Fall Guy (A Youngblood Book) by Reinhardt, Liz (knowledgeable books to read TXT) 📕

whole life never going to church? Christmas, Easter, nothing. Not when someone you love dies and there’s a big funeral, not for your daughter’s wedding. Never."

I watch her curves under the clear blue water and try to think about, really think about...church. Right. Thinking about church. I swallow hard and swim after her.

Church is a big part of my life, despite the fact that I'm not necessarily the most devout guy. I believe in fate. I believe in a higher power. And, even when I'm sweating my ass off, I like those hours of quiet in the shadowy interior of the church. Plus, I'd be excommunicated if my family even caught me thinking I could skip a mass, let alone a funeral. It would never happen.

"You thought this game up when you were in middle school? This is a pretty depressing game for a middle school kid."

She doesn't seem to mind that I skirted her church point, I know because she's probably packing something heavier in her bag of tricks.

Her shrug lifts one slim, tan shoulder out of the water, then back down into it. She bobs by the pool ladder.

"I was a troubled kid. Lousy parents, lousy supervision, into things no kid my age should have been into. You can fill in the blanks."

Her jaw is stuck out far, the way it gets when she's making a point that she'll claw your eyes out to defend. I'm not about to be on the receiving end of her temper.

"Do you want me to give you three?" I ask to change the direction of this conversation.

She dips her face low in the water again and nods slightly. She's drifting away, away from the hot, close place we were locked in when our arms were around each other, when I was deep inside of her, when she was wrapped around me and moaning my name. I want that back, but I don't know if I can have it.

"Okay." I squint at her, willing a smile, a laugh, anything, but she gives me nothing. "Outfits."

A frown tugs down on her lips and she paddles a tiny bit closer. "Outfits? Like clothes?"

"Yeah." I can feel the wicked grin on my face. "So the first option is clothes. If 'clothes' is your 'never,' you gotta make do with one outfit, clean and all, but no changing. Ever."

"What about for my wedding?" She narrows her eyes at me, her dark hair stuck to her cheeks.

I wish she'd let me closer, but she keeps a constant two foot radius around herself at all times, circling me out.

"Weddings, parties, community service, school. One outfit."

The smile I crack her way is meant to loosen whatever went tight between us, but she repels from me, despite smiling back.

I don't know if we're going forward or backward.

"What if it means I'd get kicked out of school? You can't just show up without a uniform at my school."

She bites at the side of her mouth, willing a second smile away, and I get my first surge of pure hope for better.

I shrug. "Sorry. A year's worth of detentions for you. One outfit only."

I float a little, trying to focus on being happy to just hang out in a pool with the girl I love, no matter how complicated it might be, and I let the worries about my family life take a welcome backseat in my brain for once.

She takes a deep breath and lets out a sigh. "What are my other two?"

"Hamburgers." I watch her lips pull tight. "Your parents."

Her eyebrows press down, dark and furious over her light eyes, and I feel a grip in my chest. She looks like she might pull herself up out of the pool

"It's fair," she finally gripes. "Except mine don't exist without each other."

"No one's choices exist without each other. That's the point." We're still lobbing softballs at each other. We haven't even moved on to hardball, and this whole thing already stings. I open the escape hatch. "It's a game, Evan."

"It is," she agrees. "And it isn't." She starts to dip her face down into the cool liquid of the pool water, then lifts it back out, the defiant line of her jaw dotted with droplets of water. "My parents? Never. Hamburgers? Sometimes. Outfits? Always."

"If you never had your father to worry about, you wouldn't need hamburgers, right?" I don't respond to the obviously shocking anti-parental aspect of her list.

She leans back, her hair billowing behind her. Stretched long, her foot reaches out and brushes against my leg. That single second of touch shocks her vertical.

"That night we went out for hamburgers? I needed one because of you."

I shut up. I shut up and will this stupid game to stop with my cool, carefully-managed disinterest. We're at the point where anything we say is just another barb in the wire going up fast between us. I'm not even positive why we're at a point where we're fenced off from each other, but it brings all my defense mechanisms to the forefront. I go icy.

"Fair enough. At least hamburgers is a 'sometimes' for you. So that means I get to hang around you once in a while, right? I mean, I'm cool with not being an 'always' in your life."

Evan's eyes go wide for a split second with a quick stab of hurt before she shrugs. "'Sometimes' is all we really have anyway, right? Nothing is 'always.'"

She looks up at me, smiling with her mouth, but jabbing at my heart with her eyes.

She brought this on. She pushed me away and asked me to play a game that amounts to emotional Russian roulette, she asked me not to talk to her about her history or our present. I refuse to accept the blame for this crash and burn.

"You're right,” I agree, even though I don’t agree at all. “That's why we should enjoy tonight. Right? Cause maybe that's all we're gonna have."

There's no sound but the lapping of the pool water. And I feel