Looking to Lose (completed)

*16*

I'm cold. Well, more specifically, my leg is cold. One of them. Okay, okay, so really the only spot that is cold is on my thigh where Aaron kept his hand for thirty minutes back at Mrs. Van Groen's house. It's as though he convinced my leg that it can no longer produce its own heat and that I can only ever be warm again if he rests his hand back on my thigh.

"Will you please stop shaking your leg?" Aaron glances over at me with an annoyed expression. It seems as though my body decided that if Aaron so rudely refuses to return his hand to my thigh, then it has no choice but to heat by movement.

"Since I'm not driving, I hardly see why it matters," I reply in a tone similar to the temperature of my left thigh – icy.

Aaron refused to let me drive Gabriella home. He said my fatigue plus my tendency to completely zone out makes me a liability on the road and, seeing as though we are in a two-ton truck with two hefty pieces of furniture in the back, he didn't want to take any chances.

Little does he know that leaving me with no distractions, no ruse of driving to keep my eyes off of him, is a much more dangerous scenario. Because now my daydreams have free reign, and I can't keep my eyes off of him. Anything is possible when I'm not in control of myself. I could lunge across the center console and jump him right now. It'd be like sleepwalking, but in a daydream instead.

Why have I never noticed how nice his cheekbones are? Not angular and pronounced like Scott's, but still apparent, shaping his face without sticking out like they're going to cut through his skin at any moment. His face is soft, boyish almost, yet his strong, straight nose and full lips give him an air of maturity. But then his hair counteracts that by curling in a playful halo. And his eyes counteract his playful hair by glimmering with such an intense ferocity, you could never mistake him for anything less than a man. His face is a living enigma. But one thing is perfectly clear: he is attractive.

At this point I can't tell where my brain's meddling ends, and my own thoughts begin. I let out a groan and knock my head against the dashboard, trying to think of anything but Aaron.

"Fighting with your brain again?" Aaron speculates in his rough voice I've become so used to these past few weeks. I groan again in response.

"Sounds like quite the battle," he says. "What are you two fighting about?" My crush on you. My virginity. My general pathetic state of being.

"Too embarrassing," I grumble into the dashboard.

"Come on, you told me you have a timeline to lose your you-know-what," he points out. "That has to be the most embarrassing thing you've got."

I turn my head and glare at him with all the aggression I can muster – which is quite difficult, since his eyes look like honey in the afternoon sun.

"Oh," he says, his cheeks turning pink. "So that's what you're fighting about."

If Aaron's cheeks are pink, mine are beet red. It's one thing that he knows about my virginity quest, but it's entirely another when I'm starting to consider him as a prospect. And it's yet another thing when he still dislikes me with the strength of a thousand suns. Okay, subtract 50 suns from that total because he did keep his hand on my thigh without being forced to, so the dislike can't be that strong anymore.

"When's your birthday?" He asks.

"June 12th," I mumble.

"Oh shit, that's next week."

This time I don't care that his eyes are the color of amber held up to the sun, I glare with all the death and destruction and hatred I can muster up.