Summer Apart Read Free Page B

should be over it by now. Maybe Park, who is usually a gentleman, will force himself to forget about that moment as well.
    Or maybe I should just throw my car in reverse and get the hell out of here.
    Park taps on the glass again with his knuckles and I reluctantly climb out of my car.
    “Sorry,” I say as I close the car door and look up at him. His expression is unreadable. “I was lost in thought.”
    “I can see that,” he says with a little snort of laughter. “Should I put these in your room or the garage?”
    “Let’s take them to my room,” I say. “Maybe I can practice packing up the canvases your mom and aunt bought.”
    By the grace of every god in existence, my mother isn’t in the kitchen when we walk in through the garage. She’s also not in the living room. When make it to the hallway, just a few feet away from my bedroom when Mom calls out, “Becca, is that you?”
    “Yes,” I yell back, feeling the thundering of my rapid heartbeat as I hope to God that if I talk fast enough, she won’t say anything embarrassing. “Park is with me and we’re working on my art.”
    Mom’s head pops out of her bedroom door down the hall. “Oh hi, Park! I’m trying a new self-tanner so I can’t come out for fifteen to twenty minutes,” she says with a laugh. “Or longer, if I end up looking like an orange.”
    “That’s okay,” Park says. “I’ll be around a while.”
    Mom smiles and closes the door, leaving us in silence for a glorious fifteen to twenty minutes. Seriously, this must be my lucky day.
    We go in my room and I shut the door, since Mom never cares and Dad is at work. When Dad’s home, he doesn’t allow the door to be closed with a boy inside. Not even with Park. And he likes Park.
    “Why do you use a different voice when you talk to my parents?” I ask as he sets the packing supplies on the floor and I kneel next to them, digging through the open one.
    “What do you mean?” Park sits on my bed, elbows on his knees as if he’s thinking really hard about something. It’s crazy how something as simple as sitting on a bed can be so sexy when he does it. It might have something to do with the fact that it’s my bed he’s sitting on. I doubt I would find it as attractive if he were sitting on another girl’s bed.
    I fold up the first of the triangle shaped cardboard boxes, peeling off the tape that sticks two sides of the triangle together. “I don’t know, it’s like you change your voice to make yourself sound more professional every time you talk to my mom. And when you talk to Dad, your voice gets lower.”
    He shrugs. “I don’t think I do it on purpose. Must be a subconscious way of trying to make them like me.”
    I poke him with my cardboard triangle tube. “And how do you change your voice when you talk to me?”
    He leans forward from his place on the bed. “What makes you think I change my voice for you?”
    His snarky reply makes it feel like all of the air has been sucked out of my lungs. I look to the floor and try to focus on the stupid cardboard, even though now all I want to do is pile it up in the back yard and set it on fire. “I was just playing around,” I say.
    “Aww, don’t be that way,” he says, nudging my shoulder. I still refuse to look at him but he keeps talking anyway. “I’m just playing. Of course I change my voice for you. You’re the only one who gets this version of me.”
    I look up from my place on the floor. “So I get a fake version of you?”
    He shakes his head. “I’m never fake around you, Becca. I’m just…different.”
    “Like how?”
    He runs a hand over his mouth, probably buying some time to get his answer straight. “I don’t curse that much around you. That’s kind of a huge difference.”
    “Why? You think I can’t handle cursing? I’m not a child, you know.”
    He rises from my bed and ambles over to the pile of canvases in the corner of my room. “I know you can handle it. I’ve heard the way you and