Biggest Flirts Read Free

single-handedly. Sawyer didn’t care. He stared up at Will with murder in his eyes.
    I stood too. “Come on, Sawyer. You were the one who told Will about this party in the first place.”
    “I didn’t invite him here .” Sawyer pointed at the bench where Will had been sitting.
    I knew how Sawyer felt. When I’d looked forward to hooking up with him at a party, I was disappointed and even angry if he shared his night with another girl instead. But that was our long-standing agreement. We used each other when nobody more intriguing was available. Now wasn’t the time to test our pact. I said, “You’re some welcome committee.”
    The joke surprised Sawyer out of his dark mood. He relaxed his shoulders and took a half step backward. Brody and the other guys retreated the way they’d come. I wouldn’t have put it past Sawyer to spring at Will now that everyone’s guard was down, but he just poked Will—gently, I thought with relief—on the cursive V emblazoned on his T-shirt. “What’s the V stand for? Virgin?”
    “The Minnesota Vikings, moron,” I said. Then I turned to Will. “You will quickly come to understand that Sawyer is full of sh—”
    Will spoke over my head to Sawyer. “It stands for ‘vilification.’ ”
    “What? Vili . . . What does that mean?” Knitting his brow, Sawyer pulled out his phone and thumbed the keyboard. I had a large vocabulary, and his was even bigger, but we’d both found that playing dumb made life easier.
    Will edged around me to peer over Sawyer’s shoulder at the screen. At the same time, he slid his hand around my waist. I hadn’t seen a move that smooth in a while. I liked the way Minnesota guys operated. He told Sawyer, “No, not two L ’s. One L .”
    Sawyer gave Will another wild-eyed warning. His gaze dropped to Will’s hand on my waist, then rose to my serious-as-a-heart-attack face. He told Will, “Okay, SAT. I’ll take my vocabulary quiz over here.” He retreated to the corner of the porch to talk with a cheerleader.
    Relieved, I sat back down on the bench, holding Will’s hand on my side so that he had to sit down with me or get his arm jerked out of its socket. He settled closer to me than before. With his free hand, he drummed his fingers on his knee to the beat of the music filtering onto the porch. The rhythm he tapped out was so complex that I wondered whether he’d been a drummer—not for marching band like me, but for some wild rock band that got into fistfights after the hockey game was over.
    As we talked, he looked into my eyes as if I was the only girl at the party, and he grinned at all my jokes. Now that my third beer was kicking in, I let go of some of my anxiety about saying exactly the right thing and just had fun. I asked him if he was part of our senior class. He was. It seemed obvious, but he could have been a freshman built like a running back. Then I explained who the other people at the party were according to the Senior Superlatives titles they were likely to get—Best Car, Most Athletic, that sort of thing.
    My predictions were iffy. Each person could hold only one title, preventing a superstar like my friend Kaye from racking up all the honors and turning the high school yearbook into her biography. She might get Most Popular or Most Likely to Succeed. She was head cheerleader, a born leader, and good at everything. Harper, the yearbook photographer, might get Most Artistic or Most Original, since she wore funky clothes and retro glasses and always thought outside the box.
    “What about you?” Will asked, tugging playfully at one of my braids.
    “Ha! Most Likely to Wake Up on Your Lawn.”
    He laughed. “Is that a real award?”
    “No, we don’t give awards that would make girls cry. I’ll probably get Tallest.” That wasn’t a real one either.
    He cocked his head at me. “Funniest?”
    I rolled my eyes. “That’s like getting voted Miss Congeniality in a beauty pageant. It’s a consolation prize.”
    A line