The One That I Want (18 page)

Common sense said I should not go over to my best friend’s date’s house. But I was not going over there to steal him. This was totally different. In the next few days, when I found the words, I would call Carter to tell him I didn’t want to see him anymore. Addison could find another way to go out with Max—meet him in a well-lighted place that her mom would approve of, or rope another majorette into going out with Carter.

Tonight, I only wanted to see Max to make sure he was okay after his scrimmage.

And to say good-bye.

Max’s neighborhood reminded me of the one surrounding Little Five Points, with small yards overflowing with summer flowers. The houses were bungalows from the twenties rather than rambling Victorians. Max’s house was gray wood with a rock foundation, a wide front porch, a red door, and white flowers in the window boxes. It looked so sweet that I hated to disturb his happy family with my teen drama.

I might want to say good-bye, but I didn’t have to do that at nine o’clock at night. It would look weird to his mom. Depending on whether she was one of those moms who got close to her son’s girlfriends, she might mention my visit to Addison. Hell,
Max
might mention it to Addison.

Though I didn’t think so.

I pulled into their driveway, behind Max’s enormous car, and sat there in the dark for a few minutes, wondering what to do. Should I back out and go home? That was definitely the best plan. But I would not be able to sleep tonight. I would be
tortured
until I settled things with Carter and Max. I couldn’t leave yet.

It didn’t matter because the decision was made for me. A curtain in Max’s house lifted a few inches, letting golden light escape into the dark yard. Someone inside peered at me. Busted! Next the porch lights and the lights lining the sidewalk blinked on, blinding me.

I guessed that meant I was going in. I felt like a juvenile delinquent as I shuffled up the neat sidewalk and rang the bell.

My heart sped up as footsteps approached. The door opened, and Max’s mom stood framed in the doorway, holding a microphone.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m sorry to come over so late, but I wanted to check on Max and—”

She was looking at my hair. “You’re Gemma! Come on this way.”

Max had told his mom about me. He must like me! But no—he could have told her Carter’s date had striped hair, nothing more. Shutting the front door behind me, I followed Max’s mom through the foyer, into the den. Max’s dad sat in a recliner with a Japanese newspaper open in front of him. Max’s sister wore pajamas and screeched karaoke into her own microphone while she watched her avatar on a video game on TV.

Max was stretched out on the sofa in a T-shirt and track pants, his head cradled on one arm. His other arm, wrapped in a plaster cast, balanced on his stomach. He was sleeping in this room full of racket. I sucked in my breath and moved to stop his mom from waking him.

But she was already stroking his hair and whispering to him in Japanese. He’d told me he couldn’t read his T-shirts, but he obviously understood the spoken language. He sat up in a rush and blinked at me. “Cool shirt, Gladys.”

I had forgotten I was wearing my new-to-me vintage shirt. For him. “Thanks,” I murmured, absolutely certain that no girl had ever blushed this brightly when a boy noticed her bowling shirt. “I’m so sorry. I wouldn’t have come over if I’d known you were hurt.”

Max’s dad had stood and put his newspaper aside. Max stood up too, moving slowly now, like he was sore. His sister had stopped singing and stared at us while the music howled on in the background.

Max glanced uncomfortably around the circle and cleared his throat. “Gemma Van Cleve, this is my dad, Dr. Hirayama, and my mom, the other Dr. Hirayama.”

Max’s dad smiled, said, “Pleasure,” and shook my hand. Max’s mom put her hands on her hips. “How come I am the
other
Dr. Hirayama and Daddy gets to be the main one? Why can’t Daddy be the
other
Dr. Hirayama?”

Max stared blankly at her. She grinned.

Max gestured to the girl watching us. “And this is my sister, Taylor.”

“Are you Max’s girlfriend?” Taylor asked. Their mom giggled.

“No,” Max and I said at the same time.

“Why not?” Taylor asked.

“You’re grounded,” Max told her. He turned back to me. “I’m sorry we have to leave. My mother has superhuman hearing, and whatever we say inside the house will get translated into Japanese and repeated on the next seven family-plan phone calls to Tokyo.”

“Max!” his mom exclaimed. “I would never embarrass you. That is complete bullshit.” His dad started cackling.

