Page 43 of Play For Me

Behind us, Jay cackles. “I was trying to spare you by not bringing him into it. You just discovered one of Solomon’sspecial interests.”

I glare at him in the rearview.

“Your special interest?” Cecelia asks.

“Oh yeah,” Jay says before I can brush it off. “My boy Sol has a major obsessive streak. Had a huge Titanic era when we were kids. Then there’s baseball—that one never really went away. Anime was a big one for a while. The Disneyland phase was, what, seventh grade? He probably read every book, website, or article ever written about Walt Disney. I bet he could still tell you any fact about the park, its creation, the building codes, their hiring practices?—”

“Jay,” I snap, but he just grins at me from the back seat. So much for having my back.

I glance over at Cecelia but can’t read her expression. “I’m a giant nerd,” I mutter. “And I sometimes get a little obsessive about things.”

Her grin almost makes the teasing worth it. “And what about now? What’s the current obsession?”

Jay chokes on nothing behind me, then coughs loudly to hide his laugh. I shoot him daggers through the rearview mirror.

“I’ve been pretty pre-occupied with school,” I mutter. Yup, just school. Definitely not the gorgeous brunette soccer player sitting beside me.

Luckily Jay drops the topic of my “special interests” and obsessive streaks and changes the subject, telling her a story about us skipping class during our sophomore year to go to Six Flags—where we ran into one of my grandpa’s field hands on hisday off. The guy promptly snitched on us and we both had to muck out the horse stalls every day for the rest of the semester.

“Wait, were you guys in the same grade?” she asks, turning to me. “Jay is a senior—I thought all the student trainers were in grad school.”

Jay scoffs. “Girl, Solomon iscrazysmart. It’s annoying, actually. He’s a senior, but he’s in a special program to work on his master’s degree at the same time as his bachelor’s.”

“Wow.” She sounds impressed, and if that makes my cheeks flush with pleasure, I’m only human.

“So you reallyarea giant nerd?” she says, and that makes my cheeks even warmer. Why do I like being teased by this girl so much?

Pretty soon, the scenery out the window has changed to the sparse vegetation and rocky, dry earth that tells me we’re getting closer. I can practically feel my shoulders relaxing.

“I haven’t spent much time out this way,” Cecelia says. “The colors look so different and everything is so much more spread out. Does the sky always look this big?”

“I knew you were a city girl,” Jay teases.

She turns in her seat to narrow her eyes at him. “I’ll have you know I’ve spent a decent amount of time at a farm in the mountains in Tennessee.”

“Really?” I ask, surprised. I’d assumed she was a city girl, too. “What kind of farm?”

She shoots me a self-deprecating little smile that definitely doesn’t have my stomach clenching with desire. “Okay, it’s not an actual working farm, just the land. But we do all kinds of outdoorsy shit there.”

“Sol and I are big fans of outdoorsy shit,” Jay says.

“How’d you end up spending so much time in the Tennessee mountains?” I don’t mention that I did enough internet stalking to know she was born in LA and has lived there her whole life.

“My Uncle Daltrey bought the place years ago,” she says, voice easy, like she isn’t talking about one of the most famous singers in the history of American rock music. “He wanted more privacy for his family.”

“I’m trying to be cool here,” Jay cuts in. “But I have to say, hearing you casually mention Daltrey freaking Ransome iswild.”

“Jay,” I say, voice sharp. Yes, I’d been thinking the same thing, but I’d managed to hold my tongue. The last thing Cecelia needs is to be made to feel weird about her family. She probably gets that shit all the time.

“It’s fine,” she tells me, her voice a little softer than usual. Then she turns back to address Jay. “It’s actually the opposite for me. Whenever I see him on TV or something, I feel like I’m in bizarro world. Uncle Daltrey is the guy who burns the cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, he shouldn’t be on a magazine cover.”

“Your dad, too,” Jay continues, and I really wish he was sitting next to me so I could smack the back of his head. “I mean, he’s probably the best guitar playerever.”

That makes Cecelia snort. “Hardly. My brother Will is way better.”

That surreal feeling hits again. Her brother Will is a pretty successful musician in his own right, often performing with his wife, Eva—who’s one of the biggest names in pop music.

Her life must be so weird.