“What about me?” Jasper asked. “Where should I sit?”
In a different room. Sadly, my throat had gone too dry to translate this thought into speech. I tried to think of something else to say, but the only conversational gambit I could come up with was,What’s the deal with you and my sister?
A door slammed overhead. Jeff’s head snapped up. After a moment of frozen stillness, he rose from his chair and moved toward the stairs as if pulled by a hooked line.
The rapid staccato of footsteps identified the person descending as Cam. She hurtled three-quarters of the way down before noticing Jeff. The moment seemed to swell, a bead of water expanding until it was too heavy to do anything but drop.
“Cam,” he said. I shivered, never having heard my sister’s name spoken quite that way.
Tearing her gaze from his, she cast a quick glance around the dining room, registering our presence.
“What are you doing here?” she asked him, hands fisted at her sides.
“I wanted to see you.” He made no mention of Concerned Citizens. Apparently it had been as much a ruse for him as it was for us. Which was ... only fair.
Cam inhaled sharply. “No,” she said, sounding almost childlike in her defiance as she slipped past him.
“Cam—” He reached for her, then seemed to think better of it. His arm fell to his side. “Please.”
She stopped with her back to him, shoulders hunched. I’d never seen Cam shrink from anything in my life, including the perpetually enraged Doberman on the next block. Jasper and I exchanged baffled looks, eyebrows at maximum extension.
Jeff walked slowly around Cam until he was facing her again, placing his weight as cautiously as though he were approaching a wild animal. Lowering his head, he tried in vain to catch her eye. “Can we talk about this?”
Instead of taking him out with a reinforced elbow, Cam hesitated. The rest of us held our collective breath.
“That’s all I’m asking,” Jeff said quietly. He must have sensed the glimmer of opportunity. I could practically hear the pounding of his heart, in time with the heaving of his muscular chest. Though he wasn’t on his knees, his attitude was definitely one of supplication.
My sister relented so far as to look at him. Her complexion darkened. On anyone else, I would have called it a blush. She opened her mouth.
Instead of speaking, she lunged for the door. A second later she was barreling down the front steps.
“Cam!” Jeff shouted, giving chase. The screen door slammed behind him.
We hurried to the window in time to watch them round the corner and disappear, running full out. I thought of what Alex said about crossing a room to talk to someone. To me it had sounded like a conscious decision-making process, but this felt a lot more visceral than that. Maybeattractionwasn’t just something that happened in your mind. It could be entirely literal; a physical compulsion.
“Wow,” Arden sighed as we drifted back to the table. “That was something.”
Lydia popped open a can of seltzer. “Yeah, a disaster.” She gestured at the window. “Nature Boy chose option D. None of the above.”
“But wasn’t itepic?” Arden tugged the bowl of snack mix from Jasper’s greedy hands before he could finish it off. “I forgot what it’s like. There’s so much passion at the beginning of a relationship. You want to spend every second together, juststaringat each other. You wouldn’t dream of canceling plans at the last minute or waiting four hours to answer a text.”
Jasper dragged the plate of date rolls to his side of the table. “Tell us more.”
“Don’t,” I warned her. “He’ll use it against you later.”
Terry’s hand darted out, snagging the second-to-last date roll. “I don’t blame him for liking your sister. She’s so bold and strong and—” She gestured mutely with one hand.
“Formidable?” I suggested.
“Scary?” Jasper countered.
Terry managed to shrug and nod at the same time.
“The chemistry was off the charts,” Bo chimed in. “So much tension in that scene. I would have set it in the middle of a rainstorm, though. LikeBreakfast at Tiffany’s.”
Arden clapped her hands together. “OrThe Notebook!”
“If you want to go contemporary,” Bo conceded.
