You win

Chapter Seven

“I don’t understand how this makes me appealing,” I said as we stopped at a stoplight.

Maggie swatted my hand away from the shirt I was wearing. It was so tight I couldn’t help but pull at it, if only to breathe every once in a while.

“It makes you appealing because Luke is a guy. A seventeen-year-old guy. With hormones. And eyes.”

It was embarrassing. The amount of cleavage I was flaunting made me more uncomfortable than the tightness of the shirt. I felt fake. But Maggie wasn’t clueless when it came to guys, so I blindly went along with it.

It didn’t take very long to pull up to Luke’s house. Maggie threw it in park and took the key out of the ignition. She reached into the backseat to grab the pathetic plate of chocolate chip cookies and set them in my lap. I refused to move. She unbuckled my seatbelt and unlocked the doors.

“Open the door,” she instructed. I did as she said. “Get out of the car.” I obeyed. “Now win him back.”

I looked at the house and turned back to Maggie, terrified. “How is this happening right now?” I asked

“Go,” she urged.

I was so out of my comfort zone that I decided to just go for it.

Luke’s house had never looked so intimidating. And it smelled like his laundry detergent. The flowers lining the front of the house were bright and accusing. My palms were sweaty and my eyes darted to the windows facing me, looking for any signs of life. Luke’s car was in the driveway and I had never been so unhappy to see it.

I rang the doorbell, increasingly glad that I had talked Maggie into letting me wear jeans instead of a miniskirt.

The door opened, and Luke’s little sister, Lily, appeared.

“Caroline!” she squealed. She was positively delighted to see me. She was wearing a light pink dress and had the same dark hair and blue eyes as her brother. Bonnie, their enormous yellow lab, ran toward us, her nails clacking and scraping against the wood flooring in her haste. When she made it to us, her momentum was too much and she almost trampled me right over.

“Hi, Bonnie,” I said, holding the cookies out of her reach as she jumped all over me, sniffing my legs and slobbering over any available skin.

Lily tried to control her, but she was too small. “Luke!” she called.

I froze in panic. Luke’s footsteps thundered down the stairs and he appeared before me, as easy as that. He tried to grab Bonnie, but when he saw that it was me she was attacking, he let go of her collar immediately. I pegged this on shock, not the fact that he wanted her to trample me.

She took one last sniff of my leg and darted outside, frolicking toward Maggie’s mom’s car. I would have been worried for the paint job, but I had bigger issues. I turned back to Luke, who was standing with his arms crossed and his face blank. He was wearing athletic shorts and a soccer t-shirt, but he still managed to look a mix between intimidating and adorable.

I feebly held out the cookies to him, but Lily snatched them out of my hands before he could take them. “What are these for?” she questioned. “My birthday isn’t for a month, Caroline.” It was almost accusing, the way she said it. “But thank you anyway! Your cookies are always the best!” She was back to being a chipper little girl, and she skipped off with the plate of cookies, disappearing into the house. I never understood small children.

Once she was gone, it was just Luke and me. I looked down at my shoes, trying to find the courage to look at him. He didn’t say anything, just waited. He was good at that. I always used to talk his ear off about the stupidest things, and he would just let me, like he didn’t have more important things to be doing, even though he most likely did. And he would never interrupt! If I couldn’t think of a way to put something, he would just wait patiently for me to work it out in my brain until I could verbalize my thoughts. But nothing was like it used to be between us. For once, I couldn’t say anything. My mind went blank. My throat had gone dry and I felt like I was choking on air.

He sighed and started to shut the door.

“Wait,” I said, finally bringing my eyes up to his.

“What are you doing, Caroline?” he asked. I knew he was referring to the cookies and the ridiculous shirt I was in and the fact that I was even at his house.

“I want to explain,” I said.

“I don’t want to hear it,” he said in a flat voice. His mind was already made. It stung. He’d always wanted to hear it before.

“Well too bad,” I retorted. He raised his eyebrows. “I don’t care if you don’t want to hear it, because I need to say it.” Maybe I was a little too mentally disturbed to talk to Luke as rationally as I should have, but if he wasn’t going to listen, I was going to make him listen.

He gave me an irritated look. His arms were crossed and his eyes were guarded. He was so far away, and I didn’t know how to bring him any closer. “I don’t want to hear the shitty excuses you’ve made up to ease your guilty conscience,” he said.

“Shitty excuses?” I scoffed, on the defensive, forgetting about the reason I was on his doorstep in the first place. “You have no idea what was going through my mind that day or any day since. Don’t even pretend like you do.”

“Oh, so you kissed me because you actually meant it?”

What?

“You’re the one who kissed me!” I protested, dodging the question.

He looked at me in outrage. “You wanted me to!” He was really mad now. “Don’t try to blame this on me—this mess is all yours.”

“I know that!” I cried. This was all wrong. It wasn’t supposed to go like this. “But Luke. I…” Nothing really made sense anymore. My mind was completely rattled and all my thoughts were in a free fall. “Why did you kiss me?”

He gave me an unreadable look. Oh, how I wanted to be able to decipher it. But he was still far away and we were so disconnected. “Why does it matter?” he asked. “It was just a kiss, after all.”

So he was throwing my words back at me. Wonderful. It never ceased to amaze me how the past always liked to come back and slap me in the face.

“It wasn’t,” I said. It wasn’t just a kiss. It was absurd that anyone in the entire universe could think that it was. Relief flooded me even as my heart struggled to beat at a normal pace. I was there, right in front of him, and I had said it.

I stared at him, waiting for a reaction. Something flickered across his face for just a second. I wasn’t completely sure what it was—shock? Fear? Was he as scared as I was? But then his face turned blank and he shook his head, breaking eye contact.

“Caroline…” he said. It sounded like a protest. “I just—you can’t just show up here with some cookies and make it all even more confusing and then expect everything to be better.”

“Why not?” I asked, my voice rising. “Why can’t everything be better?”

“Because it doesn’t work like that! You can’t just magically erase what you did.”

“Well maybe if you would let me explain for two seconds—”

“Go right ahead!” he yelled. “I’d be happy to hear why you’re suddenly such a bitch again. It baffles me. Really. I thought you were done with that little phase.”

“Oh!” I said, feigning hurt. Well, I really was hurt, but he didn’t need to know that. “Says the stubborn asshole!” I shouted. I hoped his mom wasn’t home.

Bonnie sprinted back into the house then, narrowly missing me and tearing through the house in a path of destruction. Luke gave me an angry look and slammed the door. In my face.