Paper Airplanes (20 page)

Aww, poor Scott.
I put my arm around him and gave him a side hug.

“You’re something else, Scotty,” I told him, seeing what a great guy he really was. When you got beneath the hyper puppy dog demeanor he usually possessed, you saw what a loyal
friend he was and a truly genuine person. “And I think you’re cute. If other girls can see that, then they’re blind.”

He grinned
down at me. “Thanks, Cass. It’s really too bad you like my best friend.”

I froze when he said that
and pulled away from him. “No, I don’t,” I said quickly.

“Yes, you do.”
He shrugged. “I wish you didn’t, but I’m not blind. I see how you look at him and how he looks at you. Jared doesn’t play with anyone, but he messes around with you, and even though he’s never said anything, I’ve seen his face when you walk into a room. It’s pretty obvious how you both feel.”

My face fell when he said that, knowing there was no point in arguing. He was completely right.

“Are you mad?” I asked him.

He shrugged
again. “Nah. Disappointed, I guess, because you’re really hot, but Jared needs someone like you in his life. Ever since Brooke dumped him and then the shooting, he’s been so serious, almost sad, you know. You make him happy, and that’s cool with me. You really like him?”

I nodded. “I do. He’s amazing and perfect, and he’s so sweet. I like him a lot, but he’s been acting all weird lately. I’m not sure what to think.”

Scott rolled his eyes. “He’s an idiot, but I know he’s got a lot going on right now, so I wouldn’t read too much into it.”

“So you don’t care if I date him?”
I asked, making sure what I thought I was understanding was accurate.

“I guess not. It’s not like I had a chance with you or anything.”

“Scott,” I said, shaking my head. It sounded like he was putting himself down, and I hated that.

“It’s cool. I’m just the goofy best friend. I get it.”

“You’re not goofy,” I told him, because I didn’t want him to think he wasn’t worthy.

God knows I wasn’t anything special when you peeled back the layers. I was kind of
a mess in all honesty.

“Yeah
, I am,” he said, pulling a face at me and making me laugh.

I tr
ied to smack him with my hand, but he stepped out of my reach.

“Ha, ha! You can’t get me,” he said as he walked backward toward the kitchen.

I just shook my head at him.

“Were you being honest when you said I was cute before?” he asked me, his back against the swinging double doors.

“Yeah, I was,” I told him sincerely. “You’re totally cute.”

He grinned. “Awesome!
So you’ll come tonight? To my show?”

I smiled. “I wouldn’t miss it.”

“Cool. Maybe while we’re there you can scope out a cute girl for me in the crowd.”

I laughed. “Totally.”

He shot me a double thumbs-up before he backed the rest of the way into the kitchen.

Chapter Fifteen

Jared

I w
as almost late getting back since there had been an accident on the interstate. My drive home with Austin had taken an hour longer than I’d planned. Scott was blowing up my phone with text messages that I refused to answer because I didn’t feel like dealing with him.

Finally he called me, so I picked up. “
There was a huge wreck on the interstate. I’m almost there,” I told him instead of saying hello.

“Dude, I’m going to be late,” he whined.

“No, you’re not. The show doesn’t start for two hours.”

“Yeah, but we have to drive there, and I have to get set up. I
need time for that.”

“Aren’t Tom and the guys handling all that?”

Scott had a team of people who worked with him over the summer to help out with the shows. Business had gotten better, and he couldn’t do it all on his own. Tom was his partner, and he handled all of the logistics of the events where Scott handled the technical components. They made a good team, and Tom was efficient. He could handle set-ups with his eyes closed. Scott was just being paranoid, wanting to make sure everything was perfect. And it would be.

“Yeah, but I want to be there,” Scott insisted. “Come on, Jared. You know this is the biggest show we do all year.”

I sighed. “I’m turning onto our street now. I’ll be home in two minutes.”

“Cool! I’m ready to go. The car’s loaded. We just have to pick up Cassie, and we can get on the road.

My heart stopped for a second. “Cassie’s coming?”

“Yeah,” he said exuberantly. “
I invited her, and she was totally down with coming. Isn’t that great?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Come on! It’s so cool! I told her all about the light show this afternoon, and she’s so stoked to see it!”

