Chapter 12 #2
The only saving grace was that Logan couldn’t sink a basket one-handed while distracting me, so when the timer buzzed, I still won with a hefty lead.
His pouting face was nearly as adorable as his flustered one. “Let’s move onto the next,” he grumbled, and I giggled, plucking the tickets from the machine and following him along.
Never would I ever have thought twice about the arcade. If I’d stumbled upon it with Jade, we’d have rolled our eyes and cracked a joke or two. If a guy had asked me to an old arcade for a first date, I probably would’ve laughed aloud. It just seemed so… dweeby. Lame.
And here I was now, actually having fun.
Logan picked a zombie shooting game for our next one, with two different booths that had plastic guns sitting on the dash of the game. I picked up my gun and gave him an expectant look. “Is this the part where you put your arms around me and show me how to shoot?”
“I was kind of hoping you’d do that to me.” Logan picked up his plastic gun, giving it a little jiggle. “I don’t know how to hold this thing.”
My cheeks were beginning to hurt.
The game was far more graphic than I expected it to be, with each shot causing the gun in my hands to vibrate and blood to splatter across the screen in a semi-transparent haze.
Logan and I were characters stuck in the woods on a crappy hiking trail, trying to defend from zombies coming left and right.
Logan had better aim than I did, but the zombies didn’t have that high of a threshold.
A bullet to the arm would cause them to explode in a spray of decomposing guts.
“This would make Jade faint,” I said with a little laugh, holding down the trigger.
Logan swung his gun around, and from a quick glance over, I could see he had his eyes squinted. “So,” he began, firing. “Why were you put on the list?”
I flinched as a zombie head exploded right in front of my screen, smattering blood everywhere. “The list?” I echoed.
“The Most Likely To list.” The mindless shooting from Logan’s set nearly drowned out his voice, which was soft, hesitant. “Jade was the one who put you on it?”
I hesitated shooting the zombie that came at me. By the time I lifted my gun high enough, my health had gone down ten percent. “It’s because I didn’t vote a label for the list. It’s a ‘if you don’t vote, you’re on it’ sort of rule.”
“Why didn’t you vote?”
I shot another zombie, another headshot. “It was the day we saw you at Expresso’s.”
Logan lowered his gun a little. “Ah,” he murmured. “So it was my fault.”
“I just wasn’t in the mood,” I said quickly, feeling awkward. I’d blamed him in the heat of the moment yesterday, but that hadn’t exactly been fair. “And then I forgot about it, and instead of reminding me, they just put me on the list. With that label. It was—”
“Cruel.”
The zombies were multiplying quickly now, and my health was depleting fast. I couldn’t swing my gun around quickly enough. “I was going to say not nice.”
It was no secret that Jade had a mean streak, but I wasn’t used to being in that line of fire. She’d apologized for it, but the pain of it still lingered, a papercut that was slow to heal.
“That guy you were with that day…” Logan began slowly. “The one whose lap you were sitting on. I’m assuming you two aren’t…”
“I’d rather die,” I deadpanned. And almost on cue, my screen flashed red as my health bottomed out, and my screen tilted as my character fell to the ground.
The camera angle panned up as zombies swarmed where my character had fallen, the word DEAD scrawling across the screen. “Seriously. Kyle is…” I shuddered.
“A jerk,” Logan finished for me.
“You know him?” I asked in surprise. “I mean, like, outside of just the normal rivalry stuff?”
Logan still had a minute left to his level, so I put my gun back on the dashboard and watched him maneuver his kills. “Not really.”
“Then how do you know he’s—”
“It’s good to know I shouldn’t be jealous of him.”
Ooh, that prospect was interesting. “Were you?”
“Jealous of you sitting on his knee? Of his hand on your waist?” His fingers flexed on the handle of the gun. “I’m surprised you couldn’t tell.”
I thought about the way Logan’s eyes had fallen to Kyle’s hand and stayed there. “You barely looked at me,” I pointed out, studying his profile. His nose was sharp, his eyes soft. “I didn’t think you noticed I was even there.”
“I noticed. I just didn’t want to do anything that’d make your friends notice that I noticed.”
So that explained why he avoided my eyes like the plague. “Are your friends the same way? With the school rivalry?”
“My friends don’t really care about that sort of thing.”
I shook my head. “Tell that to the guy from the coffee shop. He looked at us like he hated us.”
“Noah?” Logan’s game ended as his screen flashed green, the word SURVIVOR scrawling out in block letters. He lowered the gun. “He’s different.”
