Kael was waiting for me by the wall, sipping his new beer. My insides wouldn’t settle. Gah, he made me feel on edge one second, yet so calm the next.
We were both quiet as we walked into the living room. There seemed to be the same number of people in the house—minus the two assholes—but the crowd felt dense now that everyone was crammed into the living room. It didn’t help that my heart was pounding in its cage, no matter how hard I tried to calm myself.
Austin was talking to the pizza delivery man. I watched as he handed over some cash, shoving a wad back into his pocket. As far as I knew, Austin had been working only a few hours a week at Kmart, which he supplemented by asking my dad for money here and there. My brother was never good with money. Even when he worked summer jobs, he’d spend his check the day he got it. I wasn’t much better, so I wasn’t judging, but where did that cash come from? It didn’t make sense.
“Kare! Grab some plates?” Austin yelled to me, passing out pizza boxes to the group.
I didn’t know what was going on, but my brain couldn’t handle any more tonight. I wanted to have fun, to not worry about things that I couldn’t control. I had been trying that for years—maybe tonight would be the night that I actually followed through with it?
Black jeans were a girl’s best friend. They stood out from the usual indigo. They made your legs look longer. And that dark wash was great when you were out on a date and needed to do something about greasy pizza fingers. Not that I was on a date. Was I on a date?
There was just this way that Kael was looking at me that made me wonder. The fact that he’d agreed to come to the party at all made me wonder. But as with everything with this man, I couldn’t be sure.
We were still sitting next to each other on the couch. Kael’s empty plate rested on a napkin on his lap. The plate was clean and the napkin was spotless. My plate had a splinter of hard crust on it and a bit of stray pepperoni. My white paper napkin was splotched with pizza sauce. My black jeans didn’t show my greasy handprints, though. Small mercies. I wasn’t neat and tidy. Not like Kael. And certainly not like Estelle, the perfect housewife, whose picture was hanging in a thick black frame above us. A black cloud was more like it. I couldn’t see her face, but I could feel her bearing down on me. I knew that picture well—it had been taken on one of their many vacations. My dad was next to her, wearing a big smile and a Florida tan. A beachfront American Gothic.
Kael leaned up to grab a pizza box. “Can you hand me a napkin?” I asked.
Another guy might have made a crack about the red sauce massacre I had going on, but he didn’t say anything, just grabbed some pizza and napkins, then leaned back into the couch cushion. I could feel the heat rising off him. My imagination was playing with that. My body, too.
“Want some?” he asked. He offered his plate, which had two thick slices, glistening with cheese.
I shook my head, thanking him.
“I see you have a new twin.” Austin pointed to Kael and mostly everyone looked at him, then me. His shirt and jeans were practically identical to mine, only my shirt was plain gray. I thought back to the photograph of my dad and Estelle, standing side by side in their matching Hawaiian shirts from Old Navy, and burned with embarrassment. Kael cracked a smile. A very small smile, but it was there, all right.
“Ha, ha,” I said, rolling my eyes. “You were gone awhile, sooo—”
Laughter bounced around the room.
“Fair enough.” Austin took a bite of pepperoni pizza.
Cheese slid down the slice and he caught it with his tongue. He was so much like a younger teenage boy sometimes, as if he had stopped maturing after tenth grade. It was part of his draw, I guess—the innocence of him. He really did have a good soul, and it was easy to see. He was the kind of boy who would start a fire and then save you from it.
I wondered if this new girl understood what she was in for, if she knew she was playing in the brush on a hot day. A pretty brunette with a smattering of freckles across her cheeks, she had deep blue—almost navy—eyes. Her shirt set off her coloring, and the style of her loose peasant top resembled her hair—ruffled sleeves falling in waves down her arms, mimicking the curls in her long tresses. She was sitting on the floor by Austin’s feet, looking up, a flower tilted to the sun. The attraction she had to him was clear as day. The way she almost willed him to turn his face to hers, to say something, anything, to her. The way her shoulders were angled toward him, pulled back to expose her long, graceful neck. She wasn’t sitting cross-legged like the others on the floor. The awkward child’s pose was not for her. She had folded one leg on top of the other, ankle to knee, and she was tilted sideways so that her legs formed an arrow pointing toward my brother. This girl was vulnerable and open. Calculating, too.
Body language could be so obvious.
Did Austin know that she was planning their first kiss, their first date?
The paper plate in his hand slipped a little and she lifted the corner for him. He looked at her, smiling, thanking her, and then she did this pouty thing with her lips, and a flippy thing with her hair. It was impressive as hell, even to me, and I wasn’t the intended target. I looked away from my brother and the girl. I’d seen this movie before.
“Mendoza seems great,” I said to Kael.
“Yeah. He is.” Kael looked at his friend, who was offering his special tequila to someone who had just come in. I thought I had seen the guy before. In the kitchen, maybe. I remembered his black-and-white checked T-shirt. From the way he reeked of cigarette smoke, it was clear that he had been outside for a smoke break. At least this group of friends was respectful enough not to smoke inside the house, unlike some Austin had had in the past.
“He’s married?” I asked.
Kael’s forehead scrunched up a little and he nodded.
“Cool.” I was about out of small talk. I could have talked about the weather or the alcohol, but that would have seemed desperate. I was buzzed from the drinks and getting paranoid about Kael’s silence, and while I may have been anxious, I wasn’t desperate. I wasn’t going to be the needy girl at a party. A party at my dad’s house, of all places.
Kael nodded again and then . . . nothing. I should have been used to the barriers he put up, the distance between us, but he had let down his guard since coming to the party, so much so that I was beginning to forget it had even existed. But there it was, brewing next to me.
And that was why I didn’t like dating. Or whatever this was.
I knew I was being ridiculous. I mean, it had been only about twenty minutes since I’d decided to admit to myself that I was more than just attracted to him. I was completely fascinated. Enamored. We had been standing side by side in the kitchen and I could feel that heat of his. It didn’t matter that we weren’t touching. I could feel myself being drawn toward him. It was strong, this pull. Almost animal in its intensity. I lost myself in the physical for a moment, and then my brain took over and started to dissect the reasons he wouldn’t like me, or why this couldn’t—wouldn’t—work. I was such a romantic.
I looked around the room, to friendly Mendoza pouring Austin and the ruffly brunette a shot. To the three guys sitting on the floor, and the voices coming from the kitchen. Everyone was alive in their own way, talking, listening, drinking, laughing, playing with their phones. Everyone except the one person I really wanted to connect with.