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She searched my face for understanding. “I would love nothing more than to say yes to you right now, but it would be in hopes that it would help get him out of my head, and that wouldn’t be fair to you. You deserve so much better than that. You deserve a girl whose whole heart is in it, not some permanently-damaged mental case.”
I had to read between the lines. She’d said no, but it wasn’t really a rejection.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that you weren’t damaged goods. If my brother weren’t in the picture, if I had been born an only child, if all you knew was me, would you consider being my girlfriend then?”
I braced myself for a real rejection.
“Grayson,” she said tiredly. “If that were the case, I wouldn’t have to consider it. I’d probably already be naming our future babies.”
I am not often taken by complete surprise, but that comment had me reeling.
Avery gave me a sad smile and slipped her arm around me. It was the first hug she’d given me since we kissed. “You have no idea how amazing you are. This is about me. I promise.”
I hugged her back and felt my smile spread from ear to ear. “All you had to do was say you weren’t ready,” I teased, wanting to lighten the atmosphere before she started dwelling on how miserable she felt again. “I can wait. We’ll get your heart all nice and patched up and then you can say yes to me.”
“If you actually manage to fix my heart, I’ll say yes to whatever you want.”
Avery was so i
“Anything I want?” I laughed. “Will you do me a favor and put that in writing?”
She finally caught my meaning, and I was rewarded with that cute little embarrassed shriek of hers. “Grayson!” And the rosy cheeks. “You know I didn’t mean that!”
“Believe me, I know,” I said mournfully. “But you did mention having my babies, so I know you’ve at least thought about going there with me. I’d say there’s hope for my future.”
“Grayson! Oh my gosh! Stop!”
“Okay. Okay. Fine.” I really didn’t want to stop. I loved getting her all worked up. “I’ll stop on one condition.”
“What?” she asked so warily that I laughed at her.
“You can’t let Aiden ruin your birthday weekend. Don’t smart people know how to compartmentalize? File him away in your stress-about-later folder, and starting right now, just think about how much awesome fun we are all going to have tomorrow.”
The mention of our skiing overnighter got Owen, Pam, and Chloe all talking before Avery could respond, but their excitement perked her up. “Make sure you all pack your swim suits,” I said. “Our building has a sick indoor pool and a hot tub.” Then, because I couldn’t resist, I leaned down and whispered in Avery’s ear. “Unless you’d rather just hit the shower together again. But then it’s your turn to be naked.”
Avery shrieked again, just like I hoped she would.
That conversation at lunch was the most life I’d seen in Avery since my brother caught us kissing. I wanted to make sure her mood stayed happy for her birthday the next day, so I showed up at her house after school prepared to keep her distracted the rest of the day.
“Grayson!” She was more excited to see me than I’d expected. “What are you doing here?”
I held up my science journal. “We only have a month until the science fair. We have work to do.”
Avery smiled and opened the door wide to let me in. “I don’t know why Mr. Walden was worried about you being my partner,” she said as she directed me into her living room. “You’ve been more of a slave driver than a slacker.”
I rolled my eyes. “A slave driver? We haven’t worked on this since I took you to that party weeks ago.”
Avery gave me a confused look. “Didn’t you write up an entry in your journal about the kiss?”
“Why?” I eyed her journal as she took it from her bag and set it out on the coffee table in front of us. “Did you?”
I was hoping to fluster her, but instead she frowned again. “Of course I did. We have to record all of our experiments.”
I resisted the urge to bang my head against a wall.
Avery paused and then sent me a panicked expression. “You are recording our experiments in your journal, aren’t you? Because we need your viewpoints on everything to keep the integrity of this project.”
“Aves, relax. Yes, I’ve kept my dumb journal up-to-date. I blabbed all about our kiss in it, okay?”
Suddenly curious about what she’d written on the topic of our kiss, I snatched up her journal and flipped to the last entry. I thought she’d freak, but she just smiled at me and asked if I wanted something to drink.
I assumed that was permission enough, so I read her entry as she went in search of some soda. All I can say is no freaking wonder she considered our kiss an experiment. I flipped back through all of her entries and found every step of this project mapped out in detailed outlines.
“What is this?” I complained when she came back and handed me a Sprite. My voice conveyed all the confusion, disappointment, and horror I felt.
“My journal?” she asked, confused.
“This is not a journal. This is . . . it’s a freaking textbook. Where’s all the good stuff?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, all the girly stuff.” I kicked my voice into my best falsetto. “OMG I got my first kiss tonight! It was AH-MAZING! Grayson Ke
Avery burst into the biggest laugh I’d ever heard from her. She went into full hysterics.
“What?” I demanded.
“It’s not a diary, Grayson!” She had to wipe tears from her eyes. “It’s a scientific study!”
I failed to see the difference.
Avery looked at my face and fell into another fit of laughter. Once she could talk again, she opened the book—I refused to call it a journal—to the last entry and started pointing things out. “It’s a log book of all the work we’ve done through the experiment.”
“It looks like a bunch of outlines. What is this pattern you’re using?”
Trying very hard to get her giggles under control, she pointed at the first heading. “It’s called the scientific method,” she said. “It’s the process by which science is carried out. Basically it boils down to question, hypothesis, prediction, test, and analysis.”
“What does that even mean?”
Aves got that look on her face that she’d had when she handed me a bowling ball and told me about Newton’s Laws. It was a little pitying, completely amused, and slightly excited. I could tell she liked teaching. She’d be a great teacher, actually.
“Here.” She sat down next to me and opened the book back to the kiss entry. “First you have to have a question. In this case, yours was, ‘Why can’t Avery move on from the guilt stage?’ Your hypothesis was that I was self-fulfilling the feelings of guilt and subconsciously repressing the anger. Next you predicted that if I could be forced to feel something out of sequence, it might break the cycle and put me back on a more natural path. You tested it by kissing me. The analysis is the result of the test. In this case the experiment failed because afterward, despite momentarily experiencing feelings of acceptance and happiness, the second I was faced with the original problem, I went right back to guilt.”
I had no idea what to think. I read her “analysis” again and frowned. “Geez, Aves, you sure know how to bleed all the romance out of a kiss. I must have really sucked performance-wise if this is how you remember it.”
“Grayson, this journal is a record of our scientific research. It doesn’t depict my personal feelings on the matter.” Avery’s face crept into fire-engine territory. “Of course you didn’t suck. I think that might be impossible. I couldn’t have asked for a more perfect first kiss.”