“Why?” I thought about what Jade said. You don’t remember him? From the Bobcat/Bulldog game last year. I only just realized now how odd it was that Jade had recognized him.
“He just is.” Logan gave a small shrug. “But my other friends from theater aren’t like that. Not nearly as intense.”
A different memory popped in my head then. Their QB is in the school theater? Riley had asked when Ashton cat-called Logan for the first time. What is this, High School Musical?
My first instinct was to scrunch my nose. “So you are in theater?”
“Jefferson’s more of an arts school than a sports-centered one,” Logan told me, watching my reaction. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were light. Wholly unembarrassed. “It’s a fun outlet.”
“Is it—is it, like, singing and stuff?”
“Are you asking me if I sing?” When I nodded, he asked, “What would you do if I said yes?”
I opened my mouth, brain flipping through all the things I instinctively wanted to say, knowing all of them would come out sounding rude. “I don’t know.” Logan was beyond handsome and adorable, but singing?
Maybe it wasn’t that big of a deal—as long as I didn’t have to watch him do it.
Logan nudged my knee. “I don’t sing,” he said, putting me out of my misery. “Ever. Never ever. Did I mention never?”
I snorted. “Your voice is that bad?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.” But his expression was still playful. “I don’t audition for musicals, but when we do non-musical plays, I try out for those. Otherwise, I help with lighting, stage setup, that sort of thing. We all kind of change up our roles from time to time.”
“Is that why you asked me if I’d ever date a dweeb?” I watched as he bent down and collected his tickets. “Because you think you’re a dweeb?”
“I figured you’d think I was a dweeb.” Logan slid his tickets into his pocket. He straightened, looking at me with a curious expression. “How did you get into cheerleading?”
All at once, my thoughts rushed back to freshman year, just before tryouts. Some of my light feeling dissipated. “My best friend wanted to do it with me.”
“Jade?”
Mutely, I nodded. It wasn’t a lie if I didn’t say it aloud.
“Acting on a stage is no dweebier than chanting cheers at a game.”
Now I couldn’t fight my nose scrunch. “I don’t know about that—”
“What makes it better, then? Plead your case.” He lifted his chin, looking at me like a judge on his stand. “Give me one reason why cheerleading is cooler than acting.”
It was another thing about Logan that opened my eyes. If a guy from our theater program came up and asked me out, what would I have said? Would I have laughed, just like the idea of a date in an arcade? Would I have looked down at it all, rolling my eyes, deeming it dweeby?
I would’ve. I knew that in an instant. I definitely would’ve.
Guilt rolled in like a wave, and I found myself wilting against the zombie game’s chair. “That’s a peak in high school mentality, isn’t it?”
Logan tipped his head to one side and then the other, pressing his lips together as if he were trying to fight a smile.
“Maybe you just need to change my mind,” I told him as we got to our feet, rubbing my arm. “You said yourself, you needed to stick around and give me my daily dose of dweeb. That is what this is all about, you know. Exposure therapy.”
Logan gave a light laugh, nodding. “I’ll work on it.”
We played a few other games—like Dance, Dance, Revolution, which I absolutely annihilated him at—and foosball—which led to another horrid defeat like the air hockey.
We moved around the arcade slowly, our laughter mixing with the various games’ music.
We ended up both sitting beside each other again at a NASCAR racing game, and Logan put quarters into both our machines.
“Winner takes the other person’s tickets and gets what they want from the gift machine?” he proposed, settling into his seat beside me. It was like a car style, with a driver’s seat and a passenger’s seat style, except we both had steering wheels.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “You’re so sure you’re going to win?”
He gave a confident shrug, the lights of the game reflecting on the planes of his face.
The race started off totally unfair. I don’t know what sort of cheat code Logan performed, but his car skyrocketed forward while mine petered off in a slow chug, immediately landing me in eighth place. I pressed down harder on the gas, but my stupid car took forever to pick up speed.
Logan leaned sharply to the left with his turn, his shoulder brushing mine. I expected him to jerk back, but he didn’t; it was almost like he didn’t notice. But I did.
Every centimeter of skin he brushed lit alive, instantly hyperaware.
I could think of nothing other than the pressure of his body as it pressed against mine, and the race of my pulse became far, far more important than the one on the screen.
Inexplicably, I thought of the way I sat on Kyle’s lap that day at Expresso’s.
Jealous of you sitting on his knee? Of his hand on your waist?
Logan asked. I’m surprised you couldn’t tell.