“Are you ready to go?” Charlie asked.
I couldn’t nod fast enough.
“Let’s go left today,” he suggested as we fell into step beside each other. “To pass Gatsby’s.”
“Why do we need to pass Brooks?”
Charlie’s eyes met mine, but then quickly darted away. “So we can pick up Morrissey…”
“You invited Luke to come?” I asked. It was always just the two of us.
“Um, yes, I did,” he said. “Is that okay?”
“Of course!” I playfully punched him in the arm. “The more, the merrier!”
Okay, Sage, why so enthusiastic? You guys are just running.
“All right, cool.”
As we approached the senior guys’ dorm, I spotted Luke sitting on the stone wall that surrounded the house’s terrace, his legsdangling over the edge.He really is cute, I thought, just as Charlie whispered, “Paddy, Jack, or Cody?”
I tightened my ponytail. “Cut the crap.”
“Ah, dark horse, then.”
All of a sudden there was that coldness again, sinking into me.Don’t hurt my brother. “Okay, listen…” I began.
“You guys are late!” Luke called out, tapping his wrist.
I laughed, relieved that Luke had rescued me, but then my ears pricked up, because something strange happened when Charlie’s confident comeback came. “Oh, Morrissey!” he called back. “Counting the seconds until you see me, are you?”
He wavered.
Charlieneverwavered.
Wednesday afternoon, I was trying to multitask—walk and text at the same time—as I headed for my human anatomy class in the CSC, when I heard: “Need a lift?”
I looked up to see Nick cruising toward me on the mostridiculousbike I’d ever seen. Not Ace, his usual mountain bike, but a tandem bike, whose colors were far from subtle: stop-sign red and school-bus yellow. “Where the hell did you get that thing?” I asked once he’d braked beside me.
Nick grinned and rang the bike’s bell, the dimple in his cheek cute as could be. My heart cartwheeled. “Meet Cherry Bomb,” he said. “Nana and Granddad wanted to declutter their life, so I offered to take this winner off their hands.”
I laughed and climbed onto the back seat. We started pedaling. “It’s so obnoxious!”
“Yeah, I love it too…” he said dreamily as he stretched a hand back to take one of mine.
I tangled our fingers together for a few moments, which felt strangely automatic. I quickly kissed his knuckles before letting go. Nick needed to focus on the road, since our fellow Bexleyans were everywhere.
Riding Cherry Bomb together was different than riding side by side like we usually did. Nick and I loved racing our mountain bikes back home, deep in the woods behind our neighborhood. “Grinds,” we called those rides. We’d laugh and trash-talk, always trying to one-up each other. The first time Nick tried to jump his bike over a boulder was classic. We were twelve. “Watch this!” he’d shouted, but instead of a clean landing, he’d wrecked the bike and dislocated his shoulder. My doctor dad had popped it back in for him in our driveway.
I liked this leisurely pace too, though. It was natural; it made me smile.
Soon, we slowed to stop in front of his grandfather’s building. “Here we are, miss,” Nick said in a deep voice. “The CSC, erected in 2014…”
“And named after the highly esteemed Carmichael family…” I joked, but trailed off when I noticed two guys several yards ahead of us, walking up Belmont Way toward the Buck Building.Charlie and Luke, I realized, and squinted to see Charlie saying something, with Luke nodding along, his hands in his pockets. But he must’ve made some sarcastic comment, because Charlie then reached out toshove him. And when Luke stumbled over the cobblestones, Charlie grabbed his sleeve to keep him from tripping over. I only looked away when Nick spoke.
“I guess Charlie hasn’t memorized his schedule yet,” he said.
My eyebrows knitted together. “What do you mean?”
