Chapter 19 #2
“No, but I could still surreptitiously take pictures of them.” I rested the book in my lap. “Is this actually some sort of trap? You expect me to send them to my date, but really, the plays are all different, and when TC implements them, their team will be trounced?”
Cooper’s head whipped to mine. “You’re going to the dance with TC? TC Mullins? How do you even know him?”
I flipped through more pages of the book, curious as to how many plays it contained. “His mom works for my dad’s firm. I see him at every company picnic and Christmas party. How do you know him?”
Cooper gave me a look like it was a stupid question. “I played league football with him from the time we were both in elementary school.” Cooper’s disapproval was etched in the crease between his eyebrows. “I don’t think you should date him. He’s not your type.”
“What do you think my type is?”
“Rich Ivy League guys.”
I preferred to think of them as smart, ambitious guys.
“Rich Ivy League guys” sounded snooty. “Maybe my type is expanding and becoming more inclusive. Watching football games isn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be.
” I turned my phone’s flashlight on low to see the notebook’s pages.
“So, is handing me the playbook part of your nefarious plan to win the homecoming game?”
Cooper gave me the side-eye. “First of all, that’s not the team playbook.
If it were, I wouldn’t be sketching date-night diagrams in it.
Those plays are just my own inventions. Second, we don’t need help to beat Riggs.
Their team isn’t that good. And third, don’t you want your school to win the game?
” He shot me a quick, wry look. “Or are you making another football reel and want to see me tackled?”
I was, but not that kind. “I guess my answer depends on how you treat me from now until the homecoming game.”
“Right now, I’m treating you pretty well. I didn’t order both of those desserts for myself like I told you.”
I flipped the pages back through the house diagrams. “What does the triangle with the lollipop represent?”
“That’s your stick figure.”
“Should I be worried that I no longer have limbs? What type of date is this going to be?”
He laughed and shook his head. “I didn’t give myself arms or legs either. I’m the square figure. I know we talked about going to your house, but I think the best way to pull this off is to kiss on my front porch when your father drops my mother off.”
I flipped back a page and realized that the first diagram was the downstairs of my house. “What’s wrong with our original plan?”
“Too much time elapses from the time your garage door opens until the time your father walks into the family room. Any normal teenagers would stop kissing once they heard the garage door, or at least when they heard the door to the house open. That plan will seem too suspicious, like we want to get caught. So we’ll go with plan B instead. ”
He plucked a fry from the bag, popped it into his mouth, and went on.
“I’m not supposed to have a girlfriend over unless someone else is home.
We’ll pretend that we forgot Claire was gone, and we went out on the front porch to talk because being outside the house is technically not against the rules.
One thing led to another, and when the headlights hit us, we’ll be getting to know each other better than our parents want. ”
Deep breaths. Don’t think about the kiss in too much detail. “How do we make sure we time things right? Our parents could be out late.”
“I doubt my mom will stay out late. As soon as she checks my phone’s location and sees I’m back at the house alone with you, she’ll want to head home. I’ll just keep an eye on where my mother’s phone location is, and when she gets close, we’ll start kissing.”
He’d put a lot of thought into this. I examined the last diagram more closely. “Why is my triangle on top of your square in this scenario?”
Cooper cleared his throat uncomfortably.
If my eyes were seeing correctly in the darkness, he also blushed.
“I forgot about that. That’s just symbolic to show that you’re the, you know, the more aggressive one.
If it looks like I’m the one who’s all over you, your dad will jump out of the car and hurt me.
Plus, it will worry my mother if you’re the more aggressive one.
That way she knows that you won’t be putting the brakes on our relationship. ”
“The more aggressive one? Honestly, Cooper, how do you kiss a girl?”
His eyebrows lifted upward to tease me. “You’re one of the few girls at school who know the answer to that question. So far, I haven’t gotten any complaints.”
The boy wasn’t lying about that. Cooper was an amazing kisser.
Dahlia’s words flashed into my mind again.
Somehow, the idea of kissing him on his porch before he drove off to see her—the one he actually wanted to kiss—became less appealing.
I ran my tongue over my teeth and wondered if he would think I was jealous if I asked him when he was going to see her next.
