Every Time I Think of You Read Online Free PDF Page B

possibly because I didn’t offer it myself, and wouldn’t have known how. None were close friends, and I was far from a star athlete, so they didn’t seem to care what I did or didn’t do.
    But I wanted Everett to care. I wanted to care about him, and find a common ground that would settle my freshly unleashed affection toward him.

    “What about you?” I asked. “You’re more…”

    “What? Slutty?” He fake-punched me.

    “No, just experienced.”

    “There was an older guy at school. He graduated.” I caught a faraway look in his eyes, wanted to ask more.

    “Any, uh, ‘townies’?”

    “Ha. Perhaps. But you wouldn’t want me telling other guys about you, would you?”

    I shrugged agreement, but wasn’t so sure. Something in me wanted to share this giddy feeling, but I knew it was too soon.

    Everett shifted to telling tales of family conflicts and dramas, and the peer pressure and scholastic competition at his pricey school.
    “If I don’t keep a four-point-oh, if I don’t get into a ‘top-notch’ school,” his mother’s term, he revealed, “like Carnegie Mellon, I’m sunk. I’d have to go to some state school –no offense– plus, it’s bad enough that neither my sis or me are destined to marry or breed, so we’re basically the end of the family tree, which disappoints them even more.”
    “The Forrester tree,” I joked.
    He barely smirked in reply. “Which is why,” he scooted closer, turning on the charm, “I do so enjoy a little R and R with my new studly skinny dude.”
    “Hey, I’m not skinny.”
    He smiled, rubbing his hand on my thigh as he furled his eyebrows with a sort of Groucho Marx innuendo. “I bet you wanna pull over now, doncha?”
    “I bet I do,” I replied, slowing the car down, signaling as I pulled to the right lane in between the sparse weekend traffic. The roads were clear of snow, but coated in a crust of road salt.
    Everett reached for the radio dial, turned down the volume, and suddenly blasted in a bright a cappella, “Anticipation! An-ti-ci-pay-yay-shun, is makin’ you wait.”
    While the Carly Simon song was memorable, it still brought to my mind the ketchup commercial. Like the song, I waited.
    For the rest of the drive, I let Everett tell stories that were less serious, laughed at his jokes, asked more questions, fascinated by him as I stole glances at his handsome face. While he continued acting relaxed, I would notice him fidgeting or repeatedly tapping his legs to the beat of the music. Perhaps he was as nervous as I was.
    As we approached the city, after a half-serious argument over directions, Everett relented to my preference. Route 30 was the easy side way in, but for the big impact, I cut across one of the bridges, back around through Mount Washington, then drove through the Fort Pitt tunnel. He saw the reason for my determination. We cheered at the fantastic view of the skyline from the front with the three rivers’ convergence into an actual point.

    “We’re almost there.”

    “Whoo-hoo!” he shouted.

    “Sing another song.”

    “I don’t have anything memorized.”

    “What, no choir trophies to go with all those others?” I taunted.

    “We don’t have a choir at my school.”

    “Well, pick something off the radio.”

    He raised the volume, searched back and forth, half-heartedly fumbling the lyrics to a few hits, until a new mutual favorite’s tinkling piano intro played, The Babys’ “Every Time I Think of You.”
    Everett’s singing was so open-throated, so honest, unlike his somewhat rehearsed demeanor with my parents. He turned the volume up high, coaxing me to sing the back-up vocals, albeit a few octaves lower, as he belted out each high note with fervor, occasionally marred by a cracked note, which only endeared him to me more.
    “People say a love like ours, will surely pass…”
    Hearing him so close to me, the pure mutual joy we shared, must have been what led me to realize I was falling in love with