Kissing Jayden: a romantic teen thriller Read Free Page B

time. Still, Tyler said stuff like, “Molly, you’re so pretty.” Plus, he had started picking me up in the mornings so I didn’t have to ride the bus.
    I mostly tried to forget about Jayden Stone, his lips, the bet … and Mike Jensen. Forgetting about Mike Jensen, though, was next to impossible since every time he saw me in the hallway, he’d chant like he had back in middle school, “Look at the bookworm squirm.”
    And maybe I should have hauled off and smacked his face rather than Jayden’s since I had liked Jayden before all this. Because on top of being really hot, Jayden had never seemed like a total and complete jerk like Mike. Mike was scary mean. But they were buddies, so maybe Jayden was more of a jerk than I had thought.
    Any time I saw either of them, I just looked down and walked away as fast as possible. In Government, I told Mr. Franklin that I was having trouble seeing the board, and he let me switch seats. That way, at least Jayden was behind me, and I didn’t have to spend all of class sitting right next to him, red-faced.
    A couple of times, Jayden had come up to me after class, looking miserable, but I had just walked right past him, feeling my eyes burn. There was no fixing getting humiliated in front of half the school. What I was really wondering, though, was why me ? What had I ever done—other than refusing to let Mike Jensen copy off my vocab test in middle school? Just the thought made me cringe. I had seriously thought he was going to kill me. But Jayden? I had never done anything to him except secretly crush on him.
    Either way, it was Jayden’s fault that people stared at me in the halls.
    For a while, every time Stace and Kelly asked if I wanted to go out, I made up excuses. And when Tyler and I would get together, I’d tell him that I’d rather stay in and watch Netflix. I even bribed him a couple of times by making my mom’s famous brownies. Anything to avoid the humiliation of running into Mike “The Jerk” Jensen. Or Jayden.
    Finally I agreed to go out to the movies, figuring that it was pretty safe, because the movie had been out a couple of weeks. Wrong . The minute we got into the theater, I saw Mike and Jayden and a bunch of guys from the baseball team with their dates. I could feel my cheeks getting flushed, so I turned and joked with Stace and Kelly while the guys got popcorn and stuff. But seriously? Did we have to end up at the same movie on the same night? It wasn’t fair!
    Tyler held my hand all through the movie, which was kind of sweet and kind of annoying since his hand was sweaty. Every few minutes, I had to pull away and wipe my hand on my jeans. Gross.
    Jayden and Mike and their group were a few rows ahead of us. Mike, as usual, was showing off and being the jerk he was, making a bunch of noise and hassling people. Part of me wanted the usher to come in and kick him out, but Mike Jensen never got in trouble — mostly because people were too scared to say anything. And maybe that’s why he hated me — because I had stood up to him one freaking time.
    When the movie ended, I went with Stace and Kelly to the bathrooms, but the line was super-long so I decided to go back and find Tyler. When I didn’t see him in the lobby, I went along the theaters in the back. By the time I got to the last theater, I still couldn’t find them, so I turned around and started walking back to meet up with Stace and Kelly.
    Then, right as I passed the second to last theater before the lobby, the door opened and somebody grabbed my wrist and pulled me inside. It was pitch-black, and I giggled. This totally wasn’t Tyler’s style — at all .
    “Tyler!” I squeaked.
    We were off to the side where the stadium seats came down, so nobody could see us, but I knew somebody could come walking in at any second.
    “ Shh …” he whispered.
    Then a pair of arms wrapped around my waist, and I put my hands on the broad shoulders in front of me while my eyes and brain adjusted.