Cooper noticed my hesitancy. “You’re not about to give me one of your drama critiques about my kissing, are you?” A smile grew on his lips. “But hey, if you think I need extensive practice, I’m game.”
Should I feel complimented or insulted that he didn’t mind having a noncommittal make-out session with me?
I flipped the book shut. “I imagine you’ve gotten enough practice with Dahlia.”
He cocked his head in confusion. “How would I have gotten any practice with her? I’ve been grounded until tonight.”
“You see her at school.”
“I don’t even hold girls’ hands at school. You think I’m kissing Dahlia in the hallway? Besides, she’s not my girlfriend. Right now, she’s just the homecoming date who has mostly been giving me the cold shoulder since she found out I kissed you.”
That news probably shouldn’t have cheered me, but it did.
We pulled up to Cooper’s house, a small one-story building with faded blue paint and a palm tree that was past due for trimming. The yard and bushes were well-kept, though, and the place had a cheerful white porch with a wooden swing.
Cooper dropped his football duffel bag inside, then we sat on a wooden bench and talked while we ate. I was glad Cooper had bought me the ice cream even though I’d said I hadn’t wanted it. It gave me something to do besides look at him and wonder how long we had until we needed to start kissing.
When our desserts were done, he stretched his arms along the back of the bench. “We probably really should practice this.”
“Wasn’t that what we did by the refreshment shack? Every-one seemed to think it was a believable performance.”
His hand ran through the ends of my hair. I’d worn it down and put loose curls in it to give it volume and make it more glamorous. I wondered if he was considering the amount of time I’d taken to look good for him. A fake girlfriend wouldn’t care.
His fingers didn’t leave my hair. “How many times do you run through a play before opening night?”
“A lot.” I didn’t turn to him, didn’t move closer. I just stared out at the street.
“Are you nervous?” The idea seemed to surprise him. “It’s just another role. You kiss guys onstage in front of the whole school.”
He was optimistic about the number of students who went to our plays. The whole school had never turned out.
His fingers kept fiddling with my hair. “How many times did you have to kiss that dude in Guys and Dolls?”
Twice each performance. Which was two more times than I’d wanted. Nothing had been going on between me and the guy who’d played Sky Masterson, but his girlfriend sent me squinty-eyed glares during the entire production anyway.
Cooper stretched out his shoulders like kissing me was something he needed to warm up for. “You are nervous, aren’t you?” he said, clearly amused.
I wasn’t nervous. Not exactly. The problem was that my attraction to Cooper had grown and become harder to ignore.
Kissing him didn’t feel like a role anymore.
It felt like a one-sided, doomed romance.
When I kissed him, it would be real for me and—what for him? A chore? Cheap entertainment? A joke?
When he finally did kiss Dahlia, he was bound to compare us. Since she was the jealous type, he’d probably reassure her that she was much better than me, that he didn’t even like me.
And what if he could tell that my feelings had changed? The last thing I wanted was for him to know I’d developed a crush.
I shifted away from him. “I’m only worried because everything else we’ve tried has backfired.
” Selena hadn’t been wrong about that. “Think about it. Our trip to the ice cream parlor ended in disaster, the flowers ended in disaster, and the kiss at the refreshment shack—what’s a word for worse than disaster?
Catastrophe. That’s how that one ended. What are the chances this plan will turn out well? ”
His eyes didn’t leave mine. “That’s faulty logic.” He clicked his fingers, trying to summon the right phrase. “The gambler’s fallacy. It’s believing that past outcomes influence future ones when really every throw of the dice is independent of any other.”
This was a new side to him. “You remember the names of logical fallacies?”
He shrugged. “We learned about them in English for persuasive writing. You know—correlation versus causation. Slippery slope. Don’t they talk about that sort of thing in AP Lit?”
I vaguely remembered going over logical fallacies last year and was surprised he still remembered those details.
This only made the situation worse. Cooper was not only gorgeous and strong, he was also smart.
Totally my type. But I couldn’t have him.
Even without taking our past into account, he wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. He dated girls like Dahlia.
“You know I’m in AP Lit?” I asked.