Page 3 of Secret Triplets, Second Chances
LARA
“ I actually hate parties,” Jake admits, letting his head tip back against the tree house’s wall, exposing his throat.
I stare at it, thinking about vampires and how soft his skin looks, the gentle spattering of stubble that runs over his chin and neck.
Clasping my hands together, I order myself to stop looking at him. I’m staring.
And I definitely need to stop wondering what that stubble would feel like under my fingertips.
Jake is wearing a pair of worn jeans, the white of the cotton showing around the knees, and a pair of scuffed sneakers. His sweatshirt has blocks of blue and white.
I shift and feel the hem of my dress digging into my thighs. Jake definitely didn’t have a friend shove him into something uncomfortable before this party. He looks like he could curl up and go to sleep at any moment, perfectly cozy.
Jake goes on about all the reasons he hates coming to parties, and my gaze falls to his chest, running the lines on his jacket, memorizing the way it falls over his pecs and shoulders. It feels like an entirely new experience, like I’m a baby opening my eyes for the first time.
I have obviously seen boys at school wearing sweatshirts before. In fact, I have been to the theater with my mom and seen fully topless men with very refined muscles dancing and sword fighting. I’ve watched the sweat drip off them and land on the stage, and it never made me feel a thing.
So why, looking at Jake, does it feel like standing at the Grand Canyon with my parents, wonder blasting through me, unable to tear my gaze away from the sheer grandeur of the thing?
He is just a boy.
But I can’t stop myself from thinking this might be what my mom feels when she writes her poetry — something itching under her skin, wanting to get out. Jake makes me feel like I’m too much for my body, like I might overflow just by watching him laugh.
“Is that allowed?” I finally manage to ask, when Jake falls silent and I realize it’s my turn to talk. I’m fully objectifying him here, finding it hard to pay attention to what he says each time he knocks his sneaker against mine.
Each second feels like an hour up here, but time is also moving faster than it ever has in my life. The sun could start coming up through the windows, washing us in pink and orange, and I wouldn’t even be all that surprised.
Time is warped in this tree house—maybe it’s the one from those kids’ books.
When Jake’s eyes meet mine, I find myself trying to find the perfect word to describe the color. Amber? Caramel? When have I ever thought about another person’s eyes like this before?
Even more important than the color is the way they crinkle at the corners when he smiles, and how they feel like they’re seeing right inside me. Do the heroines of books ever spend much time describing the space outside of the irises?
“Is what allowed?” He laughs, staring right back into my eyes without fear. He carries the kind of confidence that I could never dream of.
If it were me, and I’d climbed up here to find someone else inside, I probably would have let go and plummeted to my death as penance for bothering them.
But I guess that’s why Jake is captain of the hockey team. He’s a natural leader, charismatic. Even if he tries to downplay the role, I know he probably worked really hard for it.
“Being an athlete and not liking parties,” I say, waving my hand in his general direction. “I thought that was, like, your main hobby. Every weekend, there’s a football player throwing a pool party — even the golf kids were getting drunk on social media last week.”
“The 4H kids, passed out in a barn?” Jake laughs, his words halting as they come out, like he can barely breathe through his amusement. The idea of it is hilarious, and I fall into laughter with him, too.
Outside the tree house, we can hear the faint sound of the party — shouting, giggling, the occasional crash of something falling — but nobody else comes outside. Jake and I exist in our own little bubble.
We talk about the 4H kids, about the time they get off for the state fair, and Jake shrugs. “I’ve never been.”
“You’ve never been?” I’m astounded. My parents are not state fair people — my dad shaking his head at all the fried food, and my mother finding the general ambiance of the heat, stickiness, and animal shit to be uninspiring — but even they’ve taken me a few times. “Aren’t you from here?”
“Wildfern Ridge born and raised,” he responds, but there’s a note of distaste in his voice.
“And you’ve never been to the state fair? You know that we’re kind of known for the state fair, right?”
“I do now.” He’s completely relaxed, his head lolling to the side as he looks at me, like he can’t be bothered to hold it upright. “Maybe you should take me.”
“ I should take you?” For some reason, the thought makes my heart flip.
Throughout my high school experience, there have been moments like this.
The time I was stuck with Brittney Shelman, who some might refer to as the Wildfern High queen bee , in an elevator for two hours.
Coming out of that, we had our own little inside jokes, and I thought we might be friends, but a week later her eyes completely skimmed over me in the hallway.
