If you're loved by someone, you're never rejected, decide what to be and GO BE IT
-The Avett brothers
Recommend Reading Introduction to Unproven
DEFINITELY READ Prologue
Chapter Two
Ary walked into her house and peeked in the living room. Her grandma was sound asleep in her recliner, the blue and green blanket she'd been knitting resting in her lap. She crept quietly down the short hallway to her room and once inside she closed the door and leaned against it, her heart thudding in her chest. If things went as planned, she would lose her innocence at some point the following night.
“Lose your innocence,” she snorted. “Say it like it is, you’ll have had sex.” The thought gave her a chill, fear with a touch of something else, something that made her lower belly feel watery…and her feminine parts tingle warmly. *My chim is tingling^, she thought and snickered. Chim. It was a word her mother had invented because she thought every term used to describe a woman’s vagina sounded vulgar or ridiculous. Her mom had been like that about a lot of things…her smile faded into melancholy.
Although it had been eight years since the accident that had taken her parents’ lives, the hole they’d left behind had never completely healed. Her grandma was wonderful, doing the best she could despite her advancing age, but she could never replace them.
Her thoughts returned to Grayson. He’d lost his mother in a car accident too, and she secretly believed it bonded them. She wondered what his father was like. She knew he made a great deal of money based on the tailored designer clothes his son wore, not to mention the car he drove, but that was the extent of her knowledge. Her girlfriends used to tease her saying she wanted to marry rich, but that wasn’t the case; it wasn’t the reason for her hopeless fixation on Grayson.
She couldn’t deny that his looks had something to do with it, most of the girls at school were infatuated with him based on his excessive physical beauty. He hit the gym daily and trained in martial arts, the combination giving him a hard, muscular physique that she admired, though it was his neck up that really stole her breath. With his purposefully messy dark hair, a facial structure without flaws, and eyes the color of sapphires…
“Oh God Ary,” she scoffed aloud, “the color of sapphires, seriously?” She giggled as she flopped backward onto her bed and stared at the ceiling where a small picture of him cut from the yearbook stared down at her. His dark brows were angled erotically and his perfectly sculpted lips were curved in an almost cruel expression. She desperately wanted to press her own against them and soften them up, had done so thousands of times in her vivid imagination over the past three years…
Which made her about as unique as a zipper. A whole Facebook page was dedicated to lusting after him, and last time she’d snuck a peek there were more than three hundred subscribers to Team Grayson. And if she wasn’t open about her obsession how many more were like her? Another three hundred? Talk about long odds.
She sighed and closed her eyes, consoling herself with the thought that while the other girls were only enamored by his looks and status, for her it was more than that. He had a maturity about him, something in his eyes that spoke of experience far beyond his seventeen years. What Andie called arrogance she thought of as confidence. He had an air of superiority certainly, like he owned whatever space he happened to be filling at the moment, but instead of self-importance it came across to her as self-awareness. If he were to switch personalities with someone like ‘The Dude’, her interest in him would disintegrate. And if tomorrow went as planned…
“As if,” she sighed. Oh, he might take her up on her offer, sure, after all he was a guy and guys rarely passed on sex as long as the girl in question wasn’t a complete dog. But the rational part of her knew that Andie was probably right. He would take what she offered then leave without a second glance. She pressed her hand against her chest to quell the sudden pain. Was she really going to put herself through that? Sadly the answer was yes. At the very least it might shake her out of the absurd obsession, seeing him for who he really was rather than who she dreamed he was.
Absurd was definitely the right word, it summed up not only her thing for him but the whole plan that she and the girls had concocted a year ago.
All through school they had busted their humps academically, doubling up on AP classes, drowning in schoolwork, which gave them zero time for a life outside their own circle. Their social lives had consisted of study parties with pizza as the main event of the evening. Yeah, they were geeks all right. Then last summer they realized if they kept up their current pace they would have all their required classes out of the way, along with several electives by the end of junior year. So unless they wanted to take more unnecessary classes for the hell of it, their senior year would mainly consist of study halls and free periods; and that's when they'd made a pact.
The moment their junior year ended they would transform themselves from boring bookworms to partiers extraordinaire. She knew Amanda was secretly hoping the transformation would propel them into the “popular” crowd, though she and Andie knew better. The girls who comprised that social circle would not welcome them no matter how sexy and fun they suddenly became. Those chics were far too petty and shallow, not to mention covetous of their elite positions, to ever share them. Which was fine with Ary, she had no desire to become a part of that anyway.
Nooo, all she wanted was to be the girlfriend of the most sought after guy in school, that wasn’t asking too much, was it? She snorted and flipped onto her stomach, hugging her pillow into her chest. Oh well, she thought, I'm entitled to dream.
Closing her eyes she indulged in one more fantasy.
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