Discovering Us (True Love Trilogy) Read online

  I was devastated. Thank God Rebecca had been there for me or I don’t know what I’d have done. Probably most definitely pulled a Sybil and developed multiple personalities. That or turned completely girly like Marie, trying to catch Jag’s attention. Oh, what fun that would’ve been.

  Chapter 5

  I was sixteen when I fell in love with Jag for real.

  By that time, I hadn’t talked to him for five years.

  Five years.

  And, God, had it hurt.

  Of course, I’d kept tabs on him during that time, but it’d only added to my heartache. I’d discovered that he and Marie Jackson had lasted a good two weeks, which in the seventh grade is the equivalent of an adult year of dating you know, but after their breakup, he was off and running, seemingly “dating” every hot girl in his grade and even a few eighth graders, which took him to celebrity status amongst his peers. As the years passed, I’d heard of the relationships he’d had with several of the most beautiful girls in school including the homecoming queen, the cheer captain, the head of the debate team and the yearbook staff editor.

  All of which broke my heart in two.

  I’d seen him pitch when I’d gone to baseball games, but never had the nerve to tell him afterward that he’d done a good job. Catching glimpses of him here and there over the years either in the neighborhood or at school was particularly painful. Oh, he’d wave from afar whenever he saw me, which just seemed to make things worse, and I’d wave back if he’d caught me looking, but what usually happened was I acted like I hadn’t seen him and just carried on.

  The hallways at school were even worse, seeing him with his arm thrown around the shoulders of whichever hottie he was dating at the moment, observing how the girls looked so smug walking beside him as if they were the queen of the world, like they’d staged a coup on the previous girlfriend to win him over, which probably wasn’t far from what’d happened.

  And, oh, how I’d wished I’d been in their place.

  Our verbal drought continued until a day in late March of my sophomore year when I was sitting on a silver-painted rail in the parking lot after track practice waiting for my mom to pick me up since my car was in the shop getting the windows tinted. A rowdy group of sophomore and junior boys was hanging around, all of us just chatting it up, when Jag drove up in his dusk blue ‘69 Camaro with white racing stripes on the hood, most kickass car ever, and asked if I had a ride. I almost fell off the rail when he’d spoken to me. Then I had one of those look behind me to make sure he was actually talking to me moments, then pointed to myself to confirm I was who he’d meant to address. You know what I’m talking about, like the scene from Sixteen Candles when Jake pulls up to the church and Samantha doesn’t know he’s there for her, one of my top ten favorite romantic movie scenes ever by the way. Anyway, yeah, that was me. When I finally got my wits about me, I told him my mom was coming to pick me up, but he told me to call her and let her know he’d take me home.

  I looked at him for a couple seconds before making up my mind. Hm. Wait for Mom or get a ride from the hottest senior in school?

  My fingers couldn’t dial her number fast enough. I waved at the group of guys as I got in Jag’s cool-as-hell car, noticing the look of awe on their faces as we drove away.

  “So.” Jag looked over at me.

  My face flushed. What was there to say after five years? I had no idea.

  So I rallied.

  “So?” I tugged the hem of my track shorts down a little. Damn. Had they always been this ridiculously short? Jeez.

  “So how’ve you been?” he asked, obviously noticing my nervousness as he smirked, glancing down at my hands.

  “Um, good.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” We drove in silence for a few minutes, the guy singing on the radio telling us to hate him today and tomorrow.

  Wow. This wasn’t awkward to the max at all.

  “I, uh, saw you race the other day. Not bad, El.” He smiled over at me.

  El. He still called me El after five years.

  Five years.

  Did he still deserve to get to call me that? Of course he did. He’d been with me through a lot. And I was sure he had no idea how much our not talking had devastated me since I’d never let him in on my complete and utter adoration of him. That or our impending nuptials, of course.

  “Thanks.” I pushed some hair that’d fallen out of my ponytail behind my ear. I was sure I looked fab since I’d just gotten out of practice. Yeesh.

