The Ex Games by Jennifer Echols

saunas, don’t you?” he purred, leaning close to my face. “The heat.” A lockof his dark hair stuck to my wet cheek. “The steam.”
    My heart knocked so hard against my chest that I could hardly stand it. “The scent of eucalyptus,” I suggested before I thought about whether this added to the romance of the situation. “Smells like a bottle of my granddaddy’s Old Spice that’s been fermenting in his attic since 1969.” I cringed. I just couldn’t leave it alone and enjoy the moment, could I?
    Nick pressed his lips together to keep from laughing. He nodded sagely. “I’ll never think about this scent quite the same way, that’s for sure.” But Nick had a one-track mind, and even my lame jokes couldn’t distract him. One of his hands still moved on my tummy. The other picked up my hand and moved it to his thigh.
    Talk about a body like a rock.
    I wanted to do this—had wanted it forever—but somehow I had thought there would be more preamble to it, more than fifteen minutes of flirting in the school hall. Even though I’d admittedly accepted every advance he made on me, picking up my hand and putting it on his thigh seemed mighty forward of him. I didn’t take theradical step of
removing
my hand, but I did open my mouth to act all indignant.
    He put two fingers to my lips to stop me from talking. He knew me pretty well. His mouth close to my ear, he growled, “You know, you and I
are
exes.”
    “So?” I asked around his fingers. My skin tingled with excitement, or possibly eucalyptus poisoning.
    He leaned so close, I could feel his breath on my cheek, cool compared with the hot air. “If we weren’t exes,” he whispered, “it might be different. But we are. We won’t do anything we haven’t done before. What could it hurt?” His dark eyes looked deep into mine for a few more seconds. Slowly he peeled his fingers away from my lips like he was afraid of what would escape my mouth.
    What came to mind:
Oooh, yes, please, thank you
. But I couldn’t let him know how much I wanted this. Sarcasm, I needed some sarcasm. “What a bunch of bull,” I breathed. “Haven’t you learned
anything
since the seventh grade?”
    “One way to find out,” he purred, moving in. He slipped his hand around the back of my neck, and then—

invert
    invert
    (in v-rt)
n
. 1 . a handstand on the lip of the half-pipe course 2 . Hayden turning the tables on Nick
    —I hesitated.
    I
never
hesitated. Hesitating in the slalom could cost me the race. Hesitating in the half-pipe could earn me a concussion. Hesitating on a jump could get me killed—and since I did have a tendency to hesitate there, I did not go off jumps.
    And I knew better than to hesitate with Nick. That would show weakness, and he would swoop in and take advantage of me. Better to keep him off guard if I could.
    Yet here we were, inches away from each other in the hot shadowy sauna, breathing hard, looking into each other’s eyes, with my hand on his chest to keep him from coming any closer. He glanced to my lips, then focused on my eyes again, genuinely perplexed. Like he wasn’t Nick at all but that boy my age, someone without filthy rich parents, someone unsure and terrified of messing this up.
    Someone like me. I was terrified of messing this up, too. Which was exactly
    why I held him off. I
wanted
to believe he was unsure and vulnerable like me. But those old suspicions about Nick resurfaced. I’d waited too long for this, and I wanted to make sure we were doing it right.
    “What’s up?” he prompted me, cluing me in that I’d guessed correctly about him. Not a gentle
What’s the matter, dear Hayden?
but a sharp
What’s up?
like a boy growing impatient while bowling a girl over.
    “Uh, I don’t know,” I stammered. “I just don’t get a good vibe about this.”
    “You don’t get a good
vibe
?” Although Nick controlled his emotions carefully, I could tell he was mad. This frightened me a little. I held the dubious honor of being