If I wasn’t driving, I would have dropped my head in defeat. I needed to talk to him about Cassie, about how I felt about her, but I kept putting it off. It would crush him. I knew it, and until I was sure I wanted to pursue something with her, I wasn’t going to talk to him. I was kind of losing my resolve though between the way I’d caught her looking at me over the past week to how
she flirted with me and smiled. I wasn’t sure I could stay away much longer. I needed to talk to her about my concerns since she probably thought I was bi-polar with the way I’d been acting. I’d gone from one extreme to the other after she’d told me about her ex-boyfriend. But I was giving her the space that I knew she needed. I didn’t want to push her to do something she wasn’t ready to do, and until she was ready, I wasn’t going to talk to Scott.

“Well, I’m excited to see the show too,” I told Scott,
since I knew how hard he’d worked on it, and I kind of wanted to change the subject. Cassie was a dangerous topic for us.

And Scott had been working on the show for months. He
kept telling me how the soundtrack alone was epic. He’d revamped his usual show for the Fourth of July, wanting to make it extra special. I knew he loved making the kids who came to his shows smile. It was all really family friendly, something he’d done for the small town of Wishburn for a few years now. It was mostly a farming community, and they loved the high tech elements that Scott and his company brought to their light and fireworks shows. They’d definitely gotten more advanced in the past few years.

He usually set up near the town hall and used it as a canvas to create an array of images that made it look like it was covered in leaves or snow or rushing water. It was really impressive, and then he ended the night with
a huge fireworks display.

The company had come a long way in the years since he’d started working for them, and now that he was part-owner, he was bringing all sorts of new ideas into the fold. He really was a genius in his own right.
He had a ridiculous artistic vision about everything. He saw ways to make things be eye-catching and beautiful where others couldn’t.

But there were only so many demands for that kind of work which was why he
also worked at the restaurant. I knew he ultimately wanted to make his money in animation or from illustrating graphic novels, and I vowed that if I ever made it big as a writer, I’d introduce him to some people who could make that happen. I’d even encouraged him to take art classes at the Art Institute in Chicago, but he kept putting it off, choosing to go part-time to a local art school near home. I was pretty sure it was because he didn’t believe he could get in to SAIC. One of my goals over the summer was to get him to at least apply, because he had some serious talent.

I pulled into the
driveway, not even bothering to go inside. Scott would have a conniption if I did that. Since Saylor was sitting on the front porch waiting for Austin, he barely told me goodbye before he ran over to her, and they hugged like they hadn’t seen each other in months instead of a week. They’d been texting the whole way home too. I shook my head, making a mental note to keep an eye on them as I walked over to where Scott was anxiously waiting for me, practically bouncing out of his shoes. I slid into the front seat of his newly fixed car, and he just about dove in after me.

“You should let Cassie sit up front,
” he said as he started the engine and screeched out of the driveway, just narrowly missing his sister’s BMW that was parked in front of my truck.

I gripped the oh-shit handle above the window and held on for dear life. Scott slammed on the breaks, and then we shot forward to Cassie’s house. When we stopped, I turned to him.

“Dude, we’ll get there. Please don’t kill me in the process. I already almost died once this year. I’m not interested in reliving that experience.”

“Just get in the backseat,” he commanded. “And hurry. There
she is!”

“Fine,” I grumbled, as I got out and slid into the backseat.

“Damn, she looks hot,” Scott said, as I kept my eyes on the seat in front of me. “Doesn’t she look hot, Jared? Doesn’t she?!”

I made the mistake of looking up and almost choked when I saw Cassie walking toward
us wearing a red strapless top, little tiny white shorts and wedges that made her legs look extra-long and sexy. Her long blond curls flowed down over her shoulders.

Scott turned around to look at me, eyes shining. “Tell me she’s not the hottest girl you’ve ever seen.”

I swallowed hard, having trouble not agreeing with him. But he wasn’t really looking for an answer. Most of the time Scott’s questions were rhetorical.

“Hi guys,” Cassie said as she slid into the front seat, folding her long legs in after her.

“Hey Cass!” Scott said exuberantly as he backed out of the driveway. “Look who I found.”

Cassie turned around in her seat and looked back at me. “Hi Jared,” she said, and I had no idea how Scott didn’t pick up on how she felt about me. She wasn’t exactly being discreet.

“Hi,” I said, aiming for polite. I didn’t want Scott or Cassie to think I was flirting back. I’d been carefully avoiding doing anything that looked like flirting for the past week.

“How was your day?”
she asked me.

“It was fine.”

“Good,” she said, smiling brightly before she turned back around and looked over at Scott. “So tell me more about the show.”

Scott launched into a seemingly endless diatribe about the different
technical aspects of the show and the music he’d play. He talked for twenty minutes straight which was good in one way because it meant that I didn’t have to worry about Cassie flirting with me and me accidentally reciprocating because she got under my skin so easily that I could lose myself around her without even realizing it. But she didn’t talk to me. She listened attentively to Scott instead, asking pointed questions and inflating his ego with her interest.

