My Cone and Only (King Family #1) - Susannah Nix Page 0,6

out the local wildlife. Andie laughed, her dimpled cheeks pinking beneath her freckles, and one of them touched her arm.

I grabbed Brianna’s hand. “Let’s dance.”

She wasn’t as good a dancer as Andie, but then no one was. Brianna didn’t have Andie’s athletic physique or self-assurance. She was slimmer and more delicate, despite being taller, and too busy playing coy to match Andie’s quickness.

Brianna wasn’t as funny as Andie either. Or as smart. Andie was way too fucking smart for me. Smart enough to skip a year of elementary school when I’d almost been held back a year. After graduating close to the top of her class, she’d gone off to college in Huntsville and come back an ecosystems biologist. Then she’d earned herself a master’s degree while working at the state park nearby, and now she taught a class at Bowman—the same local college I’d dropped out of.

Brianna was much more my speed than Andie. She kept up with me fine on the dance floor, but I didn’t try any fancy moves with her. I moved on autopilot, my gaze locking onto Andie and her new city friends with every revolution around the floor.

She wasn’t wrong that I hadn’t been around much. I’d been avoiding her intentionally, and I hated that she’d noticed. But then she always noticed everything. That girl saw through me like no one else alive ever had. She saw me so well, I had to be careful around her, or she’d figure out my secret. And I definitely couldn’t have that.

I couldn’t let her know that I’d been half in love with her since I was seventeen years old.

Me and Andie’s brother Josh, we’d been best friends since first grade, when we were assigned seats next to each other in homeroom. King and Lockhart—lucky for me, K and L came next to each other in the alphabet, or my life might have taken a whole different path.

Josh and I were inseparable growing up. I’d spent almost as much time at his parents’ goat farm as I did at my own house. More, after my mom died. Josh’s family accepted me as one of their own and made me feel more wanted than my own father ever had. Josh’s little sister Andie had been tagging along with us for as long as I could remember, but Andie was cool, so I’d never minded. Even as a kid she was tough as nails and game for anything, with a nose for mischief almost as finely honed as mine. As far as I’d been concerned, she was just one of the guys.

Until I hit puberty and discovered girls—or more accurately, girls started to discover me. I guess I went a little girl crazy after that. What could I say? I loved the attention.

I loved the way their eyes followed me when I walked through a room. I loved the way they couldn’t keep their hands off me. I loved how smooth their skin was and how sweet they smelled. I loved kissing them and discovering they tasted even sweeter. I loved their soft parts and their hard parts and all their parts in between.

I just really loved girls, okay?

I was so busy loving girls, I might have been a little slow to notice Andie was one too. She was two years younger, so the girls in my class had a head start on her. But damn, when she caught up, she caught up with a vengeance.

I don’t even remember when I first started to notice. It must have happened gradually. But at some point, my awareness of her changed. The way I thought about her changed. The things I wanted to do with her changed.

Fortunately, as much of a dumbass as I was back then, I was smart enough to keep my hands off her. I knew instinctively it wouldn’t be cool. You didn’t hit on your best friend’s baby sister.

Josh had always been hella protective of Andie. Because she’d skipped first grade, she was only a year behind us in school and younger than all her classmates. In fifth grade, Josh got in trouble for getting in a fight with some dickhead fourth-grade boy who’d pushed Andie down on the playground. In eighth grade I helped him fill Caroline Tingle’s locker with dead cockroaches after she shit-talked Andie to a bunch of her seventh-grade friends. Then there was that time, senior year of high school, when Bradley Squires ditched Andie at the homecoming dance to stick his tongue