  But, God, was he hot. He was now eighteen and had bulked up nicely. He was well over six feet tall, and although he was still kind of lanky, the muscles in his arms were quite nice to look at. His chest had filled out too and I could see the outline of his tight abs through the baseball shirt he wore. I could also see the definition of his thighs through his white uniform pants. Wow. His jaw had squared, which cast a damned movie star aura about him. His eyes were just as astonishing a blue as they’d always been and I saw that that one shock of his dark hair still hung adorably in them.

  I’d grown up a lot too—my mom had made sure to feminize me some once my brothers had all left for college by making me wear a little makeup—and even though I was still thin, I’d actually developed boobs that I never thought I’d get. At 5’8” I was taller than most of my friends and my long, brown hair had developed auburn highlights from my being out on the track in the sun after school each day. My tanned skin made my green eyes stand out more, but a consequence of spending so much time in the sun was the stupid freckles that dotted my nose. Running hurdles had made my legs stronger, so I guessed I looked okay, or at least some of the boys yelling, “Nice legs!” at me when I wore shorts or skirts to school and the whispers I heard in the hallways about my being hot—this made me crack the hell up they’d say that about me—made me think I was at least passable.

  Sitting there in his car with Jag was so surreal, that when he asked if it was okay if we stopped at a fast-food place where a lot of the kids hung out, I just stared at him.

  “El?”

  I snapped out of my haze and asked, “Huh?” because I was smooth that way.

  He smiled back at me before turning to watch the road again. “Care if we stop to get a float before going home?”

  “Float?” I couldn’t grasp what he was saying, like being in his presence stripped me of all cognitive ability. And I couldn’t stop staring! Gah!

  “Yeah. You know, root beer float?” He grinned over at me as he shifted gears on the car probably thinking I was mental.

  “Oh, yeah. That’d be fuper.” Oh, dear God.

  “Fuper?” He muffled a snicker, looking over at me confused.

  “Yeah, I, uh, meant to say ‘fun’ but then ‘super’ snuck its way in there too.”

  Yep. I was officially an idiot. I turned my head to look out my window, bringing my left hand to shield my face so he couldn’t see me as I rolled my eyes and shook my head at my stupid self. Ugh. Kill me now.

  “Fuper it is,” he said with a chuckle, reaching over to pull my hand away from my face. I looked over at him to see him wink at me before smirking again which only made me want to put my hand up to cover my face again. Jeez.

  Despite my dumbass tendencies, I was thrilled to be hanging out with him again, and not because he was hot, though that didn’t hurt matters any, but because he was Jag. My Jag. And he was back. At least for now.

  We stopped at a little fast food joint and went inside, sitting in a booth. There were a bunch of other kids there from school, and I thought that for him to actually take me there and not be embarrassed to be seen with a sophomore was pretty cool. When the waitress came by, he ordered our customary root beer floats.

  A few of the guys in the place came up to talk to him, smiling and saying hi to me. Some even knew my name. Huh. When the waitress brought our drinks, they left, telling Jag they’d see him at practice the next day.

  “So what have you been up to?”

  Hm. What had
I been up to? I wondered if I could, in one concise paragraph, tell him all that’d happened in the past five years.

  “In the past five years or lately?” I asked, spooning some ice cream into my mouth.

  He chuckled. “Let’s start with lately and work our way back.”

  I twisted my lips to the side, thinking of all that’d been going on lately. “Rebecca and I barely made it out alive in Chem I the other day because Zach Darren thought it’d be fun to point a test tube at us that had potassium chlorate in it after he’d dropped in a gummy bear.”

  He raised an eyebrow as he looked over at me. “Don’t those pretty much shoot out fire?”

  “Yeah. So I didn’t feel bad at all when I grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and sprayed that foam stuff all over him.”

  He laughed, shaking his head.

  “Oh, and Rebecca and I also got tickets to see Three Days Grace…”

  Looking impressed, he commented, “Yeah? How’d you manage that?”