Max pressed two fingers between his eyes. “Quick, get me out of here.”

“It was so nice to meet everyone!” I sang, pulling him gently by the good arm as I backed toward the door.

They sang back a chorus of good-byes. Max’s mom followed us to the door, speaking to Max in Japanese. He nodded. She reached up and pressed her hands on either side of his face, looking into his eyes, then said, “Okay, then. Have fun,” and shut the door behind us.

Max jogged down the porch steps like he couldn’t get away from the house fast enough. He stopped short when he saw my car.

“Birthday present from my dad,” I said sheepishly. “It’s no Aston Martin.”

Max laughed heartily at that. “Yeah, but it’s . . . wow.”

“You want to drive it?” I fished the key fob out of my pocket and held it up.

He shook his head, and his hair fell into his eyes. “I couldn’t do that to you. It’s your new car, and your birthday.”

“I came over to tell you that I’m not going out with Carter anymore,” I said. “So this may be your last chance.”

Without another word, he took the key from me with his good hand. When he turned the engine over, he grinned. “Grrrrrr,” he said along with the motor. We were laughing as he backed out of the driveway and pointed the car down the lamp-lit street.

“So, you’re not going out with Carter anymore?” he asked. “I take it your birthday date didn’t go well.”

“He gave me a bear,” I said. “He
made
me a bear wearing an ‘I love you’ T-shirt.”

I expected Max to laugh uproariously at this, like he laughed at just about everything I said, making me feel a hundred percent better about myself. Instead, he frowned at me and said, “That sounds like a good birthday, not a bad birthday.”

“I don’t love Carter,” I said. “And he doesn’t love me.”

“You make out with him like you do,” Max said quietly, watching the road. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he sounded jealous.

“I don’t want to have that argument with you again,” I said quickly. “And now that you’ve pointed it out, I feel ashamed about my reaction to the bear. I should have more appreciation for the bear. Maybe I’m allergic to the stuffing. Or the fur.”

“Or sentimentality,” Max said.

“Yep.” I turned to the window, unable to look at him anymore without crying. Because I was allergic to sentimentality. Yes.

He glanced into the backseat. “Where’s the bear? Did you toss him?”

“No! I’m not
that
heartless. He’s in the trunk.”

Max pulled into a shady park with towering oaks. My cheeks burned at the thought that he wanted to be alone with me here. But as soon as he turned off the engine, he popped the trunk and bailed out of the car, saying, “Let’s see this bear.”

I met him at the trunk. He opened it, and we stared at the bear lying in the fetal position.

“It’s like you’re a serial killer,” Max said.

“I don’t fit the profile.”

He gave me a sideways glance. “It’s always the quiet ones that fool you. Mild-mannered. Keeps to herself.” He closed the trunk and leaned against it, crossing his arms with some difficulty because of the cast. “Have you told Carter you’re not going out with him anymore?”

“No, but I will. Maybe you and Addison can arrange some other way to spend time together. You could ingratiate yourself to her mother. Just open the door for her a few times. Mothers love that.” I mimicked him, leaning on the trunk and crossing my arms for protection against what I was about to say, and how I was going to expose myself. “I was so sorry you didn’t get to come tonight. I realized I looked forward to seeing you more than Carter.” Revealing this didn’t necessarily tell him I had a crush on him, right?

Regardless, I felt a strong need to change the subject before he could grill me about my feelings for him. I nodded at his cast. “What happened to you?”

“Carter told you I wasn’t hurt?”

“He—” I needed to phrase this carefully so I didn’t make things worse between them. I didn’t want to misrepresent what Carter had said. “He didn’t seem sure.”

Max nodded sadly, as if this affirmed bad news he already knew. I noticed then how different he looked from last Friday night. This time he hadn’t grown a goatee or shaved one off. He looked like he’d aged five years. His eyes were hollow and dark.

“Tell me what happened,” I repeated.

Max smiled wanly with one side of his mouth. “You know how there’s a penalty in football for roughing the kicker?”

I cringed. The reason there were rules against tackling the kicker, even touching him, was that he was so vulnerable when he kicked, off balance with his foot in the air. He couldn’t defend himself against somebody coming at him.

“Fifteen-yard penalty, automatic first down,” I said. “Did you get roughed? What did those bastards do to you? I’ll kill them for you.”