“Here, let me play it for you,” he said, as he fiddled with his iPod.

We were about five minutes from Wishburn, and he’d been telling her about some of the new songs he’d selected for the show. His goal was to get the crowd pumped up so they’d be all excited for the fireworks.

When the song he’d been talking about started playing, he nodded his head in time with the beat that slowly built to a rapid-fire pace.

“I like it,” Cassie said, nodding her head along with him. “What song is it?”

“It’s called
Fireworks.
It’s by a band called Madina Lake. Cool, right?”

I’d been listening to the words of the song as they’d been talking about how great it was, and I realized pretty quickly that it wasn’t exactly family friendly.

“Scott, you know this song is about sex, right?” I asked him.

“No, it’s not,” he said quickly
, catching my gaze in the rearview mirror. “It’s about fireworks, and that’s what I do. I’m the fireworks guy.”

I rolled my eyes. He’d never get it. The song was completely about sex, but he refused to hear it. He was so dense sometimes
– and usually it was in a really good way since it shielded him from getting hurt – but this was different. This was his work. I just hoped no one complained about the show.

“I like it,” Cassie told him, but then she turned around and winked at me, so I knew she’d heard what I had.

A few minutes later Scott had parked the car and was talking to the guys on his team who’d gotten there early to set up the platform he’d work from. He was asking them rapid-fire questions that they were answering just as quickly since they were used to how he ran things. I looked away before it made me dizzy.

“So are you not speaking to me?” Cassie asked, nudging me in the side.

When I looked down at her, she was smiling up at me.

“No, I’m talking to you.”

“It didn’t seem like it. You were so quiet in the car.”

“I’m a quiet guy,” I defended.

“Yeah, you are,” she said, as the backs of her fingers flirted with mine. I pulled my hand away, afraid Scott would see. He was only ten feet away from us.

“You know that song he played was completely inappropriate, right?” I said then, because I didn’t want he
r to think I was mad at her, and it was the only conversation point I could think of.

“It wasn’t that bad.”

“It was about sex,” I insisted.

“I know, but it had a good beat, and not many people will be able to hear the lyrics anyway. They’ll just hear the chorus
and the awesome beat. It’ll be alright.”

“I hope so.”

She turned to me then. “Have a little faith in Scott. He’s not as clueless as you think. He knows what he’s doing.”

My eyebrows rose involuntarily as she said that. “I know he does, and for the record, I give him complete credit. He’s a
friggin’ genius with this stuff.”

She cocked her head to the side. “I bet you weren’t saying that when he burned off your hair,” she said, reaching up to finger the hair at the nape of my neck.

I pulled away before she could touch me. “He told you that story?”

I could have killed him that day. He’d freaking set me on fire. He hadn’t been paying attention and the next thing I knew, my hair that had hung halfway down my back because I hadn’t cut it in years, was ablaze.
Thankfully I’d been wearing a winter coat, so the fire hadn’t reached my skin, and I’d doused it out in the pool before it could do any real damage to my scalp, but ever since then, I’d kept my hair short and stayed away from Scott when he was wielding explosives.

Cassie
nodded and smiled at me. “Yup, he told me. And for the record, I like your hair better short. It’s more you.”

“I guess. I had it long for years.”

“I know you did, but you used to hide behind it. You used it as a shield,” she accused. “Now that it’s short, people can see you – the real you. It’s better this way, trust me.”

She was right. In high school I’d always walked with my head down, not making eye contact
, so I didn’t run the risk of anyone feeling they could make fun of me or push me around. I tried to stay invisible. I wanted to tell her that I kind of liked my shield, but I was too damn flattered to argue with her. I knew she liked the real me, the guy who’d been there all along that she could never see before, and for the first time in my life, I was okay with that.

“Hey guys?
” Scott called out to us, and we both turned to look at him. “Come up on the platform with me.”

He indicated where they had all his computer equipment erected fifteen feet above the street. He liked to be eye-level with the town hall so he had a view of how everything was lined up against the backdrop.

Cassie and I followed him over to the ladder, and he started to climb to the top. He never even thought about letting her go in front of him. So of course, I gestured for her to go in front of me. That way if she fell, I’d break her fall. I needed to teach Scott about how to be chivalrous. Not that I wanted him to do that to get Cassie to like him. I knew that wouldn’t work – and it wasn’t like I’d be able to deal with him dating her at this point anyway. I was sucked in too far.