Endless Summer: The Boys Next Door; Endless Summer by Jennifer Echols Page B

would ask me out for tomorrow night and I wouldn’t get to go with him! Right. I wasn’t lucky enough to have problems like that. Silly me. “You shouldn’t have to drive all the way down here to pick me up and then drive me all the way back.”
    “I don’t mind.”
    Stepping onto the Vaders’ porch, I said, “McGillicuddy can come get me when we’re through.” My brother never had anything to do on Saturday night. It ran in the family.
    “McGillicuddy?” she asked.
    We walked back into the party. Fluttering my finely separated lashes, I could hardly believe my luck. Usually at parties I wandered in alone and hoped someone took pity and talked to me. Then, by degrees, I faded into the shadows. Tonight I was entering the party with someone.
    Of course, the instant we hit the wall of crowd and sound, she pointed across the dark room and shouted above the music, “I’d completely forgotten McGillicuddy was coming back from college! I’m going to say hi.” The two people I felt most comfortable hanging with, hanging with each other instead!
    Except for the kids from Birmingham and Montgomery who were vacationing on the lake with their parents and had wandered into the party, I knew all these people from school. I’d been in school with most of them since kindergarten. For some reason, this didn’t help, and possibly made things worse. I watched Tammy weave between knots of people to hug McGillicuddy. I thought about going after her. But then I might look like I didn’t want her to leave me by myself because I wasn’t good at talking to people at parties. Imagine!
    Suddenly things looked way, way up. I saw Sean in the darkness, next to the stairs, with his back to me. He stood a few inches taller than his friends who’d just graduated too, who surrounded him. Sean was always surrounded.
    As I crossed the room to him, folks kept stepping in my way, wanting to say hey and have conversations with me, of all things. The one time I wasn’t interested in being well-liked. Drat! I made nicey-nicey, go away, and resumed my uphill trek across the room, only to have someone else stop me.
    By the time I finally reached him, my heart pounded. But it was now or never. I made myself grin at his friends as I slid my hand across his T-shirt, feeling his hard stomach underneath the cotton. I almost flinched at how good and how intimate it felt, but through the marvel of my own willpower, I did not flinch. I laid my head playfully against his chest, as I’d seen girls do when they claimed to be just friends with a guy but everyone whispered something more was going on.
    I half-expected him to shout, “Get off me!” and shove me away. Not because Sean would ever do this to a girl—he had more charming ways of extricating himself from cretins—but because my life generally had been a long series of mortifications, and Sean shouting in alarm at my embrace would fit right in. The other half of me expected him to chuckle gently, but not make a move of his own quite yet. It might take him a while to get used to the new me.
    He didn’t chuckle. He didn’t shove me away. He did exactly what he was supposed to. He slipped his arm around my waist and drew me closer against his warm body. I felt him nodding at something one of the other guys said about baseball, but he didn’t say a word to me or anyone. As if a greeting like this from me were the most natural thing in the world. He smelled even better than usual, too, just a hint of cologne. A woodsy scent with undertones of musk and gunpowder.
    I snuggled against him, nose close to his warm, scented chest, and enjoyed a few more seconds of this tingling paradise. What heaven if my whole summer could be like this—
    His low voice vibrating through my body, he asked his friends, “Have you been watching the Braves? Awesome pitcher or what?” Oh God, I was hugging Adam!

    I jerked away from him. Almost instantly I realized I shouldn’t jerk away from him, because the situation