The guys all grinned.
“Find yourself some rocks, then search around for your balls, since you’ve clearly lost them,” Max smiled wide, “and shimmy up that damn house and tell her how much you’ve missed her, and then, when she’s primed, naked and—”
Becca clapped a hand over his mouth and winked at me.
With a sigh, I waved to everyone and limped across the chalk line and onto their property.
It was a little after nine, now. The lights were dim in her room as I knelt, grabbed a few rocks, and tossed them up at her window.
The curtains pulled apart.
And then the window was raised, and she poked her head out. “Jason?”
“Can I come up?”
“You aren’t a teenager anymore, Jason. What if you fall and break a hip?” she teased, leaning over the windowsill with nothing on but a white racerback tank and a wide smile that had my body tightening in all the wrong places, if I was going to attempt climbing to her second-story window. Her white teeth sucked in her bottom lip as tendrils of strawberry-blond kissed her shoulders.
Like hell was I going to stay on the grass a second longer.
“You’ve got this!” Reid.
“I believe in you!” Max.
I muttered a curse and started scaling the tree outside her window like I used to in high school. I was stronger now, so pulling myself up to the first branch was cake; though somewhere in my heavy, lust-filled brain I realized that I’d been struck by lightning, so maybe climbing a tree and stumbling across an old roof hadn’t been the smartest choice I could have made, but she was smiling at me, and I could see in her bedroom window, and it just felt — right.
I stepped away from the tree and onto the roof.
Easy street.
I sent her a wink as I took another step.
And then made it all the way to her window without falling through the roof or tumbling off it.
“The universe agrees!” Max yelled.
“What’s this about the universe?” Maddy asked, holding out her hand as I ducked into her bedroom.
“Ignore him. He used to buy holy water in bulk, just in case my ex came back to haunt him.”
“Seriously?”
I nodded. “Yeah, but I think he just wanted an excuse to put in a bulk order from the Vatican.”
She laughed.
“I’m serious!” I did a slow circle.
The posters were gone from the walls, and the pink had been covered over with a mute tan that made the room look more grown up. Everything was different.
A jolt of disappointment hit me as I tried to keep my smile in place when uneasiness pulsed through me.
Nothing was the same.
What the hell had I been thinking?
That I would crawl through that window like old times and step into my senior year with Maddy?
I sighed and sat down on her bed then said the only thing I could say that made sense, “I missed climbing into your window.”