Besides, I wasn't sure I was ready to hear Alex's side of it just yet.

"We both kind of suck at this dating thing, don't we?" Alex finally said, glancing over at me with a huge grin on his face.

I burst out laughing. "We kind of do," I agreed. "I fall for a guy that's completely unavailable emotionally and ends up getting back together with his ex, and you fall for a girl that can't see past her own body."

Alex's grin widened, then faded a little. "I wouldn't say I fell for her," he murmured. When I looked questioningly at him, he shrugged. "She's not really the sort of girl you fall for-at least not right away, you know?"