Read Most Likely to Succeed Page 13


  He climbed into the van wearing gym shorts and his Pelicans T-shirt, with his huge costume bag slung over his shoulder. He stood next to me in the aisle.

  “Do you need to put your costume on before we make up?” I asked drily.

  He glanced toward the rear of the van as if he was considering this.

  “Go put it down,” I said. “I owe you a shoulder rub, remember? Or is staying mad at me too important?”

  “It’s not that important,” he admitted, already moving into the back to dump his bag.

  He didn’t make it all the way. He took two steps and chucked the bag over Ellen’s head, making her squeal in fear. It landed on the back seat with a rustling of pompons.

  He sank into the seat beside me. Before he could change his mind or feign anger again, I gripped both his shoulders and kneaded those tense muscles. He melted under my hands as if he’d never been touched before.

  * * *

  The ride home was even better. The cheerleaders were in a great mood after Brody led our team to yet another win. The highlights of the game had been Brody bulleting an impossibly long pass to our best tailback for the winning touchdown, and Sawyer directing the band. Usually when he wandered into the band’s section of the stands, the band director, Ms. Nakamoto, made him leave, or DeMarcus, the drum major, wouldn’t let him direct. This time everyone had been elated enough about our pending victory to forget all the times Sawyer had stolen flutes, disassembled them, and hidden them in the pelican’s mouth. Ms. Nakamoto let Sawyer through. DeMarcus moved aside. The pelican directed a funny version of “Fight, Pelicans, Fight,” speeding way up and then slowing way down and accelerating again. The cheerleaders, laughing, finally gave up trying to dance to it.

  After the game, Sawyer disappeared into the locker room to take a shower. I carried his dead carcass of a costume back to the van, then retrieved his T-shirt and waited outside for him so he didn’t have to look quite so buff and manly by walking across the parking lot bare chested. That’s what I told him, anyway. Personally, I wouldn’t have minded. When he was dressed, I extended my hand to him, and he took it. We held hands as we walked back to the van.

  Ms. Howard already had the engine running. Sawyer and I were the last ones in. Before we’d even sat down, the van started moving, and the lights blinked out. This time he got into the seat first, taking the window. He propped his forehead against the glass, anticipating what I would do next, as I took his shoulders under my hands. The groan he let out caused Ellen and Grace to stand up from the seat behind us to see what was going on. Grace made a motion with her hand indicating I should jerk him off next. Grace. Sigh. If Sawyer had seen her do this, I would have died.

  But she was right about one thing. I was giving Sawyer some pretty intense physical pleasure. And he was letting me know. I felt his groan in my crotch. I curled one thigh up and over his, letting my lower leg curve around his calf, as if this gave me better leverage.

  “Oh God, Kaye,” Sawyer said, guttural and appreciative.

  “Ms. Howard!” Grace called. “I can’t sleep because Kaye and Sawyer are having sex.”

  As a wooooooo echoed through the van, Sawyer straightened slowly so he wouldn’t knock me onto the floor with a sudden movement. He pulled off his shirt and tossed it over the back of the seat at Grace.

  “It’s not a rock concert,” Ellen said. “Geez.” The shirt came sailing back to land on Sawyer’s head.

  “We want the shorts,” Grace yawned.

  Sawyer put his shirt back on—but not before I passed my hand down his bare back.

  And he felt it. With the shirt over his head but not yet pulled down to cover his back, he looked over his shoulder at me. Our eyes met as the van passed under a light on the interstate. A shadow descended over his face when we drove away from that light and approached the next. Then his blue eyes lit up again.

  I moved my hand down his arm and felt chill bumps.

  He pulled his shirt the rest of the way on. “Your turn,” he said, shifting in his seat.

  “Here.” I fished around in my bag and pulled out the pillow I brought on long trips. He propped it behind his back against the wall of the van. With one of his legs extended along the seat, he pulled me by the hips until I settled back against him.

