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CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT | TOO MANY GIRLS
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you are unexplored, unusual and frighteningly beautiful
-nikita gill
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A stupid grin stretched across Steve's face as he took Jackie's hand and led her upstairs. The radiator in Steve's room was blasting at full power. Jackie shrugged her jacket off and laid it over his desk chair before approaching the window.
His bedroom faced the backyard and looked right down at the pool. With the blinds down, he had a nice view of the woods. Remembering Shelly's story about when Steve and Nancy had sex last November, a shiver ran down Jackie's spine despite the heat in the room. She turned away from the window and took to looking at Steve's walls. Above his bed was a poster of a blonde woman in a bright red swimsuit.
"Really?" Jackie asked, pointing to the glossy picture.
"Shut up," Steve muttered, flushing red.
She giggled quietly to herself and kept examining Steve's room. It was cleaner than she would have suspected, but he did have a pile of dirty clothes in the corner as opposed to keeping them in a hamper. Other than the pile of clothes, though, everything seemed to have a place. She walked over to his bureau where a variety of trinkets were spread across the top. He had an old basketball trophy from sophomore year, his car keys, a couple cassette tapes for his car, the old copy of Pride and Prejudice she leant him early last month, and a face-down picture frame.
"I forgot I gave you this," Jackie said with a little smile, picking up the book. She flipped through the book, feeling how soft the pages had become from all the times they'd been read. She turned to the back cover and ran her fingers over her mother's name.
"It's pretty good," Steve said, frozen by the door. She could feel his eyes on her as she put the book down and moved her hand to the picture frame. "No!"
Jackie took her hand off frame and looked at him expectantly. "What? Is it worse than Miss Teen Swimsuit over there?" she asked, jutting her thumb to the borderline pornographic poster above his bed.
"No, it's just— it's embarrassing," Steve said with a red face. He pushed himself away from the door and stood beside her. "You have to promise not to laugh at me."
"Yeah, I promise," Jackie said, thinking it had to be an old picture of him and his grandmother or something.
Maybe he was an ugly little kid. Heat spread to her cheeks when he turned it over and she realized his embarrassment had nothing to do with him being an ugly kid. It was a picture of her, mid-laugh and staring into the camera. She could remember the day Steve took that picture, way back in June. They, along with Shelly, Marty, and Laura, had piled into Marty's mom's minivan and drove two hours to a lake. Shelly had brought along a polaroid camera and they'd spent the entire day messing around, taking pictures and swimming.
