Page 38 of The Charade

14

Carter

"S-sorry,"one of the Cohen twins yelped when I walked out from my closet to see who had come into my room while I was changing into my basketball clothes. "Cambrielle said it was the third door on the left, and so I opened it and I…" The girl—who I still wasn't sure was Ava or Elyse—rambled on anxiously, a vein in her forehead becoming more and more pronounced the longer she talked. "And I didn't realize anyone would be in here. And…I…um…" Her gaze traveled from my face and panned down my torso and arms, and when it seemed like she was having a difficult time finishing her sentence, I realized that I was still holding my shirt in my hand.

She was totally raking me in.

"Uh, sorry, I didn't know…" I started to apologize about my current state of undress before realizing I shouldn't be the one apologizing, since technically, I’d been changing in my own room and had shut the door before doing so. So, I'd just let her finish her apology.

But instead of picking up from where her words had trailed off, her eyes narrowed as she looked at me. Her lips moved like she was counting under her breath, and then she suddenly blurted out, "You have an eight-pack?"

And with that one sentence, the mystery of which twin had barged into my room unannounced was solved.

Because from what I knew of the Cohen twins, only Ava would say something like that.

Deciding to test my assumption, I said, "Yes, Ava, I have an eight-pack." I pulled my shirt over my head since obviously my body was more of a distraction than I'd thought. "Is that the real reason you barged into my room just now? Because you wanted to practice your math skills by adding up my abs?"

"What?" Her jaw dropped, and then she added, "How did you know it was me and not Elyse?"

I tugged on my sleeves so they rested more comfortably on my shoulders. "Elyse doesn't exactly seem the type to blurt out questions like that."

Or the type to blatantly count a guy’s abs in the first place.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Ava put her hands on her hips. And when she did that, I couldn't help but give her an inspection of my own.

Aside from the day she'd arrived at our school, I'd only seen her in her school uniforms. So seeing her in her jeans and a T-shirt was different. And while I may have admired her long legs in those plaid skirts she somehow looked better in than all the other girls at school did, Ava in her jeans just might rival even that.

But since she didn't need to know that I too found her appearance distracting, I lifted my gaze back to her eyes and answered her question. "I just meant that Elyse is more reserved while you’re significantly less so."

I mean, she had signed a contract that said she wouldn't try to date me…only to immediately turn around a couple of hours later and convince me to fake a flirtation with her.

If that wasn't the work of a master manipulator, I didn't know what was.

I still couldn't believe that whole thing had happened, actually.

One minute I was planning to ignore the entire female population at our school, and then before I knew it, I was purposely faking a romance with this girl I barely knew just to make Sofia think I'd moved on.

Insane, right?

And yet, I was still doing it.

I was even enjoying it a little because Sofia seemed to believe it all and hadn't tried to approach me since the first day.

"Well, I may be the more impulsive twin," Ava admitted. "But I promise I didn’t just pretend to get turned around in your family's massive mansion just so I could catch you without your shirt on. I really thought this was the bathroom."

"So let me guess." I cocked an eyebrow. "You were just counting my abs for research purposes?"

"For research?" She furrowed her brow.

"Well, yeah." I grabbed my basketball shoes from the loveseat in front of my bed and sat down to start putting them on. "If we keep pretending like we're doing less scholarly activities during our tutoring sessions, it makes sense that you would want to know something like that to make our little charade more believable."

I tied my right shoe, but when Ava didn't make a sound, I looked up to see if I'd said something wrong. Her eyes were wide and her mouth had gone slack as if I'd just made her speechless.

"W-why would us dating have anything to do with me knowing how many ab muscles you have?" she asked after regaining her composure.

My eyebrows knitted together, and I was legitimately confused at how she couldn’t see the correlation between the two things.

"You've had a boyfriend before, right?" I asked, slipping on my left shoe and tying it. Because there was no way in the world that this girl didn't have experience playing with guys’ minds.

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