In answer, he held up his cast. “I was trying to protect my leg, so I fell on my hand instead.”

I asked dryly, “Was it worth it?”

He looked at me kind of funny. I’d said the wrong thing. Again. Around Max, I never knew how to act. I wanted to be funny so he would like me, at least as a friend. I wanted to act like I didn’t care about him, so he wouldn’t guess that I watched his eyes for any flicker of affection. Sometimes I tried so hard to be funny that I ended up sounding like an uncaring bitch, the very princess I was afraid of being. Which might have been true of me about some things, but not about this. Not about Max.

If he was thinking how cold I was, he laughed it off the next moment. “No, it wasn’t worth it at
all
. I made the field goal, so we took the points and declined the penalty anyway.”

“That’s sweet revenge. At least you made the goal. Is your arm broken?” To make up for acting like I didn’t care, I went a little overboard. I reached out for his cast. He moved it nearer. I supported it with my palm.

“My wrist,” he said.

“Can you play?”

“Yeah, I can play. My mom doesn’t want me to, but I’m going to. Coach says the next guy on the team who hits me or allows a hit on me is off the team, so I think I’m safe now.”

Nobody should have allowed a hit on him, especially during a scrimmage when they were playing
themselves
. But to say the next person who allowed a hit on Max was off the team . . . that was saying a lot. The coach saw something in Max and wanted to keep him.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Yep.” I could tell by his curt answer that it hurt a
lot
.

“Does your hand still work?”

Ever so slowly he turned his wrist over in my palm. The cast whispered against my skin as he slid his hand down. We were holding hands.

No, he was just giving me a demonstration of the fabulous, still intact workings of his digits. And even if we were holding hands, I was in the eleventh grade, and there was absolutely no reason for my face and arms to tingle or my mind and heart to race. I couldn’t slow my breathing, but I tried to pant quietly so he wouldn’t notice.

“Anyway, it’s over now,” he said, as if it wasn’t a big deal that we were holding hands. And maybe it wasn’t. But I was dating his best friend—or at least, I had been—and he was still dating mine.

“I’m sorry I missed your birthday date,” he went on. “I was at the hospital getting X-rays. Maybe I should show them to Carter. I guess he thought I was faking.”

“There’s more to it than that,” I prompted him.

Max grimaced.

“Tell me,” I said.

He sighed the longest sigh. “I can’t prove it, of course, but I’m pretty sure it happened because Carter’s always telling the team what a wuss I am. He didn’t actually order that guy to hit me, but he might as well have.”

I nodded. Judging from the way Carter constantly attacked Max in front of Addison and me, Max was probably right.

“Carter’s not the team captain,” Max said. “A senior is, but as quarterback, Carter has a lot of sway. I already knew the damage was done and the team didn’t respect me, but I didn’t realize how bad the damage was until they came after me on the field. I don’t know of any way to undo it.”

I asked quietly, “Are you afraid you’ll get hurt again and you won’t be able to play?”

“I’m afraid I’ve lost my mojo,” he admitted. “I’m afraid I’ll never make another kick. Part of me thinks that if I can’t, it serves me right. The great kickers are the ones who don’t get rattled. That’s football.”

“Kickers aren’t usually hit,” I pointed out, “especially by their own teammates in a scrimmage. You shouldn’t second-guess yourself because of it.”

“Yeah.” He nodded. I could tell he agreed with me, in theory. He knew his team was at fault, not him, but he didn’t
feel
it, and his mojo had everything to do with
feeling
it.

He looked up at me for the first time in a while, eyes sad. “This is crazy, but I really wanted to kick for Georgia Tech.”

“That’s not crazy.”

He shrugged. “They’re not the greatest team in the world, but they have their years.”

“They won the national championship in 1990, sort of.”

“Right! They had to share it with Colorado.”

“Some years,” I said, “the kicker might be the only player putting any points on the scoreboard. On the bright side, you’d get a lot of respect from the quarterback.”

Max laughed bitterly, let go of my hand, and tried to run both hands back through his hair to push it out of his eyes. He’d forgotten that one arm was in a cast. He put both hands down.

“When this happened,” I asked carefully, “did you get mad?”