Page 42 of The Score We Never Settled

I do.

I get lost staring into her long, curly brown hair when she’s bouncing around in excitement or throwing her head back a little when she laughs.

She does that a lot.

I get a perfect view of her lunch table from mine. She’s always in dresses.

Always.

And I like that shit.

It’s not because it’s easy to get under them, but because it just gives her good girl vibes. A girl who likes being pretty and kind in this world, with all her volunteer work and charity.

She even wore a dress when her youth group was repairing Moon Hollow’s bridge. Hammer in hand and everything.

I think I barely did shit all that day.

I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place, but Maebelle Mitchell somehow got my ass to show up—probably because I ordered breakfast in front of her and cut in line, I had class—and I wasn’t sorry I had. Especially after I got the opportunity to eye-fuck Layla Jean all day.

However, this scenario is odd.

It’s impossible.

Her Uncle Ben hates me, and she’s not someone I could see being interested in me.

I have more problems than math does.

Layla’s fingers wrap around the bracelets protectively, and gone is that excited smile she just had on her pretty-as-a-picture face. “Never mind. My mistake?—”

“When are you gonna date me?”

I didn’t expect my question to make her recoil from me, but it does.

She takes a step back, staring at me like I’ve lost my damn mind. Any other girl in this damn town would’ve giggled and pawed at me.

Layla looks at me like I asked her to commit murder.

“You’ve had to have heard that I like you, right?”

She averts her eyes and looks at the baseball field with my teammates warming up for tonight’s game.

Maybe not.

My boys wouldn’t parade the information around town for fear I’d kick their ass if they tried to be dickheads about it. But some way, somehow, something must’ve gotten to her.

There’s no way my crush has been the best-kept secret in Magnolia Ridge since Bobby Papulious had an affair with two women for ten years, and they both chased him out of town.

And how that was ever a secret…no clue.

Don’t care either way.

“That was a yes or no question,” I press, stealing just a millimeter closer to her. “I didn’t necessarily make it a secret. And even the best ones are still circulated through this damn place.”

“You can’t,” she immediately retorts, her chest heaving in unsteady intakes of air all of a sudden.

“Why?”

“My Uncle Ben…he won’t like it.”