  “We heard that Bobby Winfield had a couple tickets but he was selling them for, like, three hundred dollars each. We didn’t have that much money, so we made a drug deal with him.”

  He choked on his drink then narrowed his eyes at me suspiciously.

  “Calm down. We told him we could score him some coke for the tickets because Rebecca’s dad’s a cop and she could steal some from the evidence room. So we mixed baking soda with some of Rebecca’s little brother’s crushed up Ritalin pills and traded him.”

  The corner of Jag’s mouth twitched as he shook his head again. “You two are bad.”

  “Hey, the next weekend after the concert, he told us it was the ‘best shit,’” I did air quotes here, “he’d ever had.”

  He took a bite of his ice cream, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he looked at me. “Anything else?”

  “Well,” I drew that word out into at least three syllables wondering if I really should tell him more of the stuff we’d been up to. Man, people were just dumb to ever mess with us, I realized with a snicker. Taking a deep breath, I informed him of Rebecca’s and my chicanery. “When Sissy Jacobs stole Rebecca’s boyfriend, Andy, at the first of the year, we filled her locker with tampons, so when Andy walked with her after class, and she opened it, they all spilled out which embarrassed the hell out of her. Um, we taped an air horn to the bottom of Coach Miller’s chair on a test day, so when he sat down, it went off. He fell out of his chair and was laughing so hard, he called off the test.” I twisted my mouth again and rolled my eyes to the ceiling thinking of other things we’d done. “Oh! When Brian Jones called me a bitch last semester because I wouldn’t go out with him, we had some friends keep him busy before history class—which Coach Hendricks teaches and he doesn’t give a crap about anything but football, so we knew we’d get away with it—anyway, we put plastic wrap across the door with superglue all over it about forehead level, and Brian walked right into it.”

  Jag snorted. “Wondered why he shaved his head.”

  I laughed. “He called me a lot worse names than bitch after that. But it was worth it.”

  “Damn, El. You two are devious,” he said. “That it?”

  I thought for a few seconds. “Uh, the secretary wouldn’t let Rebecca call home when she felt sick a couple weeks ago, so we wrapped her phone in duct tape after school. And when Candice Yates got her new car a month ago, she gave everyone a ride to the track but Rebecca and me, so we Saran Wrapped it to a light pole in the parking lot so she couldn’t get into it the next day.”

  Wow. Guess Rebecca and I’d really made some headway since our days of scheming to short-sheet beds or play Fifty-Two Card Pickup.

  “Remind me never to get on your bad side,” he said smiling crookedly at me, which nearly stopped my breath.

  I stared at him a couple seconds before realizing he’d spoken.

  Oh. Yeah. Conversation, El. Have one. You know, that thing where you open your mouth and use your vocal cords to create sounds, which are actually things called words. People use these to communicate. It’s cool. Try it.

  “I hadn’t thought about it before, but I guess we really are pretty ruthless.” I looked at him in surprise at my confession, which made him smile even more crookedly.

  Be. Still. My. Heart.

  “Who were all those guys hanging around you in the parking lot today?” he then asked between spoonfuls of his float.

  I shrugged. “Just mostly guys who got out of practice, I guess. I mean, some of them are in track, but I think some of them are golfers too,” I said, then took a drink.

  He was looking at me when I put my glass down, his eyes turning a dark navy. I frowned wondering what was wrong. He reached his hand out toward my face and I slowly backed my head away as his hand slowly kept inching forward. I would’ve laughed at any other time, but since I hadn’t talked to him in ages and had no clue what he was doing, I was wary. I finally stopped moving back still frowning at him, curiously wondering what the hell was going on. When I finally sat still long enough, his fingers cupped my chin and he stroked his thumb across the top of my lip then he pulled his hand away, stuck the pad of his thumb into his mouth and sucked on it. My eyes got huge at this wildly erotic gesture. I realized I must’ve had foam above my lip and he’d wiped it away then licked it. Whoa.

