Page 76 of Lovesick
Crew
Then I’m coming to you.
Me
What?
Crew
I’m gonna scale the side of your house.
Me
Are you crazy? You can’t scale the side of my house!
Crew
Watch me.
Oh my God. If this idiot breaks his leg falling off the roof, my dad will somehow blamemefor it.
I rush to witness the disaster just waiting to happen, icy fear clutching my stomach and freezing my nerve endings like liquid helium. My house is at least twenty feet tall, and last I checked, Crew Calloway isn’t some Spider-Man variant who can climb up walls.
But alas, ever persistent and concerningly unafraid of injury, Crew shimmies his way up one of the pillars of the pergola connected to the stone siding of the house.
Holy shit.
I slide my window open so I can yell at him. “Crew, get down before you hurt yourself!”
Good thing my parents only have a Ring Doorbell on thefrontof the house.
“No can do, Princess,” he shouts back, barely out of breath as he carefully treads the latticed surface in the middle of astorm, navigating his way toward me like he’s traversing a room full of booby traps. “I’m here to rescue you.”
“Are you insane?!”
His hair whips against his face from the wind. “I thought it was a well-known fact that I don’t think clearly when I’m around you!”
“If my dad sees you, you’re dead,” I warn, my tone saturated in concern.
A half-cocked grin descends over his lips, and his eyes glint with tantalizing mischief. He’s too arrogant for his own good. How many times is he going to prove his undying devotion to me by compromising his hockey career?
“Then it’s a good thing he won’t see me,” he says.
He’s getting closer now, which means that he doesn’t have to scream at the top of his lungs. It also means that his risk of falling increases by like twenty percent. Probably more than that—I’m not good with percentages. Once he slams against the deck of the roof, he only has a few inches to crawl to reach my bedroom window.
“You’re pretty confident for someone who has the stealth of a moose.”
Finally, after what feels like watching one of those funny fail videos and waiting for thefailpart, I haul Crew’s dripping, two-hundred-plus-pound body into my bedroom, both of us collapsing onto the carpet with a generous thud. He squishes me inadvertently, showering the floor in droplets of water.
“You’re crushing me,” I wheeze, though I’m not in a hurry to push him off me. Even cold and wet, I relish the closeness, purring like a contented cat in a sunbeam. I’d let him squash me any day of the week.
“Shit, sorry.”
He rolls off me accordingly, the hem of his drenched T-shirt riding up from the movement and showing me a peek of thosedangerously addictive abs of his. He’s pretty cheery for someone who probably can’t feel his feet anymore.
My belly is besotted with butterflies as I try to keep my smile at bay. “What are you doing here?”
“When you left, I didn’t know where you were going, so I kind of just stayed parked outside your apartment. I didn’t want to bombard you with text messages.”
