Read Ripple for Free Online Page B

He gives me a shy sideways glance. Shrugs. “I don’t know, I guess it’s just that this fall might be kind of hard, you know, for us, together, with work and all my practice and game time. Football is a time suck, for sure. But I don’t want you to ever think that, you know, just because I can’t be with you all the time, it doesn’t mean I don’t want to be.” His hands cup my face. “Okay?”
    He looks at me all probing and intense, like he needs me to get it. Like he really wants to make this work. Like he’s trying to show me how he feels and who he
really
is. But for some reason, I only ever get a quick sense of him. Kind of like a spritz of perfume. How it’s super-strong for a minute and then fades. Most of the time, he is warm fingers and heated breath and sweet words. Andas much as he tries to show me more, I can’t push past any of that to what’s inside, to what makes him
him
. I just know I need him. At school. In front of my grandma. And especially during moments like this, when he’s all wrapped around me.
    So I give him a reassuring smile. Say, “Okay.”
    His lips caress mine again just as Juliette’s car horn honks.
    â€œShit,” I mutter.
    His hands press against my back. “Don’t leave. Please. Let me drive you home.”
    Panic prickles through me. In the two months we’ve been dating, he’s only picked me up from my house once. I waited for him at the end of my driveway, hated that he saw the dirt stain that is my street. Wouldn’t let him come anywhere near my front door.
    I want him to imagine my one-story ranch house is small but pleasant. Flowers in vases or ripe fruit in bowls. That my mother is baking cookies, and both she and my stepdad are giving fabulous parental advice inside. But it’s so far from that. Stress hangs in the air like nerve gas. My stepdad yells. My mom, in her work coma, is oblivious, and my sister waxes ultra-bitchy. I don’t want Seth to see any of it.
    Juliette honks again. I slide off Seth’s hips and toward the passenger-side door.
    â€œSorry. Juliette needs to pick something up from my house,” I lie. “I have to go with her. We’ll have to continue this later.” I smile all seductive.
    Looking disappointed, he grips my hand. “You’ll call me tomorrow?”
    â€œOf course,” I say, then climb out into the night, rush to Juliette’s car before my boyfriend can see any trace of my guilt for lying to him again.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    Juliette stops her car at the end of my drive in the same spot where she picked me up. She hooks her chin-length dark hair behind her ears. “Tess, let me drive you to the door.”
    â€œI’m good,” I say.
    And she nods. She’ll argue and debate with me over a million things, but when it comes to my home life, she lets me win every time.
    Almost an entire school year into our friendship, when I finally had the nerve to let her come over, we got off the school bus and wandered right into my stepdad. He was home unexpectedly. Drunk. Stumbling. Screaming—first, about his shit job, then at me for showing up. Even though I came home at that time every day.
    â€œI’m sorry,” I told Juliette after we’d retreated to my room.
    â€œWhy?” she’d said. “You’re not the one yelling.”
    She’s never judged me for my stepdad’s drinking. Still, she respects that I hate having her see it.
    Now I grab her up in a hug. “Thank you for going to that sucky game with me.”
    â€œNo problem at all,” she says, “except for being subjected to waste-case Sam Kearns and that Dalton dude, whoever the hell he was.”
    Yeah,
I think.
Whoever the hell he was.
    â€œYou’re the bestiest,” I say, getting out of the car. “Love you.”
    Juliette winks, blows me a kiss, and drives away. And I thank the