Page 7 of Miss Behaved
“Well, I’m glad our circles finally collided,” he says with a panty-dropping grin. “No avoiding me now.”
I cross my arms over my chest and don’t miss that he glances at my breasts when my arms push them upward.
“First of all, I haven’t been avoiding you.” I roll my eyes. “You disappeared ten years ago without so much as a ‘Hey, how are you’ or an explanation. I might have fallen for you once, thinking I wasn’t just another girl moving through your rotating door, but I wasn’t pathetic enough to chase you. Especially when you made it perfectly clear where I landed in the notches on your bedpost.”
My head starts to swim. “Second, I have nothing to say to you. You don’t get to walk up to me ten years later and pretend we’re old buddies. Much less throw around unoriginal pickup lines like, ‘Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.’ Like that fixes everything. No way. No thank you.”
“You haven’t changed.” Carson’s mouth ticks up in the corner, letting me know that even if I act tough, we both know exactly where I stand when it comes to him: on the edge of a cliff, waiting to be thrown over.
My insides tumble and twist, and I have to hold tight to my welcome packet just to stop myself from throwing up or throwing myself at him.
I let out a defeated sigh. “What do you want, Carson?”
He might have grown into an Adonis, but inside he’s still the same boy who sends my brain in circles. It strikes me that a decade may have passed, but I’ll always be that same teenage girl around him.
“Still deciding,” he says, pulling his lips between his teeth.
“Awesome, you do that.” He hasn’t lost his touch for sending me from calm to irritated in three point five seconds. “I’m tired, and I’ve had a very shitty couple of weeks. So I’m going to find my room.” I inhale and give him a polite nod. “And I wish you the best in—well, whatever reason it is you’re here.”
I try to sidestep Carson, but he shifts his body in front of mine. “It’s good to see you.” The playboy smile slips for a second, and it’s just him.
“It’s good to see you too,” I say through gritted teeth.
Not that it is or isn’t. I’m not sure yet.
I might not have actively avoided Carson the last ten years, but I haven’t exactly gone out of my way to cross his path either. But here, one foot away, I can’t deny the frenzy raging inside me as he pins me with his gaze.
“What?” I tip my head back to the ceiling and close my eyes.
Deep breaths. Deep breaths.
“Did something happen?” Carson asks.
Dropping my chin, I realize there’s a genuine look of concern creeping up his face. The familiar crinkle he gets between his eyebrows when he’s worried or upset. To anyone else, it’s masked by the still-present smile, but I see it.
Carson steps in closer, somehow still clouded in that woodsy pine smell that takes me back ten years in one breath. I hold it, try not to inhale, try to ignore that my insides are flooding.
“You said you had a shit week?” he presses.
I finally breathe out. “Oh, that.” Carson is the last person I want to tell my latest breakup tragedy to. “It’s nothing.”
His pinched eyes see through me. It’s the same look he used to give me when we were kids and he knew I was lying. Like when I was twelve and fell off my bike and said I was fine so I wouldn’t seem weak. Or when I was thirteen and bolted on him and said I had a headache, but I really didn’t want him to know I’d just gotten my first period. And here he is still. Where every man in my life sees concrete, he makes me transparent.
“Can we—”
I cut him off. “I have to go.” If I stand here any longer, the floor might give out beneath me. My week has been rocked by exes, and there’s no escape. “I’ll see you around, Carson.”
I’m not sure the words actually got out or if they’re still in my head, but this time when I try to get around him, he doesn’t stop me. My feet move me toward the elevator while every cell in my body fights against it. And even though I don’t turn back, I feel those ocean blue eyes on me until the elevator door closes.
Carson Calloway.
A name that blows all the others out of the water, including Steven’s.
How is it that ten years later I still feel in knots at the sight of the first boy to break my heart? Good ones and messy ones all tangled together. I always knew it was a possibility we’d run into each other, but luck was on my side until today.
Of all the skeletons in my closet, the last one I need reanimating right now is Carson Calloway.
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