Carter Ortese is Trouble - completed (The Boys #1)

Chapter 7: Carter

"May I?" I catch her fingers mid-air, and we hover over the radio. Her fingertips are calloused from band, and she's warmer than I thought she would be wearing that dress.

Giving me a skeptical sidelong glance, she takes her hand back and shrugs. "It's all yours, so long as you don't put on death metal."

"Is that what people say about me?"

"You're always listening to something."

"And they think it's death metal?"

Emma's lips flatten.

"Why couldn't it be indie pop or 1980's punk? Or, I don't know, anything from the Woodstock era?"

"What are you always listening to then?"

I hold up my phone. "You want to find out?" A part of me wants her to say no, because this is one secret I've never shared with anyone outside of my family. Not even my coworker, Desmond, knows, and he pretty much knows everything about me.

She licks her lips, giving it some thought. "Okay, sure."

Within a few seconds, I'm connected with her dad's fancy console, and I open up my music. I press shuffle and watch Emma's face. She drums her fingers on the wheel, her brows furrowing. She turns us off the highway and onto the last stretch of road to the theater, located in the center of downtown Camus.

"You're kidding me." She pulls into the public parking lot, shuts off the engine, and keeps the music on. Taking off her seat belt, she turns toward me, staring at me with wide eyes. "You made this playlist to impress me, right?"

I shake my head.

"Seriously?" Emma's mouth drops open a she slides her gaze between me and the console. "I don't believe you."

"Why?"

"Because you're Carter Oh-tease. This has got to be a ploy."

It stings hearing that nickname from her, but I settle back in my seat and fold my arms over my chest. "No ploy. You shouldn't believe everything you hear."

"Let me see your phone."

I hand it over. Emma might believe the worst rumors about me, but I have nothing to hide. The last person to text me was Des, and it is a photo of a corgi attacking a pumpkin.

She scrolls through my music. "The Andrew Sisters? Benny Goodman, Bunny Berigan, Glenn Miller." Her laughter fills the space in the car and drowns out the wailing trumpets and upbeat swing music coming out of her speakers. "You've got to be kidding me." She swipes through the menus some more. "There's nothing else on here."

"Why would I have anything else?"

She hands my phone back to me, and I disconnect it from the console. The roaring 20's disappears from her car, and we're plunged into breathless silence. Neither of us makes a noise.

Emma looks thrown, like I've blown her mind. Good. She shouldn't believe she knows me just because of my reputation at school. No one knows me, because everyone believes the rumors to be true. How many girls had I slept with? How many things had I set on fire? How many piercings did I have? In accordance to my school, too many to count.

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why swing? Why do you like it?" She meets my eyes and holds my gaze this time. The liquid hazel irises make me want to close the gap between us, take her astonishment to a separate level.

I shrug. "It's soulful and honest. There's a pull in the upbeat—this crazy charge and energy, like the whole world can change. Every piece has layers, with more intricacies than songs now."

Her jaw is unhinged, hanging open with surprise.

"We're going to be late if you keep staring at me."

Emma snaps her mouth shut, grabs her keys, and shoves them into her white clutch. Her gaze flickers to mine one last time before she hops out of the car.

I'm not sure why my heart skips a beat as she shuts the door behind her. This is what I wanted—to prove that I'm different than what she believes. But I never thought it'd be so hard to see the shock on her face, the reaction as she realized that she doesn't know the real me at all. The disbelief is palpable, and it's driving me mad.

When people believe you're a monster, you become one. It never bothered me before, but now it does, because she sees me that way. I don't want to be a monster. I don't want to be trouble. And I want to prove to her that I'm more than my disreputable reputation.

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Excited to see the rest of the date from Emma's side? Is the swing music believable? (More details to come later, if you can't believe it just yet!)

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