Joel grins at me. “If you think I’m bad, you should hear my grandma.”
I’m imagining what hell it would be to share a room with Joel and his grandma when our waitress brings our food. I immediately snatch up my burger, taking a very unladylike bite out of it. Most girls would probably order a salad or something when surrounded by the likes of Adam, Shawn, and Joel—who are, I have to admit, all sexy as sin—but I’m too hungry to care. And it’s not like I’m trying to impress them.
Adam picks a steak fry off of my plate and replaces it with one of his onion rings. “I hate French,” he grumbles.
Joel blows on a chicken wing, and it looks so perfectly crispy, I’m kind of wishing I had gotten those instead. “So why did you take it?” he asks.
“Needed a language to graduate.”
I finish swallowing my bite of burger, watching Shawn as he trades one of his loaded potato skins for one of Joel’s mozzarella sticks. “Why are you in school, anyway?” I ask Adam. “I doubt any degree you could get would help you out with the band.”
Adam lays his pickle spear on my plate, which makes me smile since I absolutely love pickles, even though he doesn’t know that. “I enrolled right out of high school,” he says as I pick it up and take a bite, “back before we got as big as we are, and I just figured I might as well finish, I guess.”
“What are you majoring in? Music?” I’m half paying attention to Adam, half watching Joel trade one of Adam’s onion rings for a mozzarella stick. Watching the boys eat and pick off of each other’s plates is making me smile. They’re too freaking cute.
When Adam nods, I steal another one of his onion rings and give him three of my steak fries as a trade. He’s smiling down at his plate when Cody turns toward us from the next table and says, “So, Rowan, how does it feel to be the only girl in history to ever turn Adam down?”
A better question would be why the hell are we still talking about this? Before I can respond, Mike says, “Aw, c’mon, Code. She’s not the first girl to turn him down. There was that other one . . . What was her name . . .” His eyebrows scrunch together, and then he says, “Plum?”
“PEEEACH!” most of the guys near me suddenly shout out in unison.
Oh. My. God.
They break into loud laughter at Adam’s expense, and I’m suddenly mid-anxiety attack. Shawn is laughing with the rest of them until he sees the expression on my face. And before I can hide it, he witnesses all of the panic I’m feeling. He studies me curiously, his eyes growing narrower and narrower. And then I see the precise moment when he realizes who I am, because his eyes get wide, wider, super-freaking-wide. I can see him imagining me with my hair down, my glasses off, my makeup done. He looks from me to Adam and back again. When it seems like he’s about to say something, I shake my head almost imperceptibly at him, pleading with him to keep my secret.
Adam groans from the teasing and looks up at Shawn just in time to catch him staring at me with shock still written plainly across his face. He follows Shawn’s eyes and gives me a weird look, and then Shawn coughs and lets out a forced chuckle. “Yeah, Peach. I’d almost forgotten about her.”
My prayer for a distraction, any distraction—a fire in the kitchen, a five-car pileup on the highway, a nuclear freaking airstrike for all I care—is answered when the waitress pops back in to ask how everyone is doing. I stuff my face with more burger as I try to think of some way to change this disaster of a subject.
As soon as she leaves, Shawn says, “So.” I look up to see a devilish smirk on his face. “Why didn’t you get her number, Adam?”
“Because I’m an idiot,” Adam says, and my heart pumps a flood of heat into my cheeks. “I didn’t even get her real name.”
“And you have no idea what it is?” Shawn asks, shooting me an amused grin that no one else catches.
“Not a damn clue.”
“Do you even remember what she looked like?” Shawn chides. “You were drinking, weren’t you?”
“I’ll never forget,” Adam argues, rising to the challenge while Shawn’s smirk grows wider. “She was wearing these pink heels and this little black skirt. Her body, man . . .” This has got to be the universe’s idea of a cruel joke. Adam shakes his head like the memory is too much, and then he glances in my direction like he’s only now remembering that there’s a female sitting right beside him. He clears his throat and quickly finishes, “Blonde hair. Long legs. Pink eyes.”
“Pink eyes?” Joel asks.
“Her eye makeup,” Adam explains. “It was shadowy and sort of sparkly. And she must’ve been wearing glitter lotion or something because there was glitter all in the bed afterward.”
I swallow hard. Dee talked me into wearing shimmer body spray that night, and it had left glitter all in her bed too.