I flipped the book shut. “I imagine you’ve gotten enough practice with Dahlia.”
He cocked his head in confusion. “How would I have gotten any practice with her? I’ve been grounded until tonight.”
“You see her at school.”
“I don’t even hold girls’ hands at school. You think I’m kissing Dahlia in the hallway? Besides, she’s not my girlfriend. Right now, she’s just the homecoming date who has mostly been giving me the cold shoulder since she found out I kissed you.”
That news probably shouldn’t have cheered me, but it did.
We pulled up to Cooper’s house, a small one-story building with faded blue paint and a palm tree that was past due for trimming. The yard and bushes were well-kept, though, and the place had a cheerful white porch with a wooden swing.
Cooper dropped his football duffel bag inside, then we sat on a wooden bench and talked while we ate. I was glad Cooper had bought me the ice cream even though I’d said I hadn’t wanted it. It gave me something to do besides look at him and wonder how long we had until we needed to start kissing.
When our desserts were done, he stretched his arms along the back of the bench. “We probably really should practice this.”
“Wasn’t that what we did by the refreshment shack? Everyone seemed to think it was a believable performance.”
His hand ran through the ends of my hair. I’d worn it down and put loose curls in it to give it volume and make it more glamorous. I wondered if he was considering the amount of time I’d taken to look good for him. A fake girlfriend wouldn’t care.
His fingers didn’t leave my hair. “How many times do you run through a play before opening night?”
“A lot.” I didn’t turn to him, didn’t move closer. I just stared out at the street.
“Are you nervous?” The idea seemed to surprise him. “It’s just another role. You kiss guys onstage in front of the whole school.”
He was optimistic about the number of students who went to our plays. The whole school had never turned out.
His fingers kept fiddling with my hair. “How many times did you have to kiss that dude inGuys and Dolls?”
Twice each performance. Which was two more times than I’d wanted. Nothing had been going on between me and the guy who’d played Sky Masterson, but his girlfriend sent me squinty-eyed glares during the entire production anyway.
Cooper stretched out his shoulders like kissing me was something he needed to warm up for. “You are nervous, aren’t you?” he said, clearly amused.
I wasn’t nervous. Not exactly. The problem was that my attraction to Cooper had grown and become harder to ignore. Kissing him didn’t feel like a role anymore. It felt like a one-sided, doomed romance. When I kissed him, it would be real for me and—what for him? A chore? Cheap entertainment? A joke?
When he finally did kiss Dahlia, he was bound to compare us. Since she was the jealous type, he’d probably reassure her that she was much better than me, that he didn’t even like me.
And what if he could tell that my feelings had changed? The last thing I wanted was for him to know I’d developed a crush.
I shifted away from him. “I’m only worried because everything else we’ve tried has backfired.” Selena hadn’t been wrong about that. “Think about it. Our trip to the ice cream parlor ended in disaster, the flowers ended in disaster, and the kiss at the refreshment shack—what’s a word for worse than disaster? Catastrophe. That’s how that one ended. What are the chances this plan will turn out well?”
His eyes didn’t leave mine. “That’s faulty logic.” He clicked his fingers, trying to summon the right phrase. “The gambler’s fallacy. It’s believing that past outcomes influence future ones when really every throw of the dice is independent of any other.”
This was a new side to him. “You remember the names of logical fallacies?”
He shrugged. “We learned about them in English for persuasive writing. You know—correlation versus causation. Slippery slope. Don’t they talk about that sort of thing in AP Lit?”
I vaguely remembered going over logical fallacies last year and was surprised he still remembered those details. This only made the situation worse. Cooper was not only gorgeous and strong, he was also smart. Totally my type. But I couldn’t have him. Even without taking our past into account, he wouldn’t be interested in someone like me. He dated girls like Dahlia.
“You know I’m in AP Lit?” I asked.
Another shrug of his broad shoulders. “I learned your schedule back when we were pulling pranks on each other.” He smiled, and even in the dim light, his grin looked casual andhappy. “I had a great idea for one but didn’t know how to pull it off.”
“What was it?”
“I’d get ahold of your laptop right before you turned in an English paper and use the find and replace function to remove all the spaces from your words.”
“That would’ve been brutal. I’m glad we stopped the pranks.”
