Paper Airplanes (14 page)

“
Cassie?” Jared suddenly said, and he was so close I could almost feel his warm breath on my neck. I was suddenly so afraid he’d been able to tell what I’d been thinking.

“Yeah?” I asked, not turning around because I knew my face was flushed, and I didn’t want him to see me that way.

“Your drink is ready.”

Oh.

Okay, so that wasn’t what I’d expected him to say. I looked up to see my drink sitting on the counter and wondered if the barista had called my name and I just hadn’t heard.

I grabbed it and walked over to a set of armchairs in the corner, hoping the walk would calm me down. I’d never been this flustered by a guy before. I was usually much more confident and in control.
Even with Will who had turned my insides to jelly, I was still able to stay calm and flirt and be adorable. I felt like Jared had the ability to turn me into a blubbering mess if given the chance.

He came over to sit next to me
after I’d settled into the armchair, and I looked over at him, but I wasn’t sure what to say.

“So w
hat did you really think of class?” he asked, and I knew he was just making conversation. We’d already established that we both hated chemistry.

“Well, my hand is about r
eady to fall off, because I wrote down everything Mr. Graves said. In truth I’m horrible at science, so I figure I’ll have to work extra hard to not fail. Usually Marley, my best friend, helps me since this is so up her alley – she’s in school to be a vet – but since she’s not here, I’m on my own.”

Jared took a sip of his coffee and appraised me. “We can study together if you want. I’m not great at science either, but maybe we can struggle through it together?
And if we can’t figure something out, I can always call my brother. He’s pre-med, so he could probably pass this class with his eyes closed.”

Okay, that was really sweet and completely unexpected.
Jared was making my stomach do all sorts of funny things again. But then I remembered one issue with his seemingly stellar suggestion for us to spend more time together.

“I don’t think Brooke will like that very much,” I said as I imagined Jared and me in my room together, huddled close as we read our
chemistry textbook and made study notes.

He cocked his head to the side
and grinned. “What? Me calling Evan for help? Yeah, you’re probably right, they’ve never really like each other.”

I returned his smiled. “No,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “Me and you studying together.”

He shrugged. “I think she’ll get over it,” he said, and I didn’t think he could have been more wrong.

No way would she get over something like that.
She’d been ice cold to me when we’d worked together on Saturday night, even bumping into me ‘by accident’ twice. She wasn’t a fan and the last thing she’d want was me spending alone time with her boyfriend.

“Well, either way, I have to work with you both, and I’d rather not piss off your girlfriend. She already sort of doesn’t like me for some reason.”

Jared just looked at me and blinked a few times. “My girlfriend? Brooke?”

“
Yeah, obviously,” I said, completely confused as to why he was questioning who I was talking about.

“
She’s not my girlfriend. She’s my
ex
-girlfriend. We haven’t been together since last fall.”

Well
, this was certainly news. No wonder he was confused.

“Really? She told me last week that she was your girlfriend.”

“Are you kidding me?” he asked, and I could see the disbelief on his face.

“Uh, no. Not hardly.”

He closed his eyes and shook his head. “Sorry. She’s been bugging me about getting back together, but I’m not interested.”

“Oh, well, you should probably tell her that,
” I suggested.

“I have,” he said dryly. “Several times.”

“Oh.”

He took another sip of his coffee and shook his head, mumbling something that I couldn’t understand. I took it as a sign that he didn’t want to take our conversation any further, so I changed the subject and asked him about his book. Then I got out my
iPad and prepared to download it. I loved to read, and I was definitely intrigued to read something he’d written.

He turned red again as he mumbled the title, so I kicked him with the toe of my
shoe. That only made him turn redder, so I decided to stop teasing him. Instead I asked him to tell me about writing, which was actually a subject he was comfortable with. We talked until we both had to go to class, and then he walked me part of the way.