Once, a football player and I were tasked with cleaning out the FACS classroom before summer break, and we got along fine, mostly talking about how much we hated learning to sew. When I bumped into him downtown and waved in his direction, he’d waved a confused, unsure hand back at me.
Jake Bradford is not the kind of guy who will remember me. He’s the kind of guy who gets stuck with me for a little while, has an average time, then goes back to not really knowing I exist.
But here he is, saying we should maintain contact outside of this moment.
“Sure,” he says casually, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You’ve obviously been before. You can show me around.”
I could point out that it’s never going to happen, but I go along with it, enjoying this too much to ruin the fun with something like common sense. “Fine. But you have to buy me a corn dog.”
His grin splits his face. “Deal.”
My voice is hoarse from talking, but I don’t want to stop.
We’re both on our backs, staring up at the wood planks of the tree house’s ceiling. Outside, the wind whistles gently through the branches, but the space around us has warmed considerably from our combined body heat.
Jake says he can’t believe they actually thought to insulate the tree house, then says he hopes they did it right, or it’s probably crawling with mold.
When Zachery texts me, asking where I am, I lie and tell him I walked home. Other than calling me a killjoy, he doesn’t seem that torn up about my disappearance.
I tell Jake about the last book I read, and how it made me cry. He tells me about his prospects, and the world of high school sports recruiting. That Michigan is his top choice, and his essay is due in less than a month, and he’s nervous he’s not going to be smart enough to get in.
“My hockey skills are good,” he says, with an air of confidence I couldn’t achieve if I tried. “But some of these schools care about more than just the hockey. I’ll need to get an academic scholarship to help pay for tuition and the dorm, and I’m not sure my grades are there.”
I don’t care about the standings, but Zachery checks the academic report every month just to make sure I’m still on track for valedictorian. “Your grades are there,” I say, remembering his name from the list, only a dozen spots below mine. He’s definitely nowhere near failing.
When I tell him I’m not sure I’m going to apply anywhere, he seems shocked. He says he assumed I already had a place at Harvard, and it makes me laugh, my face flushing at the flattery again.
We talk about our Halloween costumes, our favorite dishes at Thanksgiving, who we think is going to win prom court, and how much we don’t care — even though Jake is definitely in the running for prom king.
By the time Jake finally mentions how late it is, and we realize that the party is definitely over and that we need to go home, I’m tired enough to feel loopy, laughing at nothing and touching him way more than I should.
He insists that I climb down the ladder first, then hops down next to me, his sneakers crunching in the leaves.
“I’ll walk you home,” he says, and for some reason, I let him. We walk together along the sidewalk, laughing and bumping arms like we’ve been friends forever and not just for the last three hours.
The streetlights glow golden over us, and Jake is close enough to me that I can feel his body heat. He offers me his jacket, but it’s my legs that are cold, and when I ask for leg warmers instead, we both burst into quiet laughter.
When we reach my house, I find myself growing quiet with the knowledge that right now, I’m letting Jake see another little part of me. Or, alternatively, a big part of me.
It’s not that we live in a mansion , exactly, but my parents are well-off. And good savers. And my mom has so many hobbies that we have a dozen rooms dedicated to them — writing, painting, pottery…
Our house is tall, with rolling lawns that are green in the summer but looking a bit faded now. As we walk up, a single leaf drifts to the sidewalk in front of us, and Jake picks it up, rotating the stem between his fingers.
“Well,” I blurt out because I don’t know what else to say, “good night.”
I’m realizing that if my mom is still up — hit with inspiration or just drifting through the house like she does sometimes — she could look out the window and see us together at any moment. And for some reason, I really, really don’t want that to happen.
It’s not that I’m not allowed to be out or that I’m not allowed around boys. It’s that she’ll ask me about it. And if I don’t talk to her about it, she’ll tell me to journal it. And if I do that, put this night down on paper, I might realize it wasn’t nearly as magical as I thought it was.
“Yeah,” Jake says, clearing his throat and looking down at his sneakers, “good night.”
With that, he turns to walk away. I open my mouth to take it back, to say something else, but I can’t. I’ve never really been that person, and I have the feeling this is the first time in my life that I’m really going to regret it.
That is, before Jake pauses, and my heart flips in my chest.
“Lara.” Jake turns around, reclaims the space in two quick steps, and stops, standing right in front of me.
For a single, wild second, I think that he might be about to lean down and kiss me, but instead, he surprises me by asking, with a genuine note to his voice, “Do you want to hang out sometime? Before the state fair?”
And I surprise myself by answering immediately, excitement already building in my chest, “ Yes. ”