Rowan glances my way, stepping over a discarded beer can.
“Him refusing to ask me out was part of what made it so hot.” Her face contorts with confusion, and I can’t help but laugh. “Seriously. Any other guy would have told me whatever he thought I wanted to hear. He would have asked me out and then gone and cheated on me or something if I stayed with him long enough.” Rowan flinches, and I rush to get her mind off her scumbag ex. “But Joel was honest with me. And he said he doesn’t want me to be with other guys, and God, Ro, it was just so fucking hot.”
“Wouldn’t it have been better if he did ask you out though?” she asks, and when I don’t answer, she adds, “Wouldn’t you have said yes?”
I pull the length of my hair over my shoulder to detach it from the sweat beading on the back of my neck. “What would be the point? We’d just break up in a few weeks anyway. You know we would.”
She can’t argue, so she doesn’t. Instead, she lets out a hopeless sigh and says, “I just want you to be happy, Dee. This thing with Joel . . . yeah, he makes you happy sometimes, but he also makes you miserable. What happens if we go back home and he starts messing around with other girls again?”
It’s not like I haven’t thought about it. When I was lying on top of him with him still hard inside me, all he said was that he didn’t want me with other guys. He never said anything about him with other girls.
“I don’t know,” I confess. “It’ll bug me, yeah, but I’ll just have to get over it.”
“How?”
“Bury myself in school like you do?”
She barks out a laugh, and when I push her shoulder, she nearly trips over a guy passed out on the lawn. We both end up laughing hysterically, and she chases me all the way back to the bus.
Upstairs, I root out a white The Last Ones to Know T-shirt and butcher it with scissors. The shirt I wore last night was a big hit, but I modify this one differently, cutting peek-a-boo slits in the front and slashing the shape of a heart into the back. I wear it with a lacy bright red bra that shows through the sheer material and cuts.
Joel looks me up and down when he emerges from the bathroom downstairs and spots me sitting on a bench. He’s shirtless, with low-slung shorts and his hair dark with water.
“Remember what I said last night?” he asks, pulling me up by my hand and spinning me around.
“Uh-huh,” I say. I don’t want you being with anyone else. I let him ogle while I do a slow twirl.
“Yeah,” he says, “that.”
I giggle, but he cuts it short by twirling me the rest of the way around and catching my lips with his. My fingers grip his shower-warmed biceps, and I lose myself in the scent of masculine body wash clinging to his skin. It makes my head spin, and when Rowan interrupts us by asking if we’re ready to go, neither of us acknowledges her.
She clears her throat, and when that doesn’t work either, Shawn punches Joel in his sore shoulder.
“Fuck,” Joel barks, releasing me to rub the pain away.
Shawn shoots him an unrepentant smile. “Time to go, lover boy.”
Joel quickly does his hair in the bathroom, and then he pulls on an oversized tank and big Timberland boots. He’s a mismatched mess, and all I want to do is whine about how he’s so fucking hot I can’t stand it. All I can think about is last night, and each time the memory of his hands trickles back onto my skin, my heartbeat picks up and my cheeks flush red. I blame it on the sun, and Rowan offers me more sunscreen, but I bat it away and ignore the confused look she gives me.
After spending the morning rocking out in crowds and causing irreversible damage to our eardrums, all six of us are standing in a horizontal row at the side of the main stage. We’re waiting for Cutting the Line to perform, and Joel’s fingers are sneaking into the slits in the back of my T-shirt to trace the line of my bra. My breathing turns slow and steady in an attempt to keep my lungs functioning at all. I don’t know what it is about his hands, calloused from years of playing the guitar, and more precise and skilled than any hands I’ve ever had on me. Those long fingers brush over the lacy fabric, weave over the tiny hooks . . . and my bra suddenly springs wide open. I gasp and clamp my arms to my sides to keep it in place. Everyone looks at me, but I smile and pretend Joel didn’t just unclasp my bra. One-handed. In public.
He moves behind me and pulls my back to his front, and I bite the inside of my lip, getting his message loud and clear.
I’m about to turn around and drag him back to the bus when Van sprints toward us from behind the stage, and screams fly out from the crowd as soon as the fans see him. The noise stops him dead in his tracks, and he gestures for us to join him backstage before backing out of sight.
“Wade is fucking hungover,” he complains when we meet him in the back. He strangles thick locks of his hair between his fingers like he’d rather be wringing someone’s neck.