Dare You to Chase the Soccer Player (Rock Valley High 5)

Shock hit me like a poisoned dart to the chest. Barely knew me? Is that what he called our kiss. I could hardly breathe, I was so insulted.

“Ouch.” Freddy slapped a hand over his heart and stumbled. “That hurts, dude.”

“Yeah, well, get used to disappointment.” The smile slid from Zane’s face as he looked up at me once again. “I’m sorry, but I’m late for a shoot. It was good to see you again.”

He brushed past me, the contact from his cold shoulder giving me all sorts of electric shocks that ran down my spine, despite the fact that steam was currently spilling out of my ears. I moved aside so that Freddy could wink at me and then follow his fellow star into the trailer.

The Lexi from a week ago would?

??ve shrugged it off and gone on with her life. There was too little time in the day to worry about a boy who obviously wasn’t worth my time. And besides that, there was always another boy eager to be flirted with. They were a dime a dozen.

But for some reason, I couldn’t fight off the disappointment and hurt that clogged my throat, making it impossible to take a breath. I glared at the back of Zane’s head with all the frustration I could muster, hoping he’d feel the hot sting of rejection, too. This was yet another sign of why I didn’t do complicated. And why I never let myself get too attached.

I could thank Zane for the reminder.

And for the worst first day of school ever.

Chapter Four

If I knew anything at all, I knew for sure that the only way to get a bad boy out of my system was a night of extreme exfoliation.

I tossed my backpack onto my bed when I got to my dad’s place and went straight for the face wash and my stepmom’s beauty supplies. If there was one good thing I could say about Marie, she knew her skin maintenance. She had every product in the book. Exfoliating scrubs, Korean facial masks, invigorating creams, skin-tightening lotions. All of it. I scooped it up into my arms and laid it all out on her bathroom vanity, relentlessly examining each and every bottle.

There had to be something here that could scrub Zane right out of my system.

“Uh oh, someone’s had a bad first day of school.”

Marie walked into the bathroom, her high heels clicking on the tile floor. She was curvy and shorter than me, when she wasn’t wearing her five-inch Jimmy Choos. Her skin was the same tone as the honey-golden wood of the bathroom cabinets. She wore her blond wavy hair in a short, a-symmetrical bob that barely brushed the tops of her shoulders.

Her family came from money. I was pretty sure her dad ran some kind of toilet paper company. Either way, the house she and my dad lived in was way more plush than anything my parents could have afforded when they were still together.

My dad had met her across the courtroom. She was a court reporter and had sat in on some of his cases. They’d married only two months after my parents’ divorce officially went through. My big sister had taken a long time to forgive my dad for that, but I’d shrugged it off nearly right away. Anyone could see Mom and Dad weren’t happy together anymore. They needed to call it quits. At least Marie wasn’t some wicked stepmother. She tried. Maybe a little bit too hard, sometimes, but not in the poison-apple kind of way.

“Today wasn’t just bad,” I said, putting down the seaweed mask with more force than I intended. “It was the mega bad day of all days. You know the kind you dream about? The one where you go to school and realize you forgot to put any pants on?”

She cringed and flattened her pencil skirt with the palms of her hands. “That bad, huh?”

“Worse.” My spine shrunk as I pouted at my reflection in the mirror. If nothing else, at least my makeup was on fleek. That counted for something, even if Alanis and Zane couldn’t see that. “My dreams are crushed and the boy I thought I liked turned out to be a complete bonehead. The only solution is to scrub every layer of today off and apply a deep moisturizer.”

I still couldn’t believe the look Zane had given me outside of that makeup trailer. He’d acted like he hardly knew me. I guess I shouldn’t have expected any better from the soon-to-be mega star who’d concealed his identity from me in the first place. It was obvious he thought he was better than everyone around him.

This was the very reason I’d told myself I was going for simple this year when it came to boys. No getting feelings involved. Only fun, harmless flirting, and then the easy cut-and-run.

But Zane had to come and knock me over with those blue eyes and that sincere boy-next-door smile of his. He was good, I had to give him that. He deserved an Oscar for that performance.

“Well, in that case, I think I’ve got the product for you.” Marie clickety clacked across the bathroom floor in her heels to pull open a new drawer. She snatched a white bottle from the bottom and turned to push it into my hands. “I saw this at Macy’s the other day. It’s a special clay that the Ancient Egyptian queens used on their faces. I thought it might help with...well...you know.” She gestured lamely at my face and then blushed and looked away.

The bottle felt strangely heavy on my palm. I swallowed, feeling a hollowness inside my chest. She’d landed right on it—my weakness. My skin. I knew she meant well, but it wasn’t easy having my flaws pointed out to me, especially after the day I’d had. I tried to smile at her in gratitude, but I could tell it fell flat by the way the smile dissolved from her face.

“Oh dear, I’ve stuck my stiletto in it this time.” She snagged the bottle from my hands and stuffed it back into the drawer, shutting it with her voluptuous hip. “There. It’s gone. And there’s nothing wrong with you, girlie. Nothing at all. I just thought you would like it. You’re always looking at skin care products and it made me think of you.”

“No, it’s perfect.” I reached down to pull the drawer open again and took out the bottle. My eyes skimmed over the hieroglyphics on the label and the ingredients, but I didn’t actually read any of it. “Thanks, Marie.”

“Anytime, kiddo.” She patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. It had been obvious from the start that she’d never had much experience with kids, but she’d gotten better over the past year. “Sorry, I’m still trying to figure this whole stepmom thing out. How am I doing so far?”

I smiled up at her. “Somewhere between Snow White’s stepmom and Maria in The Sound of Music. Definitely closer to Maria, though.”

She laughed, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear. “Okay, I suppose I’ll take that. Want to talk about your day? Your dad’s picking up pizza and should be here soon, but that doesn’t mean we can’t squeeze in a little girl talk before then. I made sure he ordered Hawaiian. I know that’s your favorite.”