  I stared at him for a second, the heated look in his eyes throwing me way off balance since I was new at this seduction stuff or whatever it was. Good grief, I had no idea what was happening to my body right then, but I remember thinking he could do that any time he wanted if it made me feel that way. Holy smokes.

  I must’ve looked like the big idiot virgin I was right then too, all uptight and astonished, but not because Jag made me feel that way. He just gave me his sexy half smirk then carried on, spooning a big chunk of ice cream into his mouth, his dark eyes still on mine, while I sat there all heated and flustered and panting.

  Try getting back into normal conversation after an incident like that.

  But we did, well, I finally did after my pulse rate dropped from eight billion beats per second, and it was nice to be starting our friendship back up again. It’d felt as if I’d had a hole inside for all those years and I now found that Jag was just the thing to patch it up.

  When he dropped me off at home, for a reason I didn’t question, he volunteered to pick me up every day for school and take me home after his baseball practice and my track practice. I know I could’ve driven my own car, but I was no fool. Spending time with Jag was the best thing I had going and I didn’t want to blow it.

  A couple weeks after our friendship had started up again, he came by on a Saturday night. “El, come with me. I wanna show you something.”

  I ran out of the house so fast to go with him that I barely heard Mom remind me that I needed to put away my laundry. Nice, huh? Hey, she always put my brothers’ laundry away, so I think I deserved one bye on the chore just that once.

  On the way, we stopped to get root beer floats to go then Jag drove to a kind of lookout point.

  “This is where I come when I need to think.”

  “It’s beautiful up here,” I said in approval, feeling honored that he’d share this place with me since he said he’d never told anyone else about it.

  We sat on the hood of his car leaning back against the windshield, looking out at the abundance of sparkling city lights, which was an awesome sight.

  “What do you wanna do after graduating?” he asked, staring out at the twinkling skyline.

  “Well, being the trainer for the football team has been fun, aside from all the stinky, sweaty guys, but it’s seriously made me consider going into sports medicine,” I informed him.

  He chuckled. “That’s cool. I think you’d be great in that field.”

  I smiled. “Thanks. What about you?” I asked looking over at him, still in awe that we were sitting there together after having been apart for so long.

  He sighed. “When I was little I wanted to play in a band lik
e my dad did.”

  I knew this already because he’d said so when we were young and, man, he could play a guitar crazy good. So could his sister. He’d tried teaching me when we were younger but my fingers weren’t long enough to hit some of the chords, so I opted to just listening to him play.

  “Then I thought about being a professional skateboarder.” I smacked his arm knowing he was being a dork. “Hey! When I got my kickflip down, I thought I was gonna be the next Tony Hawk!”

  “Whatever.” I chuckled.

  “Then being a gigolo crossed my mind.”

  I almost did a spit take with my float as my hand came up to cover my mouth. I looked at him and rolled my eyes exaggeratedly. “Well, I’m sure you’d never go broke.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at me as he grinned. “You think? Wow, El, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were saying I’m hot.”

  Of course, he was hot! And, of course, my face turned every shade of red imaginable, which made him grin even more.

  He leaned into me, knocking my shoulder playfully with his. “No, but it’s been insane with all these coaches looking at me from all these colleges. There’ve even been some pro scouts that have come out.”

  I knew he was good, but hadn’t realized he was that good. Dang.

  “So go pro,” I said with a shrug.

  He laughed. “You make it sound so easy.”

  “You’re good, Jag. That’s why it’d be easy.” He dragged a hand over his face looking a little worried. “What is it?” I asked.

  “It’s just that it’s a lot of pressure. If I go pro right out of high school, I have a better chance of going to the majors. But my parents want me to get a degree.” He frowned. “After three years, I can go pro, but the odds of being drafted go way down.” He looked scared and uncertain just then, something I’d never seen him be. Jag was always confident, it seemed.