“Thank God—I thought I’d completely lost you.”
Chloe’s face was flushed from the bonfire, her green hoodie unzipped to reveal a dusty pink tank top trimmed with funky antique lace. “Are you having fun yet?”
“Totally,” Julianne conceded.
“Fantastic!” Chloe bubbled, linking her arm through Jules’s and pulling her along. “It’s about to get even better.” Chloe swept Julianne through the crowd, back past the bonfire, in between two lines of coolers, and around what appeared to be two dueling sororities engaged in a full-on dance war, before stopping at the kegs.
Julianne motioned to her nearly full can of PBR. “I’m all set.” Chloe nudged her and tilted her head toward a keg about fifteen feet away. A guy, probably Chloe’s age, was dangling above it, upside down, supported by his friends.
“That’s Michael,” Chloe announced, like she was showing off a prize pig at a state fair. Julianne followed Chloe’s meaningful stare in the direction of the airborne hottie without making any sort of connection.
“Who’s Michael?” Chloe widened her eyes and arched her eyebrows as though Julianne had just asked her where babies came from. “Oh, right.” The pieces snapped together in Julianne’s mind. “The stress-reliever.
Gotcha.”
Michael flipped down off the keg and charged toward Chloe and Julianne, one arm outstretched, calling out,
“Chloe! My favorite lab partner!” as he approached.
Michael was tall and tan. His chest muscles were clearly outlined under the two coordinating J.Crew polo shirts he had layered one atop the other—both collars standing pertly at attention. His blond hair was messy, sticking up in post-keg-stand chaos, and his brown eyes were like dishes of melting chocolate. Well-worn khaki cargo pants hung off of his massive quadriceps. He looked just like all the rest of Chloe’s frat friends—definitely hot, but a little too aware of his hotness to be Julianne’s type.
“Michael, this is my sister, Julianne.” Chloe beamed once he was standing at her side. “Jules, this is Michael.
He was in my physics section last semester. I never would have made it through without him.”
Michael grinned and rolled his eyes. “Your sister is full of it. She practically wrote the textbook. She put the rest of us premed dorks to shame.” Chloe flipped her hand at him dismissively. Julianne knew that Chloe could run circles around anyone in a math or science class. Or graph circles around them. Whatever it was that physicists actually did.
“Her modesty is only part of her charm.” Julianne laughed, teasing her sister. “Nice to meet you.” She extended her hand toward Michael for a handshake and was surprised when he pulled her into a hug. “Chloe’s told me a lot about that class,” Jules said, recovering her compo-sure.
“Really?” Michael asked incredulously.
“Nope. Actually, not at all. Unless—wait … did the TA have a faux-hawk and a fantastic butt?”
“I’m more of a bowl-cut guy myself, so I didn’t really notice. Sorry ’bout that.” He chuckled at his own joke.
While he spoke, Julianne glanced behind him. A pack of identical frat boys, all clad in the same polo shirts, khaki pants, and rumpled hairstyles as Michael, were approaching quickly from the bonfire.
“Dude, where’d you go?” One of the guys clapped a beefy hand onto Michael’s back.
“Yeah, dude, you disappeared,” another one echoed, punching him in the shoulder. Julianne caught Chloe’s eye, and the sisters stifled a giggle.
Michael gestured toward Julianne and Chloe. “Guys, this is Chloe, my lab partner from last semester, and this is her sister, Julianne.”
Julianne said hello and smiled, but walked away as quickly as her round-toed slip-ons would allow in the sand.
“What’s wrong?” Chloe asked, following her. “Didn’t you like Michael? He’s such a sweet guy. And check out his arms.”
“No, he was fine,” Julianne answered, taking a lap around the kegs. “He was cute—just like every single guy you know is cute—but he wasn’t really my type. Besides, I want to try to catch up with some more people from school before they start leaving. You know, try to make plans before we all start working. But he was really cute.
And I think he may have been interested in talking about more than lab with you.”
Chloe’s eyes sparkled. “Really? You think? But I was really hoping that you guys might, you know, hit it off tonight.”
Julianne, detecting the sparkle of interest in Chloe’s voice, grinned at her sister. “Go for it. You should definitely go for it,” she encouraged. “Besides, you always tell me that you have excellent taste …”
Chloe giggled but didn’t have a chance to answer. As she opened her mouth to speak, a skinny brown-haired guy came hurtling across the beach—propelled by the force of someone’s sloppy keg-stand dismount—and tumbled directly into her, knocking her down with him.
The brown-haired guy panted, “Good to know that gravity’s still working.” He turned to Chloe. “Are you okay?” Chloe nodded, clearly a little dazed, and dusted the sand off of her denim skirt. He shifted his gaze to Julianne and smiled. “How about you? I didn’t take you out, too, did I?”
“Nope. Still standing. Are you okay?” She smiled at him, pulled her hair out of its bun, and let the curls spill down her back.
The reflection from the bonfire lit his face and his dark eyes shimmered. Julianne felt a flash of jealousy.
There was a part of her that really wished that this skinny, possibly-concussed stranger had managed to
