“I did. And Luke’s coming down to watch with Brayden.”
“That sounds fun.”
“Will you come watch?” he asks me, his gaze steady on mine.
I swallow. “Um…if you want me to be there…”
“I do,” he says immediately.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll be there then.”
Logan nods. “And I’ll be in the stands for the target contest.”
“You’ll be rooting for the enemy, though,” I say in an effort to make light of it. “So Ben won’t be able to stand with you.”
Logan gives a wave and walks out.
After he leaves, Ben shakes his head. “He’s edgy about something.”
“How do you know that?” I ask him.
“I’m a guy. Trust me, he’s panicking. And this mess with Gigi is his own damn fault.”
74
The night before the County Fair, Free stops by my duplex. She has a paper with her, the extra-credit one I was supposed to help her with ages ago.
“I’m sorry,” I say as we sit down. “I’ve been so busy.”
“It was a blessing in disguise because I finished it myself!” She grins at me.
“All of it?”
I can’t remember Free ever finishing a paper on her own. Everything else, yes. Papers, no.
“Thanks to Blake.”
I suck in a breath. “Blake helped you?”
“He didn’t actually help me write it. He encouraged me to try to do it on my own. He said he thought I might be selling myself short.”
Huh. “That was decent of him.”
“I know. And so I did. Isn’t that cool?” she says proudly. “And I got an A.”
“You didn’t even need the grade to graduate,” I tease her. “You’re definitely making the rest of us Henwoods look like huge slackers.”
She takes a long look at my face. “I saw the afghan ‘Gigi’ gave to Logan.” She puts air quotes around “Gigi.”
I sigh. “It wasn’t on purpose, okay? I was knitting it here at home, for myself maybe, or…”
“For Logan,” she says.
I laugh. “It’s a hundred degrees out, but I knitted an afghan while I sat in my sixty-seven degree, air-conditioned house.”
Free looks at me. “You okay?”
I nod and she touches my arm. “You’re so much prettier than her,” she says. “And you know he knows it, too. And you can kick her ass in the target contest tomorrow.”
