Under the Influence

Chapter Fourteen: Flirting for Dummies

   I didn’t know a great deal about crushes—my knowledge on them was limited to close to nothing—but I knew for certain I had one on Hunter. There was just no other way to describe this feeling. I liked Hunter—really, really liked him.

   It was an epiphany that I had recently (a matter of minutes ago, actually), a dawning revelation that had only honestly struck me a few moments prior. I mean, I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that I had these feeling for quite some time now, but never actually realized it.

   “Can I get you anything else?” Hunter asked, unintentionally snapping me out of my reverie. As he placed my glass in a small bin of dirty dishes, he shot me one of his signature charming grins. He began to wipe down the table with a damp dishrag as he waited expectantly for my answer.

   “No thanks.” With a sly smirk, I pointed to a dry spot on the table and playfully said, “You missed a spot.”

   He dramatically gasped in mock horror. “Well we wouldn’t want that now would we? I take my job here as a busboy very seriously.”

   Our light-hearted banter went on for a few more rounds, but had to come to an abrupt halt when Lou told Hunter to get back to work or he wouldn’t be allowed to taste-test the pies anymore. And Hunter complied because he actually did take his job as a taste-testing busboy very seriously.

   Being alone at the table once again gave me a chance to actually study the biology textbook spread open in front of me, but of course my mind wouldn’t have that and decided to wander back to my previous thoughts.

   I noticed that lately (and by that I mean for the past few months), I had been spending a lot of time with Hunter. Between attempting to set up our siblings to simply hanging out at my house or Just Pie, we had spent practically every moment of our free time together. I was with him on weekends and after school sometimes, and occasionally he’d give me a ride when it was one of those days when I just didn’t feel like walking. In fact, I think I was around Hunter more than I was around my own brother (and I lived with him).

   There was just one problem, one variable that didn’t allow the equation to come out positive—we were friends. Best friends, maybe. In all honesty I wasn’t sure what level of friendship we were on, but I knew it was something like that. I truthfully didn’t know how it happened, but I was glad it did. Which was exactly the reason I knew we could never be more than that. I wasn’t going to jeopardize our friendship just because of one little crush. I bet my sentiments wouldn’t even be reciprocated. And besides, falling for your newly acquired best friend never turned out to be pleasant in real life, despite all those teen romance books that seemed to have taught me just the opposite.

   Hunter’s gaze locked with mine from across the diner and he threw me a playful wink over his shoulder before turning back around to attend to a customer.

   As much as I wanted to keep these feelings bottled inside to save our profound friendship, I didn’t know if I could. I—

   “Charlie?” I heard my name being called and soon realized that it had come from Courtney, who had just stepped into the establishment. It sounded as if she wasn’t truly certain if it was me or not. We had met only once before (twice really, but the first time was off the record because she was drunk and didn’t remember it anyways) so I tried not to take too much notice to that. “Charlie!” This time she repeated it with much more confidence, like she was one hundred percent sure that it was, in fact, me: Charlie.

   “Um, hi,” I said, giving her a polite smile and wave. She returned the smile and plunked down in the chair across from me with an astounding amount of grace. “How are you feeling? You were kinda sick the last time I saw you…”