When we stopped to go in our separate directions, I felt the urge to hug him, so I did, equally hating and loving the feel of his hard body pressed against mine. It only succeeded in making my already elevated feelings of lust swim out of control, which told me it was a mistake, but it didn’t change
the fact that I wanted to hug him again and again. And now that I knew he didn’t have a girlfriend and the option to pursue something with him was there, it only succeeded in making me feel worse. I no longer had Brooke as a barrier, and I had a fear I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself from seeing what it might be like to be more than friends with Jared.

And just like that the guilt was back in full force.

“Have fun in class,” Jared told me when he pulled away from me, his blue eyes shining.

I smiled
and tried to reel in how I was feeling. “I’ll see you tonight?” I forced out, because I had to say something.

He nodded. “See you at work.”

Oh, God. I was in trouble.

Chapter Ten

Jared

As I drove
to the gym from class that afternoon, I thought about Cassie. She’d been on my mind a lot over the past few days, and I couldn’t have asked for a more pleasant surprise than to walk into my chemistry class and see her sitting across the room. I was stoked when she asked me to be her lab partner, because it was a harmless, completely legitimate reason for me to hang out alone with her. That probably made me a bad friend, but I couldn’t help it. I liked her more each time I saw her, and I wanted to spend time with her.

We’d sat i
n the coffee shop after class, drinking our drinks that were as different as the two of us, talking until we had to go to class. She’d asked me about my book, and as much as I hated to talk about myself and my work, she pulled it out of me. But more than that, she made me feel at ease. She was so excited about it, and to see her eyes light up as she read the description and bought my book online gave me a thrill like nothing else. I so wanted her to like it. And in truth, I wanted her to like me.

Cassie Witter
had been the unattainable girl for so long, but I wasn’t sure that was the case anymore. Initially I figured she’d never go for a nerd like me. I’d seen the guys she’d dated in high school. They all looked like Hale – tall, good looking, athletes. I was a geek who wrote stories and played video games and didn’t have an athletic bone in his body.

But there were times when
she looked at me in a way that told me she saw through all of that. She saw past the guy I’d been on the outside for so long and saw the guy I’d become. Not that I thought I looked all that different, but a lot could change in two years, and I knew I’d changed in some subtle ways that made girls like Brooke notice me – six inches in height and muscle tone will do that. But Cassie was in a whole different stratosphere than Brooke, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to go there, because if she rejected me, the fall back to earth would hurt like hell.

But I loved the idea of what it might be like to be with a girl like her who had this innate ability to light me up inside. She brought me out of my shell, and I liked that about her. No one else had ever been able to do that, but around her I felt comfortable, like I’d known her for far longer than a few days. I’d caught her staring at me at the coffee shop, and I would have paid all the money I’d saved over the past few years to know what was going
through her mind.

I knew she liked what she saw when she looked at me, because she told me she thought I was hot. But
was she just harmlessly flirting with me like she did all the time with Scott? Was that just how she was? It frustrated me that I couldn’t read her well enough to know. What if she liked Scott and was just harmlessly flirting with me? And worse, what would Scott say if he knew how I felt about her?

Dammit, this was so screwed up.

I was relieved to see my brother’s car at the gym when I pulled up, because I needed to zone out and stopping obsessing over Cassie. Working out did that for me. Punctuality wasn’t one of Austin’s strengths, and I was usually the one waiting around for him so we could start our workout. Thankfully that wouldn’t be the case today, which was good. I figured I’d spend a few minutes pounding on the heavy bag before we started lifting.

Austin
was actually the reason I looked the way I did. The summer after I’d graduated high school, he’d been in a bad place. He’d wanted to make the varsity football team, and the coach said he’d take him because Austin was fast, but he need to put on twenty pounds of muscle.

Austin
was bummed, because growing up it had been our mother, the tomboy, who had played catch with him in the front yard, timed him as he ran wind sprints and encouraged him to push himself harder when he was tired. He took after her in so many ways, and she knew how much raw talent he had. I knew he was missing her more than I’d originally thought, and of course because I felt guilty about her abandoning him, I stepped in and told him I’d help him.

