Chasing Ivy (Oak Hill 1)

I pulled my door open and rested my arms on top of my Camaro. He did the same on the other side.

“Yeah, I’m taking Jessica.” I grinned.

He laughed. “Dude, you are so fucking lucky.”

I wiggled my eyebrows. I was lucky. Jessica was smokin’ hot and I knew when I’d ask her to go to the party with me earlier in the week (before I got in-school suspension and had to stay inside one stupid room, all day long) that she’d be more than willing.

Jessica was more than willing to do anything with me.

“I know, she’s pretty hot.”

He laughed, shrugging off his letterman jacket. It was nearing spring in Ohio, which meant that it wasn’t quite warm enough to go without a jacket in the morning, but now that it was three o’clock in the afternoon, with the sun directly over our heads, it was becoming stifling.

“Yeah, she is, but I was saying you were lucky for an entirely different reason.”

I wrinkled my forehead, scanning the parking lot, once again, for the sight of a chestnut-haired girl.

“Why?” I asked, still searching. I saw Becca and Casey standing by their cars. They were talking closely to one another, but their gazes were also skimming the parking lot every few seconds. Probably looking for Ivy, too.

“Dude, because you have all these girls basically jumping your bones every chance they get and you also have, like, one of the hottest girls at this school right at your beck and call.”

I inclined my head towards him, still leaning forward with his arms over my Camaro.

“What do you mean?”

He rolled his eyes dramatically. “Dude… you’re fucking blind.”

I still wasn’t catching his drift so I only lifted my eyebrows.

His eyes widened. “Ivy, bro. I’m talking about Ivy.”

Just the sound of her name on someone else’s lips made my blood boil. I was extremely protective of her. Almost borderline psycho. I’d always been that way with her. Ivy was just… different. The first time I saw her, during the first day of the school that I’d started attending in eighth grade, I knew she was the type of girl that you treated with respect. Her smile lit up the entire gymnasium. It did it then and it does it now.

I still remember the first time I’d ever stuck up for her, too. It was only a few weeks into my eighth grade year. The seventh and eighth graders shared a hallway, which was unlike my last school but I thought it was kind of cool, nonetheless.

Anyway, I had walked over to the lockers with a few of my “new” friends and two eighth grade girls were bullying my Ivy.

Well, she wasn’t really “mine,” per se, but the moment I told those eighth grade chicks to take the tissues out of their training bras and to fucking stop bothering the prettiest girl in school, I’d claimed her.

That was the start of my feelings for Ivy and they’d only intensified over the years.

Intensified into what? I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that I cared about her more than I’d cared about anyone or anything in my entire life. She was just… Ivy.

“Bro, don’t get pissed.” Max’s voice brought me out of the memory, quickly dissolving the image of the sweet, little, seventh grade Ivy with wide, doe-like, green eyes from my brain.

“I’m not pissed,” I huffed, still slightly annoyed that he even brought her up. “Ivy isn’t like that. We aren’t like that.”

He gave me a knowing look, and I responded by narrowing my eyes at him.

“So you’re saying that if I wanted to ask her out on a date, you’d be cool with that?”

I growled and slammed my hands down on the top of my Camaro.

“Fuck no. She deserves better than you.”

He fucking fell over from laughter which only pissed me off more. Once he straightened up and got his shit together, he plastered a shit-eating grin onto his olive-skinned face.

“You are full of it, Lanning.”