“Friends with benefits,” Harrison teased.
I tried not to blush or anything dumb like that. Harrison didn’t know about my past with Nathan. I’d never told him about the graduation party or the aloe incident or the almost-hookup in the guest room. I hadn’t breathed a word, and I wasn’t planning to. Because that was all behind me. Harrison could believe what he wanted, but I was done chasing boys. Nathan and I were friends. Just friends. And future stepsiblings. That was all.
“You’re just dreaming,” I told Harrison. “You can’t have him, so you want to live vicariously through me.”
“Damn straight I do.”
“Christ, Harrison, you’re such a loser,” I joked, splashing him again.
He splashed me back, and soon a war erupted in the water around us. And the issue was dropped.
Unfortunately, Bailey wasn’t so easily distracted… or convinced.
“So, what’s going on with you and my brother?” she asked the next day. Her cheerleading tryouts were in a week, and we were out on the front lawn practicing again. I was no expert, but it seemed like she was doing well.
“What do you mean?”
“Something is up with you and Nathan,” she insisted, sitting down on the porch beside me.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, handing her a bottle of water. Christ, I just couldn’t catch a break about this.
“I’m not stupid.” She unscrewed the cap and downed a few gulps of water, letting some of the clear liquid drip down her chin. “You’re being nice to him. I thought you hated him.”
“Why would you think that?”
“You guys were just so weird around each other.” She handed the bottle back to me. “It was always, like, tense. You were pissed off—”
“It’s still weird when you say pissed.”
“Now you hang out and run errands together and smile at each other—”
“Your mom made him drive me to the bridal shop,” I said. “That doesn’t count as hanging out.”
“But you watch movies together, too. I told you, I’m not stupid. I can see that something changed. What happened?”
Goddamn, the kid asked way too many questions.
“I don’t know,” I said flatly. “Why does it matter?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Well, you’re wasting time. You should practice.”
“I have practiced.”
“Practice more.”
“Why are you changing the subject?” She raised a little blond eyebrow at me. “You act like you’re hiding something, Whitley.”
“I’m not.”
“Are you sure?”
I rolled my eyes. “You’re so annoying,” I said, nudging her arm. “If you want me to hate your brother, I will. Would that make you happy?”
“No, I just—”
“Then practice and let it go.”
She frowned at me. “Fine. But I think you’re hiding something.”
Before I could argue, she skipped across the yard and did two cartwheels in a row. “Go, go, Panthers!” she yelled, finishing with a backflip and a toe touch.
The kid was lucky I couldn’t get angry with her; even when she was being irritating, I still kind of adored her.
It seemed like the only one not questioning my relationship with Nathan was, well, Nathan. He had no issue with our sudden friendship. He invited me to go places with him, obviously aware that my social life was lacking due to my self-imposed isolation.
The next Friday night, while Bailey went to sleep over at Sherri’s, Nathan asked me to have a Back to the Future movie marathon with him. He claimed that I had to join him because it was a travesty that I’d yet to see these movies—which, I might add, came out way before I was born. I didn’t put up much of a fight, though. It was the third Friday night in a row that I’d stayed in, and a little company, even if it was just Nathan, was preferable to lying on the guest bed, listening to my iPod for hours on end.
He tapped on the guest room door around nine. “Are you ready for the epicness you are about to witness?” he asked.
“When you say epic, are you describing the movies or your shocking level of nerdiness?”
“Hey,” he said, folding his arms over his chest, only barely obscuring the image of a hand making the Vulcan salute on his T-shirt. “I thought you were giving this whole being-nice thing a try.”
“I am,” I told him. “But come on. You want to major in computer science, you’re practically swooning over some ancient movie about a time-traveling car, and you have a freaking Darth Vader bobblehead in your room. I thought jocks beat up geeks, not aspired to be them.”
“What can I say? I’m a complicated guy.”
“If that’s what you want to believe…”
I followed Nathan into the hallway, but instead of heading downstairs, he turned toward his bedroom. When he noticed me staring, he said, “Mom and Greg are watching something in the living room. I figured we could just watch the movies on my laptop—is that cool?”
I shrugged. “Fine by me.”
We sat side by side on his bed, our bodies turned toward the desk, where his laptop played the film on its small monitor. I had to admit, Back to the Future wasn’t so bad. I even enjoyed parts of it.
“But Marty McFly is, like, the worst name ever.”
“Says the girl whose parents couldn’t spell Whitney. Can you really judge?”
I jammed my elbow into his ribs. “Whitley is a real name, thank you. Christ—and Bailey thinks I’m the one who’s mean to you?”
He winked. “The tables have turned, it appears.”
“And payback is a bitch.”
“Just like you.”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“You’re so mature,” he said. “I’m just blown away by your maturity.”
“Shut up and watch your movie.”
By the time Nathan wanted to start the sequel, I was feeling tired. Since I’d had nowhere to go and nothing to do for weeks, I’d gotten into the habit of going to bed kind of early. It was barely eleven now and I was exhausted. But Nathan insisted I had to stay up for the whole thing.
“This one is my favorite,” he said. “Come on. In bed before midnight? On a weekend? Even my mother isn’t that lame.”
“I’m not lame,” I snapped, taking the DVD case from him and hopping off the bed. I took out the disc and popped it into the laptop.
“But you are easily swayed by peer pressure,” he teased.
I hit play and joined him on the bed again. “I convinced you to give up your virginity within two hours or so of knowing you. Let’s not talk about caving to peer pressure.”
“Touché.”
But no matter how I tried—or how many times Nathan poked me in the ribs to keep me awake—I just kept nodding off, my head bobbing up and down as I tried to hold my eyes open.
I didn’t realize I’d dozed off until hours later when I opened my eyes. The lights were still on in the bedroom, and the menu screen for Back to the Future Part II showed on the monitor. The clock on the desk told me it was just after three in the morning.
Nathan and I were lying crookedly on his bed, huddled together in a way that, even half-asleep, I knew could only be described as cuddling. My head was propped on his chest, its rise and fall a gentle lull, calling me back toward sleep. My left arm was stretched loosely across his torso. He was snoring softly, with one of his hands resting on my hip. How we’d ended up this way, I wasn’t sure, but somehow, between both of us conking out, we’d managed to twine together like this.
I sat up, easing myself out of Nathan’s grasp and climbing off his bed. He looked so peaceful sleeping there. I backed toward the door. It had felt good to have him next to me like that.