Channel 20 Something Read Online Free PDF Page A

me. “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
    “Um, okay.” I walked a few steps away with him while my friends waited.
    Aric put a hand on my arm, turning me a little to the side for privacy. He lowered his face to mine. My heart started thumping so hard I worried he could hear it.
    “Listen, did I do something wrong in there?” He hooked a thumb toward the club.
    “No.” I shook my head and forced a smile. “No, everything’s fine.”
    “Well, you just kinda… changed all the sudden. It seemed like we were having a good time, and then, I don’t know, I thought I made you mad or something.”
    “You didn’t do anything—it’s—I have a boyfriend.”
    “Oh.” He nodded as if it made perfect sense. “Where is he tonight?”
    That threw me. I’d expected to toss the half-truth out there and get away with it clean. Now I had to come up with another lie.
    “He’s… busy.” Lame, but functional.
    “Okay. Well, see you at work tomorrow.”
    “Yeah—see you at work.”
    I walked back to my friends, who stared at me with nearly identical bug-eyed glances. I shrugged and got into the car.
    “What the hell was that?” Mara demanded, climbing into the passenger side. “Six-feet-four-inches-of-missing-Hemsworth-brother-Viking-hotness chases you across a parking lot, and you tell him you have a boyfriend?”
    “I do have a boyfriend.”
    “You guys are on a break ,” she argued. “Which has now lasted nearly a month, so it’s looking more like a break up , if you ask me.”
    “I didn’t.”
    “Well, if he’d been chasing me down, I wouldn’t be in this car with you two right now—sorry girls,” Mara said.
    “No apology necessary.” Kenley laughed from the back seat. “I’m a hundred percent in love with Mark, and I’d have to think about it myself. But Heidi’s not interested in someone new. She and Hale are just doing the obligatory pre-engagement breakup.”
    “That’s not really it,” I said.
    “Well, what then? Aric’s not your type?” Mara asked. “Cause I saw the way you were looking at him while you two were dancing.”
    Ugh. Had I been that transparent? “He’s exactly my type,” I confessed. The type I was usually so careful to avoid. I threw the car into reverse and checked my mirrors before backing out.
    “You say that like it’s a bad thing.” Love-is-grand-Kenley frowned in the rear view mirror, totally confused.
    “Ohhh, I get it,” Mara said. “Does he look like that guy from Brown, or something?”
    I shook my head, considering it. “He doesn’t look anything like Josh, but he is like him.” As the words left my mouth, the rightness of them sank in even further and hardened like cement.
    “How do you know?” Kenley asked. “You just met Aric.”
    “I just know, okay? He’s so… smooth, so sure of his universal appeal to women. That’s why I’ll always go for a guy like Hale. He’s so much more—what am I trying to say?”
    “Safe? Boring?” Mara suggested in a kill-me-now tone.
    “Real. That’s what he is. Hale is real in a way a guy like Aric could never be.” I nodded, certain of the truth of it. So why did my reaction to Aric feel so much more real to me after one night than my feelings for Hale did after almost four years?

Chapter Four
Start Saying Yes
    I pulled my Mini Cooper into the station parking lot a few minutes before one the next afternoon, the nerves in my stomach swimming like a bowl of busy goldfish. I’d eaten only lightly today, anticipating my usual anxiety-produced reaction to being on live. The newscast was nine hours away, and I was already nauseous. Better to keep the belly as empty as possible.
    The crunch and pop of gravel alerted me to another vehicle driving into the lot, a huge Chevy Tahoe, which pulled up and parked right beside me. I glanced over to check out the other driver and saw the back of Aric’s blond head as he gathered items from his passenger seat. Not helping the nerves. I grabbed my own bags and got