  His hands gripped my shoulders and massaged. Now I understood why he’d groaned under my touch. Aidan had never bothered to give me a sexy rub like this (and in his defense, I’d never given him one, either). Sawyer turned me to water under his fingers. I nearly groaned but stopped myself so Grace wouldn’t holler any more orgasm jokes across the van. My groan came out as a squeak.

  “And you said I was tense.” Sawyer’s voice was a low rumble in my ear. “What’s this knot right here?” He kneaded a spot in my neck.

  “Ah,” I gasped.

  “Put your head down,” he said gently, his hands working their way up my neck, then down into the neckline of my cheerleading top. “I wish I could take this off.”

  “That could be arranged,” I murmured as if I were Grace, or Tia.

  My face flushed hot. He’d only made a joke. Maybe he hadn’t even meant anything risqué, and I’d ruined the mood by going too far. I wondered if he could feel my neck and shoulders tensing up again.

  He placed one kiss on the back of my neck, at the lowest dip of my neckline.

  I shivered.

  And then he passed one arm around my chest, drawing me even farther against him until I relaxed into him, and he eased back against the pillow.

  The heat of his body soaked into me. He took one deep breath. My body rose and fell with his. He nestled his arm under my breasts, his hand resting protectively across my hip.

  In the silence that came after, I didn’t know what to say.

  Finally I gave voice to what had been bothering me from lunchtime until he sat down with me in the van. I said quietly, “Aidan did tell me he wanted to talk about student council at lunch. You were there. You heard him.”

  “What did he really want to talk about?” Sawyer asked, his words vibrating through me.

  “He wants to make sure I don’t go out with you.”

  “Hm,” Sawyer half laughed.

  I waited for him to ask me out, or to tell me the idea of us going out was ridiculous, but he did neither. He only flattened his palm on my hip, then gripped me more firmly, which sent a jolt of electricity down my leg.

  I said, “And he wanted to know what I got on my paper for Mr. Frank.”

  “Was he impressed?”

  “He said you wrote it for me.”

  “He is an asshole,” Sawyer said, “and he knows how to push your buttons. More importantly, was your mom impressed?” At some point during that horrible morning, I’d moaned to him about accidentally telling my mother what I’d done. Even if I pulled off a feat by scoring well on the paper, she’d still know I’d forgotten to write it until the last second—that is, failed.

  And that’s exactly how she’d reacted when I told her what my grade was. “No,” I said, “she wasn’t impressed. She’s making me stay home tomorrow to write the next one.”

  “It’s not due for two weeks.”

  “I know.”

  “We haven’t even worked on the notes or the outline in class yet.”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “How can you be in trouble when you’re perfect?”

  I nodded, careful not to bump his chin with the back of my head. “It’s a question for the ages.”

  “Most importantly,” he said, his breath tickling my earlobe and sending a fresh chill across my skin, “are you impressed with yourself?”

  “No,” I admitted, “and I know that’s stupid. Ms. Malone will tell me this when I meet with her about handling stress. I’ve already heard it in self-esteem lectures, especially for girls only. I just can’t shake it, though. When I don’t accomplish something, I know it’s my fault. When I do make good, I feel like I don’t deserve it.”

  “I know that,” he said,
“but why do you feel that way?”

  I shrugged automatically, then hoped I hadn’t elbowed him. He put one hand up to rub my shoulders again, very gently.

  I said, “People give me stuff because of what I’ve already done, or because of who my mother is.”

  “That’s definitely not true,” he said. “People don’t want dipshits leading the student council. Well, scratch that. We elected Aidan president. But people definitely don’t want an ugly, unpopular head cheerleader. When the school voted for you, nobody was thinking, ‘Kaye’s mom runs a bank.’ They were thinking, ‘Kaye has a firm ass.’ ”

  This time I did elbow him softly in the ribs.

