“What was that?” I asked the dark, Nebraska night. He wasn’t into me. He had a girlfriend. He’d just brought me up here to… to… Holy shit, was this another one of his pranks?
I folded my legs and buried my face in my hands, feeling the heat of my blush. “Son of a bitch.”
The folded bucket list in my pocket dug into my thigh and I suddenly remembered why I was here tonight. I had been planning to make out with a Cole brother, just not that one.
Logan was probably here by now. I could still check everything off the list and give the middle finger to Levi. The night wasn’t totally lost yet.
It was my turn to jump to my feet and rush inside the house. I knew I looked crazy. My hair was wild from being outside and rolling around on the ground and I’d never had a drink before tonight, so I was definitely buzzed. But I was also on a mission.
I found Logan playing ping pong in the basement with some of the other football guys. He smiled when he saw me and set his paddle down to wrap me in a hug.
“I was hoping I’d see you tonight.” His body was warm, but it wasn’t hot like Levi’s. He was familiar, but it didn’t compare to the lifetime of tug-of-war familiarity I felt with Levi. He was Logan and he was my friend. And Levi was my enemy. I should stop comparing them.
I should.
The weird thing was, I didn’t usually compare them. Logan was the guy I sometimes chatted with online, when we happened to be on the same social media app at the same time and neither of us had anyone else to talk to—so not often. But we did talk occasionally. And we’d been friends for the two years we were in high school together.
More importantly, I’d had a crush on him since I was a little girl. Er, I’d thought he was nice since I was a little girl. Now that he was here, I could admit the crush hadn’t come until later. Probably around my freshman year, when I’d felt it was time to have a crush on somebody. I mean, Coco’s crush had changed every other day. I knew I had to pick someone, or she would likely question my sanity. And Logan Cole was the obvious choice.
There wasn’t anything about him that I didn’t like. He was nice and friendly and… not mean. I knew those all sounded like the same thing, but in my head, they were different.
I hugged him tighter. The most important thing about Logan was that he didn’t feel like Levi. He didn’t make me feel too hot and too overwhelmed and too… confused. He just made me feel nice. And after this day and kissing his brother and a lifetime of feeling like an outsider, I just wanted to feel nice. For once.
For a night.
“Me too,” I told him, letting the hug linger. I’d been better at flirting with him when he lived here. Admittedly, I was rusty with the whole batting my eyelashes and getting him to notice me. But I was on a mission tonight. Plus, he was a guy. All of my experience with men told me it wasn’t super hard to convince them they wanted to get laid. I mean, my mom got a crazy amount of action. And no offense to her, but… if she could do it, surely, I could do it. At least once. Just saying. “I was hoping we could hang out tonight,” I whispered in his ear. “Alone.”
He pulled back, his eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “Alone?”
Shrugging coyly, I dropped my hand into his like Levi had done earlier. I had to shake my head and adjust my smile back in place to banish Levi from my thoughts, but I pushed on. “Yeah, I don’t know, I thought it would be fun to… catch up.”
His slow smile confirmed that he finally understood. He told his friends he was going to grab another drink but took me upstairs instead. We did grab more drinks and we did catch up for a long time. And it was fun to hangout with him again and laugh and believe he had no sinister motive other than hanging out with me because he genuinely liked me.
Not because he wanted to embarrass me. Not because he wanted to torture me. Like his brother.
When my head felt sufficiently fuzzy and my fingers were numb, I kissed him. And didn’t stop kissing him until my entire bucket list was crossed off.
I woke up in the middle of the night with a massive hangover, an empty bed and a half-torn open condom wrapper I couldn’t remember using. I slipped out of Kristen March’s house without being seen and drove home with more regret than I anticipated.
But my bucket list was done. I’d accomplished everything I set out to do.
And in three months, I would head to college and do the same thing there. Only without the whole virginity thing and Logan Cole.
Or Levi Cole for that matter.
At least that’s what I had hoped would happen.
Six weeks later I puked my guts out after smelling scrambled eggs and everything I had planned and hoped and wished for was thrown into the proverbial fire and set to flames.
I was pregnant.
And six weeks after that, just when I had decided to find the courage to tell Logan, word came back that Logan had been killed in enemy fire in a desert halfway across the world.
That’s when I decided I wouldn’t hope for anything ever again. Hope was for the weak. I had something much stronger now. I had regret. And I would let it direct every step I took forward.
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Diners, Donuts and Dives
