Asking for Trouble Read Online Free PDF

Wouldn’t that be cool?”
    He was barely listening. “You’re a freshman?”
    “Well, yeah. Halfway through freshman year,” she hurried to
add, as if that would make a difference.
    A freshman in high school. Alec had probably told him that,
but Alec had told him a lot of things. “How old are you?” he asked. Alec had
told him that, too, he was sure, but at the time, it hadn’t mattered.
    “Fifteen. But I’ll be sixteen in March,” she hastened to
add. “How old are you?”
    “Nineteen.”
    “This is my old school, up here.” She gestured with a
mittened hand. “I played basketball there, too. That seems like such a long
time ago, you know?”
    From the standpoint of six months, or whatever it was. Chico Junior High School, he read in
two-foot-high letters stenciled onto concrete block. He was hot for a girl who
had just graduated from junior high school. What kind of a pervert was he?
    “This is my favorite tree in the world,” she was saying now,
reaching out for a trunk and swinging herself around it with a laugh. “Aren’t
the leaves gorgeous?”
    Joe looked dubiously up into the mostly-bare branches.
“Well, I can’t really tell.”
    She was scooping a few up from the concrete. “Gingko. See,
they’re fans.”
    The graceful leaves, a rich golden yellow, were indeed
shaped like delicate fans, and she was arranging them like a deck of cards,
fanning herself with one hand, then holding the whole arrangement close to her
face, peeping over them, her eyes flirtatious. “Why, Rhett. Sir, how dare you.”
She fluttered those black lashes, and he could see her smile behind the blue
mitten, and he was struck dumb.
    “Liss.” Alec and Gabe had wheeled around, and Alec was
calling out to her. “Are you teasing Joe? He’s thanking God right now that he
doesn’t have a little sister.”
    No, Joe was wishing that Alec didn’t have one. Or wishing
that she wasn’t quite so little. Or something.
    She was fifteen, he was still telling himself desperately an
hour later as he played basketball with the three of them, watched her
dribbling, showing off her jump shot, laughing at him, bumping him, killing him. Fifteen. She was a child. And he was nineteen going on
fifty, and if her brothers, if her parents could read his mind, he’d be right
out of that house and out of their lives. Out of the warmth, the light, the
laughter, hell, minus some teeth, probably, and on the Greyhound bus straight
back to Stanford. He would just have to ignore her, and the way she moved, and the
way she laughed, and the fierce, insistent craving she stirred in his body. He
could do that. He’d done tougher things. Although, at this moment, he couldn’t
remember exactly what.

 
 

Everybody Except Alyssa
    Alyssa’s unemployment blues eased a little with the arrival
of her brother Gabe on Christmas Eve. Alec had always been her exciting
brother, equal parts glamorous, demanding, and exasperating, but Gabe had been her
protector and confidante ever since she could remember. Although, she sadly
admitted to herself, he’d had less time for her A.M.—After Mira. She
liked her sister-in-law, but she missed being alone with Gabe. And with both of
her brothers newly married . . . the phrase “fifth wheel” came pretty forcibly
to mind.
    “You need to tell us all about the honeymoon, Rae. I want to
see pictures,” Mira said when they had sat down to dinner, nine of them including
Rae’s grandmother Dixie, all squeezed around the dining room table eating
spaghetti with meat sauce, their traditional Christmas Eve dinner.
    Alec and Rae had been married on the day after Thanksgiving.
A short engagement, a small, simple wedding, but Alyssa knew that Dixie’s
health was fragile, and they hadn’t wanted to wait. And, Rae had said practically,
they wouldn’t have to take as much time off work if they did it over the
holiday weekend. Which had made Alec groan, and everyone else laugh.
    “It was . . . “ Rae smiled. “Great. It