The Vigilante's Handbook (Misfits #1)

Twenty: Are Break Up Dates a Thing?

Trying to start the generator, covered in whatever black mess mechanics are always stained with, was how the rest of the team found us. Lucia, Foster, Ariana, Cody.

And Julien.

I didn't need an excuse or a reason to tackle hug him. He was ready. I had always been a tackle hugger. His right leg was braced behind him to absorb the brunt of my force. Just as readily as I wrapped my arms around him, he embraced me back.

"Ew, PDA!" Foster shouted to pull us away from each other.

"Shut up, Wright," Julien said. "You don't get to talk." Foster was notoriously terrible about PDA. Even though he had never had a girlfriend while he was at Paramount Lake, the whole of Lincoln Lincoln's female population was forever changed.

"And we aren't in public, so it's not PDA." That would have been the perfect time to press a kiss to Julien's lips to seal my words and rub it in Foster's face, but I couldn't do it. It wasn't that I didn't want to kiss Julien--believe me, kissing him was one of my favorite pastimes--but we hadn't exactly left things between us on solid terms. Was he hugging me as a friend or as a girlfriend? Worst case scenario he was wondering why I was touching him but too polite to say anything.

I stepped back maybe a little too quickly. "How did you get here?"

"We found him wandering around with a white flag on a stick around the area we all woke up. He demanded to be taken to our home base," Lucia said.

"And you listened to him?" Next to me, Juli scoffed. "No offense to you, Julien, but wasn't the whole purpose of staying out here so no one knew where we were? Mine and Miguel's signs are useless now."

"He threatened us with Valentine's screeching."

"It's singing," he corrected Lucia.

"It's awful, is what it is." She had always been more easily affected than the rest of us by psychic abilities like Valentine. That was one of the reasons she had never liked Eleanor even before she had hatched a plan to take of the world starting with Paramount Lake Academy for Troubled Youth.

She turned to me. "We blindfolded him on the way here. He almost tripped over a wire strung between some of the trees. You wouldn't happen to know how that got there, would you? Because it was further away from the base than you three are supposed to go. It's out of earshot."

I smoothly ducked her question by straight up ignoring it. "So what are you doing here? Come to surrender already?"

"Never." He smiled back at me, but I could see the strain behind the smile. Apparently that touched a nerve. "I came to ask you on a date."

It turned out that the team hadn't been lying. There was a town a few miles from our RV, Summersville. I wished there wasn't though, because then I would have been spared the most awkward start of a date ever, which is saying something.

My first date with Julien, my first date ever actually--you don't have a lot of time for romance when you're learning how to stop bad guys and save lives on the daily--was to one of our class's laser tag nights. We were on different teams and shot each other multiple times, then he tried to hold my hand when we were walking back to the vans. My hands were sweaty so I decided to end the date right then and there, in front of all of our classmates. It was a miracle that we had ever had a second date.

It was the opposite of a miracle that this date was even worse.

First off, Julien was still our willing captive, and Lucia was still enforcing her blindfold rule. And she didn't trust me, no big surprise there, which meant I was accompanied by her, Miguel, and a blindfolded Julien two miles through the woods, trying to make sure he didn't fall over a tree root and break his nose. No injuries were allowed when Mona wasn't around.