He’d
looked at me like I was crazy, which was truthfully a completely legitimate assumption. I’d never worked out a day in my life, I had no muscle tone, and I wasn’t the most coordinated of guys. But I wanted to help my brother, so I convinced him we’d do it together.

W
e joined a local gym and started a workout routine that I’d found on the Internet for kids who wanted to gain weight the right way for sports. We ran, boxed, lifted weights and pushed each other, since I was probably as out of shape as I could have been when we’d started and needed to be pushed. But by the end of three months, Austin had gained enough weight and polished his game enough to make varsity and even start, and I looked different than I ever had in my life.

I actually had muscle tone and definition. My shoulders had filled out, and my arms had
some bulk to them. For the first few weeks after I noticed how my body had changed, I couldn’t stop looking in the mirror. I was like a different person, and I liked it. So I kept up the workouts and the running, because if nothing else, looking good on the outside gave me a confidence that I’d never had before.

And now almost two years later working out had become an addiction for me. I not only liked the
way I looked, because it made girls like Cassie Witter think I was hot, but I also liked how it made me feel – physically and mentally.

“Hey bro,”
Austin said when I walked into the gym.

He was at the reception desk flirting with Carolyn, the girl who worked there Monday through Friday. The gym we went to was kind of a hole in the wall, but I liked it because it was small and didn’t have all the fancy crap that other gyms had. There were treadmills and free weights and not much else. An
d when we’d started working out there, Carolyn had been behind the desk each day.

My brother didn’t know that I’d slept with her
soon after Brooke and I had broken up, and I wasn’t telling him because he had a crush on her. No matter that she was three years older than me, which put her at six years older than him, he’d still try to kick my ass if he knew I’d swiped her from him.

But that
hadn’t been my intention. She’d been working a rare closing shift, and I’d been at the gym late working out my frustrations a few weeks after Brooke had dumped me. Carolyn came over and put her hands under the bar as I’d bench pressed more than I should have been doing alone.

“I’ll spot you,” she said, or more purred, and I
’d almost dropped the heavily weighted bar on my forehead.

My face was beet red, and I could barely talk I was breathing so hard from pushing myself beyond my limits, but I was convinced that the harde
r I pushed, the more I could force Brooke out of my head.

When I finished my set, I eased the bar back
down and let go. Carolyn guided it to rest on top of the supports. Then I sat up and reached for my water bottle. When I did, Carolyn’s hand closed around mine, her fingers intertwining with mine, so I looked up at her.

“I remember the first time you and
Austin came in here,” she purred. Then her hand glided up my forearm to my bicep and squeezed. “You had no muscle tone, your hair was long and it hung in your face, and you wouldn’t make eye contact with me. You were so shy.” She continued to run her hand up until it filtered through my short hair. “Now you’re one of the hottest guys in the gym.”

Yeah, I didn’t agree with her, but whatever, she was practically tenting my shorts just by tou
ching me. Aside from Brooke, very few girls had been that close to me. Then she took a step forward and straddled my legs, pressing herself into my semi-hard erection that I was desperately trying to keep under control.

“What are you doing?” I asked, when all I could think was,
Shut up dumbass, this hot girl is practically having sex with you, and you’re asking her why? Don’t be an idiot.

She arched her back and pressed harder against me, her eyes hooded as she looked at me. “Do you want me, Jared?”

I swallowed hard and told her, “Yes.”

I felt like a jackass, thinking how I should have played the whole situation cool, but Carolyn knew that wasn’t my forte. And she knew exactly what she was doing, especially when she started to rub the hardness between my legs.

I let out a measured sigh that made her smile and slide back on the bench. She looked at me in anticipation before she started touching herself, and I damn near lost it.

“I
f you want me, Jared,” she purred, “then take me.”

“Here?”
I choked out.