  “Oof. Maybe that’s just what I was thinking. But nobody was thinking about your mom. And you’re in all the upper-level classes. That’s no accident. You were in the Loser class way back when, right?” The Loser class was Sawyer’s term for the gifted class. “If they put people in the Loser class based only on their hard-hitting parents, Tia wouldn’t have been in it, because God knows whether her mom is dead or alive. Harper wouldn’t have been in it. I love Ms. Davis, but she’s not exactly playing with a full deck.”

  “She’s an artist.”

  “That’s one way to put it.”

  That’s exactly what I thought of Harper’s mom. I loved that Sawyer said he loved her. Everything I found out about him, every additional inch he pulled back the curtain on his life, made me like him more.

  And every stroke of his skin across mine made me want him more. Yet if we followed our recent pattern, the closer we felt to each other, the sooner we’d have a dumb fight and push each other away again.

  So I brought up the other thing that had been bothering me since lunch. “I didn’t mean to offend you today when I asked if the pelicans were your brothers. I was just trying to snap you out of being mad about Aidan, and I picked the wrong thing to make a joke out of. I didn’t know you were so serious about being a vegan.”

  “Why not?” he asked, dropping his sexy tone for the first time and sounding more like his normal self. “I have to eat, like, four gallons of salad to get any calories. Doesn’t that seem serious to you?”

  “You’re never serious about anything.”

  “I’m serious a lot,” he said.

  “It looks exactly like kidding.”

  His sultry tone was back as he whispered, “Maybe you just don’t know me that well.”

  “Maybe not.” I pulled away from him and turned around in my seat.

  “Don’t go,” he murmured.

  I wasn’t going anywhere. He was right. After two years, I felt like I hardly knew him at all. If he was as good at reading people as he claimed, he had me at a disadvantage. I wanted to look him in the eye when I posed my next question. I sat sideways, one knee bent and my foot up on the seat, open to him. “When did you go vegan?”

  His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Last spring.”

  “Why?”

  “I was about to try out for mascot. I was up against five other people, really funny characters—”

  “Like who?”

  “Chelsea.”

  “Oh, right! I’d forgotten she’d gone out for mascot.” My friend Chelsea was a majorette in the marching band. Majorettes and cheerleaders tried out in front of the whole school, and students voted. These definitely were more popularity contests than any measure of talent—though I’d probably clinched the wow factor among cheerleaders with my ability to do ten back handsprings in a row. This boggled boys’ minds.

  Mascot selection was different. These candidates tried out in front of the principal, the football coach, and the cheerleading coach only. I guessed the faculty wanted to make damn sure the mascot would do a good job of representing the school. They weren’t taking any chances on getting a lame pelican by letting students vote.

  That meant the mascot selection had flown under my radar. I vaguely remembered the announcement that rising seniors could try out, and later, the shocking announcement that Sawyer had won. But this event had been as big a part of Sawyer’s life as the cheerleader tryout had been for me.

  Maybe bigger.

  “They let us put the costume on for two minutes to see what it was like,” Sawyer said, “and that was all. The next day we had to come back, get in the pelican suit, and convince them to give us the job. But my two minutes in the suit had taught me that a lot of the gags I’d been planning weren’t going to work. You’ve got so much padding on that your movements have to be hugely exaggerated for the crowd to see what you’re doing. I left wondering if I should even come back the next day.”

  “Really!” I exclaimed at the idea of Sawyer, discouraged. This was a new concept for me. Every time he identified a real emotion he’d had, I was shocked all over again.

  “After school, before I went to work, I drove down to the marina and sat on the dock for a while, watching the pelicans, looking for inspiration.” He moved one hand up, swooping like a seven-foot wingspan. “And—”

  He stopped in midsentence, hand in midflight, lost in thought. In the dim van, his eyes were darkest blue, watching imaginary birds above us. I’d never seen him so unguarded before. I loved to look at him when he’d forgotten he was being watched.

  He blinked and put his hand down. “Pelicans are dorks on land,” he said, “little trolls waddling around. In the air they unfold their wings and grow huge, soaring and then diving for their dinner. It occurred to me that they’re like a lot of students at this school. We’re not so good at sitting in desks, staying still, and paying attention to a boring lecture.”

