Read The One That I Want for Free Online Page B

bright red, but I just smiled sweetly at all of them.
    “You
did
?” Carter finally asked.
    “Yep.” I took a bite.
    “That is hard to picture,” Max said.
    Well, don’t,
I almost blurted, but it was too late. They already had.
    “Don’t you want some of my fries, Gemma?” Addison pointed to her plate. “Or the rest of my milkshake? Gosh, I can’t finish it all, but I’ll bet
you
could.”
    Have I mentioned that I did not like my best friend very much? After a sip of diet soda, I tried to pretend I wasn’t mortified. I changed the subject by asking the boys, “What did y’all do at football camp?”
    They looked at each other. Then Max said, “We were actually in two different camps. We were divided up by position. So Carter was in quarterback camp—”
    “You’re the quarterback for your team?” Addison asked, genuinely interested in Carter for the first time. The quarterback for our own team was the most popular guy in school—so popular that even Addison, with her formidable powers of acting like a ditz so boys would like her, could not turn his head in her direction.
    “Yeah,” Carter said. A blush crept into his cheeks, and one corner of his mouth turned up in a tightly controlled grin. Aw, the big guy was embarrassed at the attention.
    “There’s more to you than meets the eye,” Addison said in the same flirtatious tone she’d used with Max thirty seconds before. “You’re silent but violent.”
    The boys and I burst into laughter. For the first time, I felt like
we
were sharing something and
she
was the odd chick out.
    “What’s so funny?” she asked.
    I turned to Max to let him explain, but his lips were pressed together, suppressing a smile. I put Addison out of her misery. “That’s a term usually reserved for describing a fart.”
    “Oh!” Sixteen emotions passed across her face in the space of half a second. Like magic, she turned the situation around. She leaned diagonally across the table and patted Carter’s muscular forearm, her bottom lip poked out in sympathy. “I didn’t mean to call you a fart.”
    Carter’s blue eyes widened. I thought he would be speechless. But then he said, “Max is the one who’s full of hot air.”
    Incredible. Carter and Max were arguing over Addison. The table practically vibrated with their lusty thoughts for her.
    I wasn’t going to take that through the rest of my chicken sandwich. To return to a more comfortable subject, I asked Max, “So you were at, what? Kicker camp?” I could have sworn he’d been staring at me on the field—
me
, not Addison. If he had been, he would have seen me staring right back at him. Since that obviously was
not
what had been going on, I couldn’t admit that I’d been watching him at practice and I’d seen what he’d done at kicker camp with my own eyes.
    He did give me kind of a funny look, like he’d thought our eyes
had
met on the field and now he was confused. But he simply said, “Yeah. I’m not big enough to play any position but kicker. The first time I got tackled, I’d get squashed like a leetle bug.”
    He was making a joke before Carter could beat him to it, I thought. Max must be used to getting teased by his team about his size. But he was taller than average and not skinny, just lean. That had become clear to me when he took his shirt off. Every other guy on their team must look like Carter the oafburger.
    “As rarely as he’s on the field, he might as well not be on the team,” Carter said.
    Max’s eyes slid to Carter, but his smile never changed. He took a breath to defend himself. For some reason, I felt compelled to do it for him.
    “He might as well not be on the team?” I repeated. “Carter, how can you say that? There’s a lot of pressure on the quarterback because you have so much to coordinate. But there’s probably even more pressure on the kicker. Max is solely responsible for scoring a field goal or an extra point, and often that’s the deciding score in a