The gym was empty. I was the last person there, and it was
almost closing time, but I looked around for cameras since the last thing I wanted was to get caught having sex in the gym and have it been recorded. I saw one up in the corner closest to us, but the red light wasn’t blinking.

“I turned the cameras off,” Carolyn explained. “And we’re the only ones here. I even locked the door.”

Then she stood and slowly slid off her tiny shorts to reveal that she was – holy shit – going commando. At that point, I was fully hard, but she still continued to strip in front of me. When she tossed a condom on the bench between my legs, I finally believed she was serious. She really wanted to have sex with me at the gym.

Sweet!

I told myself to take charge, that a real man would take command and do what she said. I hadn’t been feeling much like a man those days, since Brooke had left me feeling like shit, but I desperately wanted to get over her. So I’d stood up, slid my arms around Carolyn’s waist and kissed her.

She responded to me, moaning into my mouth and pressing her naked body against mine as she simultaneously slid my shorts down. They dropped to the floor in a heap around my ankles, and my boxers followed soon after.

Before I knew it, we were completely naked, and she was beneath me on the mat I used for sit-ups, crying out my name as she wrapped her legs around me. It was over too fast, my excitement of what we were doing, and the fact that I hadn’t had sex in several months, since Brooke had come up with every reason in the book why we couldn’t have sex when she’d been home over Thanksgiving – that should have been my first clue that something was wrong – getting the best of me. I wasn’t even sure if Carolyn had gotten off before I did, which made me feel like a total jackass. Of course she assured me she had, and because I wanted to believe her, I didn’t question what she was saying.

I laid there on the mat, looking up at the black ceiling as she stood and got dressed. She tossed my shorts to me so I took that as my cue to get dressed and get the hell out of there. As I stood, she leaned forward and kissed my cheek.

“Thanks for that,” she said. “I had such a stressful day, and I just needed to take the edge off.”

“No problem,” I barely choked out, because I was still stunned that we’d just had sex.

She winked at me and then headed back to the front desk. I silently got dressed, gathered up my things and headed home for the night. She waved goodbye to me when I left, feeling dazed and a little disjointed. I started to wonder just how awkward it would be the next time I saw her. A part of me also wondered if what we’d done might become a regular thing. I might be okay with that.

But two days later
, when Austin and I had gone to the gym, we’d seen her talking to some beefy looking guy with dark hair and a spray tan.

“Who’s that?” I asked my brother as we ran on the treadmill.

“Danny. He’s Carolyn’s boyfriend.”

“Her boyfriend?” I questioned.

“Yeah, he’s a body builder. He does all those competitions and stuff. He’s been out of town for a few weeks, but now he’s back.”

Holy fuck.

“You’re sure he’s her boyfriend?” I questioned, wondering if I’d dreamed what had happened the other night.

“Yeah,”
Austin said, as he increased his speed. “She told me about him last week. They’ve been together for like a year. She says she’s going to marry him.”

And she’s a giant cheater.

And I felt like a giant asshole. I never would have slept with her had I known she had a boyfriend – especially one who looked like he did. He was huge. He could totally beat my ass into the ground. I prayed that he never found out I’d slept with his girlfriend, because he’d probably kill me.

Thankfully he
never found out. I was also relieved when Carolyn never came onto me again. There were a few times when we were the last two people at the gym, but she never approached me again. I would have turned her down. I didn’t like being the other guy in that scenario. If she wanted to cheat, that was her business, but I wasn’t going to be a party to it.

“Hey
Austin,” I said as I walked up to him, ruffling his hair, because I knew he hated it.

He batted my hand away. “Quit it, dude.”

“Whatever,” I said, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Hey Jared,” Carolyn said in that flirty way of hers.

“Hey,” I said politely.

She just giggled. She had to have known that she still made me uncomfortable. I figured that was probably why she flirted. It was fun for her. I handed her my membership card to swipe and caught sight of the diamond sparkling on her left hand. She and Danny had gotten engaged sometime around Easter, and she seemed happy.