Shannon drives a fucking tank, but okay. I’m willing to bet Chase knows it too, but he says, “As long as you don’t mind waiting for me to shower, I’m happy to take you.”
I don’t know whether to kiss Shannon or kill her, but Kiki declares that they’ll keep me company until he’s ready since they have to wait for Gia anyway, and before I know it I’m watching Chase jog back to the game with the knowledge that about a hundred people just watched that go down and the night has only just begun.
I’m gonna need more gum.
The Stratford Saints crush it, and Chase practically skips out of the locker room to pick me up from where Shannon, Kiki, and I are discussing celebrity bullshit. “I’m so flattered, being driven by tonight’s MVP,” I tell him with an exaggerated flutter of my lashes as we head out to his X-Terra. He laughs, but his joy and pride are palpable. It’s one of the things I’ve always liked most about him—he wears whatever he’s feeling on his sleeve.
It’s also one of the things I’ve always hated. He’s so clear about his emotions, I could never wonder if he might be secretly into me or hope he might be harboring a crush. But that clarity makes this moment, when I catch him shooting glances at the low back of my T-shirt, all the more delightful.
“As much as I love talking about myself and my win,” he says once we’re buckled in, “I wanna hear more about you. What’d you do this summer? Clearly you spent some time at the beach.”
Talk about the last thing I wanna discuss. Jasmine does not factor into this equation, I remind myself, though we’re literally going to her house. I take a deep breath. “Actually, I spent the entire thing at the beach. My mom and I went to the Outer Banks.”
“Oh, where’s that?”
I’d had the same reaction when my mom first mentioned it, although it seems impossible to imagine now. While OBX is full of people from the mid-Atlantic down, up here, everyone with a summer house on the beach goes to the Hamptons. It’s where I’d normally spend a week or two, lying out by the pool at the house Shannon’s parents rent every summer. But though she extended the usual invitation so we could hang out before school started, I’d passed in favor of starting my job at the Book and Bean, where I would’ve spent the summer. It was beyond gracious of the owner, Beth, to give me another chance, including weekend shifts during the school year, and I wasn’t gonna screw it up again—not with my car fund on the line.
Plus, it kept me busy, which was way better for distracting myself from Jasmine than lazing around a pool would’ve been.
“They’re islands off the northern coast of North Carolina. You know Kitty Hawk?”
“First flight?”
“Yeah. That’s there.”
“Cool.”
I’d thought so too. Jasmine had teased me mercilessly, but she took me there for a tour and a photography session in front of the monument until the heat wore us down. One of those photos was my phone wallpaper for a couple of weeks until I got sick of feeling like every time my phone lit up it was a challenge to call her, and I changed it to a picture of my mom and me instead.
“Oh, duh, I forgot to put in the address.” Chase hands me his phone as he pulls out of the lot. “Can you check my texts? It should be the last one from Paulie.”
I’m basking in the glow of being trusted with his text messages, so it takes me a few beats to realize I already know the address. I’ve been to this house. Picking up and dropping off my mother as needed, even going inside once when she made me wait too long and I had to pee like a racehorse. I remember the bathroom being black marble, presided over by a light-up mirror. I remember very shiny wood floors. I remember thinking, “Jesus, this is a big house for one person.”
But it isn’t for one person anymore.
“It’s thirty-seven Darlington,” I tell him, typing it into his phone’s GPS. His eyes are on the road; he can’t tell I didn’t check. And I don’t want the temptation of his text messages, of knowing what girls’ names I might see. If he and his cheerleader ex, Brielle, still talk, I definitely don’t want to know. If there’s a summer fling filling his inbox with heart emojis, that can stay in the vault.
We fill the space with easy and predictable conversation about the game, where we’re applying for college, and what scouts he hopes are coming to check him out, but I don’t expect any revelations, which is why I’m particularly surprised when he says, “Can I tell you something I haven’t told anyone?”
“Of course,” I say automatically, even though I know all I’ll want to do with the secret is shout it from the rooftops to prove Chase Harding trusted me with special, classified information.
“Honestly, I’m hoping to stay local. Marist is pretty much my dream. It’s D-I ball, and Poughkeepsie is only, like, an hour away. Plus, I look really good in red.”
“I’ll bet,” I say, my heart fizzing at his confession. “Is it Stratford you’re so attached to, or your family, or what?”
“Both, I think,” he says, and I pick up a tinge of a blush in the dark. “My brother goes to Arizona State because he wanted warmer weather and a fun party school, and he almost never makes it home. I don’t wanna be that. I like doing holidays and stuff with my family, plus making my little sister be alone at home for everything would suck.”
God, just when I thought my crush couldn’t get any bigger. But then, Chase being an incredible big brother is one of the things that’s always made my heart pitter-patter in the first place. His little sister,
