where his hand touched my arm must have had a million nerve endings that I didn't know about, because every single one of them was lit the hell up. Zipping and zapping along the surface of my skin, electric pulses that followed the rapid pounding of my heart.
"Steady now," he said in a low voice, right next to my ear. The hair falling out of my ponytail ruffled from his breath, that's how close he was. "Violence is never the answer, Angry Girl."
I swallowed down the ball in my throat, dry and sticky and cottony thick, this time risking a glance up at his face. He was smiling, just a little, and when my entire body wanted to lift on tiptoe to move closer, I slowly pulled my arm from his grip.
"Sorry," I said breathlessly. "I'm okay."
Tucker held his hands up, cheeks high with color and jaw clenched tight.
"Come on, kids," Grady said behind me, clapping a hand on my shoulder. "Let's get back to the cars without killing each other, okay?"
I held Tucker's gaze for a brief moment, and I wondered if he saw the same look of confusion in my eyes that I saw in his.
Something changed.
He felt it, and I had too.
I just didn't know what it was.
Chapter 8
Tucker
Something was different. Felt different.
I sat across the table from Magnolia, and with a strange sort of detachment, I watched her mouth move around the words she was saying. Watched the way she cut her chicken into precise little squares, always setting down her fork and knife while she chewed.
The food in my mouth didn't taste like much of anything, which was fine, because I couldn't even recall what I ordered. I glanced down and saw a perfectly cooked steak, some mashed potatoes drowning in butter, and a tidy pile of brightly colored vegetables.
Right.
Magnolia waved at someone across the restaurant, but I didn't turn around to see who.
Her dress was new, I noticed. Light pink and thin-strapped against the golden skin of her shoulders. It matched the polish on her neatly rounded nails and the gloss slicked over her lips. Maggie loved pink. Had half a closet full of dresses in a hundred different shades. Our senior year of high school, she ran for student body president, and together, we plastered pink posters and buttons and fliers over the entire building.
Her father, J.T., rented a billboard, right along the road that led to Green Valley High, and the Pepto-Bismol colored background proclaimed her the winner before the vote had even taken place. She won by a landslide.
Not that anyone was surprised.
That was the night we fumbled through losing our virginity together. We didn't wait for prom. We didn't wait for graduation. Those were too cliché for Magnolia. And since she'd proclaimed that she loved me a week earlier, with me fervently saying the same, we snuck out of our respective houses, met at Bandit Lake under the cover of darkness, and spent a sweaty, woefully short handful of minutes celebrating her victory on a wool blanket spread over the ground.
The color of her dress reminded me of those posters and buttons, and I smiled a little, thinking about the girl who ran her campaign on the promise that she'd get the school day shortened by an hour, no matter how illogical that was.
"You look pretty in that dress," I told her.
Her smile was bright and pleased. "I wondered if you noticed. Daddy bought it for me when he went to Nashville last week." Another bite of chicken, fork back on the plate, then careful chewing, before she changed the subject back to her work for her dad. "The office is such a disaster. Those women wouldn't know how to organize a membership drive if a how-to booklet slapped them in the face. He needs all new staff if he's going to increase membership this year, and since it's gone down two years in a row, he can't afford more of the same."
I nodded, wishing we could talk about something other than her father's job as the president of the Green Valley Chamber of Commerce. Anything other than her father, actually.
But as I sat there, chewing my food, and listening to her talk, it didn't really matter much what I wanted to talk about. As long as I smiled in the appropriate spots, affirmed that she was right in whatever she said, Magnolia wouldn't notice much if I engaged in the conversation at all.
If I let it happen, we'd never