I grin down at her as I take out my mouthpiece. “Just playing by the rules. Moo, bitch. Moo.”
“We have a winner!” Tony Danger calls. He pulls me to my feet, and I hold out a hand for Addison, but she ignores me.
I bounce with excitement. I feel like I could punch a hole through the roof.
“What’s your name, girly?” he whispers.
“Cindy,” I tell him.
“Ladies and gents,” he says in his announcer voice, “I give you CindyClawford!”
“Cindy, Cindy, Cindy, Cindy!” the crowd begins to chant.
Henry steps up into the ring with a dozen roses in his arms and pulls me in for a hug. “You’re quite the wild card,” he tells me as he hands me the flowers and presses a kiss to my cheek.
I turn my head so that his lips graze mine. “You like the granny look?” I ask breathlessly. I feel on top of the world, like I’ve just solved global warming, fixed the health care system, and I still have time to read a good book and put on a face mask before bed. I am invincible.
“Very subversive,” he says, his eyes tilted down toward mine and my body still pressed against his.
I’m not a first-move kind of girl. Not because I don’t want to be or because I think there’s anything wrong with it, but because I’ve never been courageous enough. The fear of rejection has always pinned me in place, waiting for the guy to go out on a limb first. But I’ve come all this way, and if I go home tomorrow night without having kissed Henry Mackenzie, I’ll wonder for the rest of my life what could have been.
I tilt my head just a millimeter closer, and just like that, our lips are pressed together. His mouth moves effortlessly against mine, and he pulls me in closer to him, wrapping his arm around my waist. My mouth opens for a brief second, and it’s just enough for his tongue to dance against mine.
The crowd cheers, and we pull away from each other slowly, our lips touching until the very last second, like we’re two intoxicated teenagers drunk on each other.
Back at the house, I take a shower while Addison announces that she’s moving into Chloe’s room.
“I guess she couldn’t handle the heat,” Sara Claire says when I return wrapped in my towel.
“Guess not.”
“Pretty steamy moment there with you and Henry, huh? You know,” she says, “it’s a competition and I want to stay here for as long I can, but I want us to be friends too.”
I nod as I sit down on the edge of my bed. “I want that too.”
“We just gotta be real with each other about the fact that we both want the same thing.”
“God, this is so weird,” I tell her.
She’s about to respond, when the doorbell echoes through the house.
The date invitation. It’s here.
We both run out the door and down the stairs, and I nearly slip on the last step, but I’m still first to the door.
I swing it open and find Mallory waiting there with an envelope. I take it and slam the door in her face, immediately feeling a camera at my back.
“Rude,” I hear her say on the other side.
“Sorry!” I call.
Well, I hope being on television straight out of the shower in a tiny towel is on theBefore Midnightbingo card, because here I am with two cameras on me and a crowd of girls circling me.
I rip past the wax seal in the shape of a scroll to read the invitation.
“Come on,” Chloe says. “Read it aloud!”
Addison slinks down the stairs, her hips swiveling with each step.