  He cut his eyes to me, and I knew the same thing was going through both our minds: I was good at that. But, granted, he wasn’t.

  “That doesn’t mean we’ll never be good at anything, though,” he said. “There’s almost no job out there where you sit at a desk and pay attention while someone else talks. I mean, I’ve already got a job I’m way better at than school.”

  True—Sawyer was a terrific waiter, as long as he wasn’t mad at the customers.

  “That’s how I played the pelican,” he said. “The other people trying out were just bopping around in this big padded suit, walking funny. I made the pelican into a character, a student at our school who gets no respect but who’s a lot smarter than the teachers give him credit for. After I got the suit on, the first thing I did was walk behind the judges and try to look over their shoulders at everyone’s scores.”

  I laughed. “That could have backfired.” Principal Chen had her panties in a wad most of the time, and the football coach wasn’t exactly open-minded, either.

  “I knew that,” Sawyer said, “but I figured I had to do something. I mean, all else being equal, would you pick me for anything over Chelsea?”

  “No.” But as soon as I said this, I felt the blood rush to my face, as it did so often when I was around Sawyer. I’d thought of several things I would pick Sawyer for over absolutely anybody, and all of them required sitting very close to him in the dark, just like this.

  To cover up my embarrassment, I asked quickly, “How did this make you into a vegan?”

  “Oh.” He nodded. “It was when I was watching the pelicans. I felt like I was borrowing something from them. Like I was one with the pelicans, or something? I know that sounds stupid.”

  It didn’t sound stupid, exactly, but it sounded like something Sawyer was making up to see if I would believe it, teasing me. I said carefully, so he couldn’t tell whether I was buying it, “But people don’t eat pelicans, do they?”

  “Not unless they’re desperate. I guess I was also thinking of a deer hunt I went on before I left Georgia. I’ve regretted it every day.” He turned to look out the window at the interstate, lights and palm trees flashing past at even intervals. I could tell, though, that in his mind, he was lost in a dark Georgia forest.

  I found his hand and covered it with mine. This was hard for me, making the first move. I’d never gone out of my way to touch Aidan like this. He hadn’t ever t
ried to comfort me, either, which was probably why my three years with him seemed so sterile when I looked back at them now.

  Sawyer turned away from the window. He took my hand in his and rubbed his thumb over my palm, watching me.

  “What do you eat, as a vegan?” I asked. “Besides gallons of salad.”

  “Cereal, mostly.”

  “Dry? Vegans can’t have milk or anything that comes from an animal, right?”

  “Right.”

  I shook my head, disapproving. “Where do you get your calcium and vitamins and protein?”

  “I guess I don’t.”

  It occurred to me that, except for salad at lunch, I’d never actually seen Sawyer eat anything. “What did you eat before the 5K on Labor Day, when you nearly passed out?”

  “Nothing.”

  I slid my hand out of his and poked him angrily in the leg. “You can’t run three miles on nothing, Sawyer.”

  “Ow. I found that out, thanks.”

  “What did you eat the day you passed out at school?”

  He shrugged. “I had a Bloody Mary for breakfast.”

  “With vodka in it?”

  “And tomato juice, which is full of antioxidants.” He cut his eyes sideways at me. “I know, I know. That’s the day I realized I might have a problem.”

  Normally I would have interjected a sarcastic comment here: Oh, that’s when you realized you had a problem? Sawyer’s problems had been obvious to me and everybody else the entire time he’d lived here. Some other guys in our class drank, but most of them didn’t make alcohol their favorite hobby.

  I amazed myself by not saying a word. It took a lot of self-control, but I simply moved my hand low on his back and slid my arm around his waist.

  He set his head down on my shoulder.

  We sat that way for a while. This was a serious step past holding hands. It would have attracted attention in the van if any of the cheerleaders had been awake to see. But they’d bedded down, propping pillows against each other and the walls of the van. The silence seemed heavy, like a question mark.