Young Writers Society

Anyway, this is a revision of the original that I did and am considering turning into a short series.

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He sat at the opposite end of the couch, inhaling on his cigarette and playing with my cell phone.

I examined him the way a lioness evaluates her prey, my body bunched up tightly and my eyes probing him critically. Tonight, for the first time in the three years I had known him, he was putting me on edge. It wasn’t a feeling of threat but rather an inexplicable sensation of a tension that I had never felt between us.

No, never a feeling like this because for the past three years, there had always been three of us. Max, Trent, Kip, and I were the fabulous foursome. I’d never been in a room as just the two of us. It was a feeling of unfamiliarity.

So vividly can I remember the day we had met.

My mother had been the puppet master pulling the strings. She had claimed that the city was no place for raising a teenage girl and had been the one to call my father. She couldn’t handle all my sneaking out, the smell of smoke that would hover over me when I would return, and the stench of alcohol on my breath.

So I had found myself some four hundred miles from home, with a handful of individuals I didn’t know. But everyone I had met so far had pointed him out as Max, who was, “nothing but trouble and best to be avoided.”

I remember scoffing at those words. Mostly for they’re irony, seeing as my reputation for mischief hadn’t reached this new school yet.

And had anyone in this foreign world had known that, they would have been hesitant to point out his friends as well. The first was a year older than I, they called him Kip, and he looked a bit like Draco Malfoy with his sleek blond hair and piercing gray eyes, the only exception being the wire-rimmed glasses around his eyes.

But Kip was a rather tepid personality, more of the peacekeeper, especially between Max and Trent, the thick Irish boy with rough working boy hands and a mat of curly red hair. Trent was the real hothead, his tempter always on edge and his mind never quite capable on focusing upon anything.

That day, after school I had stopped him in the hall and grabbed his arm. He was shocked but before he could guard himself I threw a punch into his stomach.

“What the hell, new girl?”

“Someone told me you were trouble,” I had remarked, smiling.

“So, do you have a problem with that?” There had been a bite in his voice but the he had a hearty grin drawn across his big, pudgy face.

“Oh course not. Just wanted to know if you had any smokes.” We had started walking towards the door. “And the names not new girl, it’s Mina.”

He laughed. “Okay, Mina. Any yeah, there’s a half a pack of reds in my dresser if you’re up to walking to my place.”

“Sure am.”

And now, three years after the fact, I found myself sitting on the couch in the house of that boy who’s nothing but trouble, buzzed on vodka and reeking of cigarette smoke, wondering what to say and do.

I’d been in the house a dozen times before. It wasn’t the nicest place in town by all means but it had a familiar charm and there were days when I felt more at home in his house then in my own.

Very abruptly, he looked over at me and stuck out his tongue with a big smile plastered across his chubby face. Max. My sweet, simple Max. Though I was only a year older then him, I felt as though I was playing the part of his mother at one moment and then his child in another.

At that moment, I felt like a mother, looking over at her impish son.

But it flipped again. Impulsively, I stuck my tongue back out at him and laughed. “You’ll never win.”

“Win what?” He had a confused look plastered across his face.

“Win me, win the game, you’ll just never win,” I teased. In that new moment, I felt like a child and on impulse sprang over to sit next closer to him, cuddling into his side.

I was dwarfed by his size. Max was never a small boy nor had I ever been the small girl but I knew he could easily pick me up and toss me over his shoulder.

“I don’t believe you,” he responded. And in a move that shocked me and thrilled me, he ran a hand through my hair and wrapped his arm around my shoulder, pressing me closer.

For his warmth, I could only be thankful. But I was suddenly quavering at his affectionate touch. It wasn’t like him. It wasn’t like any of the boys I had gathered around me to be sincerely compassionate.

For the first time ever, I was completely out of my element. And he was just grinning. Not in a way that made me believe him to be in on a joke I wasn’t, but a smile of contentment.

I mimicked his smile but I couldn’t made myself fall into him the way I almost instinctively knew he wanted me to.

“If I wanted to win you, how would I do it?”

I tried to think of something brazen to say but the honesty was too much to lie through. “You wouldn’t have to try.”

“Thought so.”

Why was I being so bipolar with him? I wanted so badly to be comfortable with him like I was with others but I sought to keep him at the distance we’d always maintained.

“Why would you think that?”

“You love me and you know it.”

I couldn’t deny the fact. But how much so is harder to tell. “And do you love me?”

The question must have caught him off guard because he hesitated to answer. I didn’t know if I should be relieved or upset.

“Depends on whether or you want me to win you.” Max grinned at the cheekiness of his response.

My heart shuddered and I could feel my leg twitching uncontrollably. “You’ve already won me, why would you want to give me up.”

And with all the grace I could muster, I leaned up, kissed him on the cheek and fell into him in a way I had been afraid to do with anyone ever.

He didn’t hesitate to secure me to his side in his arms and he dropped his head against mine. “I could never give you up.”