Eye Contact

Chapter Three: Sticks and Stones Will Break Quinn's Bones

      Lynn was dying.

     Tears were flowing down her cheeks, her face blotchy and her hair so tangled that birds wouldn't hesitate to make a nest out of it. I tentatively raised my fingers to my own cheeks, pulling them away to find them damp. Heat rushed to my cheeks. I was crying and she was crying, but we were both doing so for entirely different reasons.

     "I can't believe you screamed the whole way down!" She cackled. "Oh, God, I can't breathe! Quinn's face was priceless; you probably deafened the poor boy."

     Wringing out my hair, I grumbled as salt water stained the sand, a mark of my successful-yet-egotistically-draining trek from marshy grass to crashing waves. "I didn't deafen him," I said. Yet, as I said it, I knew that I might as well have; the moment that Quinn jumped off the edge, pulling me along with him, a shriek escaped from my throat. That shriek didn't cease until I hit the water, when I was forced to close my mouth unless I wanted to drown. "I bet I didn't even scream the whole way down. There must have been some point where I-"

     "No, you screamed the whole way down. Trust me, I would know."

     I turned on my heel, not at all surprised to find Quinn. My eyes were instantly attracted to the hot pink towel wrapped around his head. "Go away," Lynn and I said simultaneously.

     He pressed a hand over his heart. "You wound me, ladies, you really do," he said. I caught Lynn rolling her eyes in the corner of my eye and I chuckled. "But I have to get the truck. Out of all of the jobs that we had, they gave me the one that includes walking until your feet bleed."

     A voice rang out in the distance from behind me. "It's because you're fat!"

     "Shut up, Will!" Quinn shouted.

     I looked over towards Lynn, expecting our eyes to meet and for us to share the same exasperated, blank gaze as we always did in situations involving the following: moronic boys, bickering parents, aggravating teachers, blabbering girls. In this case, it was more of the moronic boys option. Lynn met my gaze, but a devious smirk played on her lips. Not trusting the mischievous glint in her eye, I started to protest, but she was already speaking before a word could come out.

     "Dakota will go with you," she said, causing Quinn to look questioningly at her, then at me.

     His eyebrows were raised, as though he was surprised that anyone would actually voluntarily go somewhere with him. "Really?" He asked.

     I opened my mouth to protest, unsure of how my friend expected me to survive a journey with a boy I barely knew when I could barely hold a strong conversation with my own mother. Suddenly there was a pressure on my back and I was being shoved forward, stumbling directly into Quinn. His hands were on my shoulders, steadying me, and I looked over my shoulder to glare at Lynn. Traitor.

     She smiled innocently. "Of course."

     I sighed quietly, knowing that I had lost. I turned back towards Quinn. "I'm not going anywhere until you take that towel off of your head," I told him. "You look ridiculous."

     He laughed. "Fair enough." He pulled the eyesore of a towel off of his head and threw it to the ground, causing a damp mop of auburn hair to fall over his eyes. "To the truck!" Before I could fully process what was happening, I was being pulled off of the sand and into the woods.

     "Let go of me," I whined, "you smell like wet dog. Quinn!"

     Quinn smirked at me from over his shoulder. "Oh, I'm sorry," he said, "is my musky scent bothering you? That's the smell of man, sweetheart."