Meg Cabot - Safe House

"With whom," Ruth thundered. "And I'm talking to Jess, all right? Now hang up. I'll be off in a minute."

"Hi, Jess," Skip said, instead of hanging up like he was supposed to.

"Hi, Skip," I said. "Thanks again for the ride this morning."

"Jess," Ruth roared. "DO NOT ENCOURAGE HIM!"

"I better go, I guess," Skip said. "Bye, Jess."

"Bye, Skip," I said. There was a click, and Skip was gone.

"You," Ruth said, "had better do something about this."

"Aw, Ruth," I said. "Don't worry about it. Skip and I are cool."

"No, you are not cool. He has a crush on you. I told you not to play so many video games with him, back at the lakehouse."

I wanted to ask her what else I'd been supposed to do, since she had never been around, but restrained myself.

"So what are you going to do now?" Ruth wanted to know.

"I don't know. Go to bed, I guess. I mean, by morning I'll know. Where Heather is, I mean."

"You hope," Ruth said. "You know, you've never looked for somebody you didn't like before. Maybe it only works with people you don't hold in complete contempt."

"God," I said before hanging up, "I hope that's not true."

But apparently it was, because when I did wake up, after seeming to have nodded off somewhere around midnight, I did not even remember I was supposed to be finding Heather. All I could think was, Now what was that?

This was because I'd wakened, not to the sound of my alarm, or the twittering of birds outside my bedroom window, but to a sharp, rattling noise.

Seriously. I opened my eyes, and instead of morning light pouring into my room, there was nothing but shadow. When I turned my head to look at my alarm clock, I saw why. It was only two in the morning.

Why, I wondered, had I woken up at two? I never wake up in the middle of the night for no reason. I am a sound sleeper. Mike always joked that a twister could rip through town, and I wouldn't so much as roll over.

Then I heard it again, what sounded like hailstones against my window.

Only they weren't hailstones, I realized this time. They were actual stones. Someone was throwing rocks at my window.

I threw back the blankets, wondering who on earth it could be. Heather's friends were the only people I knew who might be anxious enough to see me to pull a stunt like this. But none of them had any way of knowing that my bedroom was the only one in the house that faced the street, or that it was the one with the dormer windows.

Staggering to one of those windows, I peered through the screen. Somebody, I saw, was standing in my front yard. There was hardly any moon, but from what little light it shed, I could see that the figure was tall and distinctly male—the distance across the shoulders was too wide for it to be a girl.

What guy did I know, I wondered, who would throw a bunch of rocks at my windows in the middle of the night? What guy did I know who even knew where my bedroom windows were?

Then it hit me.

"Skip," I hissed down at the figure in my yard. "What the hell do you think you're doing? Go home!"

The figure tipped his face up toward me and hissed back, "Who's Skip?"

I jumped back from the window with a start. That wasn't Skip. That wasn't Skip at all.

My heart slamming in my chest, I stood in the center of my bedroom, uncertain what to do. This had never happened to me before, of course. I was not the kind of girl who had guys tossing pebbles at her window every night. Claire Lippman, maybe, was used to that sort of thing, but I was not. I didn't know what to do.

" Mastriani ," I heard him call in a loud stage whisper.

There was no chance, of course, of him waking my parents, whose room was all the way at the opposite end of the house. But he might wake Douglas, whose windows looked out toward the Abramowitzes', and who was a light sleeper besides. I didn't want Douglas waking up and finding out that his little sister had a nocturnal caller. Who knew if that kind of thing might cause an episode.

I darted forward and, leaning over the sill, with my face pressed up against the screen, called softly, "Stay there. I'll be right down."

Then I spun around and reached for the first articles of clothing I could find—my jeans and a T-shirt. Slipping into some sneakers, I hopped down the hall to the bathroom, where I rinsed my mouth with some water and toothpaste—hey, a lady does not greet her midnight callers with morning breath. That much I do know about these things.

Then I crept down the stairs, carefully avoiding the notoriously creaky step just before the second landing, until I reached the front door and quietly unlocked it.

Then I stepped into the cool night air and Rob's warm embrace.

Look, I know, okay? Three days. Three days I'd been home, and he hadn't called. I should have been mad. I should have been livid. At the very least, I should have greeted him with cold civility, maybe a sneer and a "Hey, how you doing," instead of how I did greet him, which was by throwing my arms around him.

But I just couldn't help myself. He just looked so adorable standing there in the moonlight, all big and tall and manly and everything. You could tell he'd just taken a shower, because the dark hair on the back of his head was still wet, and he smelled of soap and shampoo and Goop, that stuff mechanics use on their hands to get the grease and motor oil out from beneath their nails. How could I not jump into his arms? You'd have done the exact same thing.

Except that Rob must have been supremely unaware of how stunningly hot he was, since he seemed kind of surprised to find me clinging to him the way those howler monkeys on the Discovery Channel cling to their mothers.

"Well," he said. He didn't exactly seem displeased. Just a little taken aback. "Hey. Nice to see you, too."

Well. Hey. Nice to see you, too . Not exactly what a girl expects to hear from the guy who has just woken her in the middle of the night by throwing pebbles at her bedroom window. A "Jess, I love you madly, run away with me" might have been nice. Heck, I'd have settled for an "I missed you."

But what did I get? Oh, no. That'd be a big "Well. Hey. Nice to see you, too."

I am telling you, my life sucks .

I let go of him and, since I was hanging about a foot in the air, Rob being that much taller than me, slithered back to the ground. Which I then stared at, in abject mortification. I had just, I could not help feeling, made a great big fool out of myself in front of him.

Again.

"Did I wake you up?" Rob wanted to know as we stood there on my front porch, awkward as two strangers, thanks to my underdeveloped social skills.

"Um," I muttered. "Yeah." What did he think? It was two in the morning. A perfect time, in my opinion, for a little romance.

But not, apparently, to Rob.

"Sorry," he said. He had shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans, but not because he had to in order to keep himself from snatching me up and raining kisses down upon my face, like the heroes in the books I sometimes catch my mom reading, but rather because he didn't know what else to do with them. "I just found out you were back in town. My mom said you came into the restaurant tonight. Or last night, I guess."

Oh, God! His mother had told! Mrs. Wilkins had told him about waiting on me and Mark Leskowski at Table Seven. The make-out table! I sincerely hoped she'd mentioned that Mark and I had not, in point of fact, been making out.

"Yeah," I said. "I got back Sunday night. I had to. You know. School. It started on Monday."

What I did not add, though I wanted to, was, "You moron."

And I was glad I hadn't, when he said, "I know. I mean, I figured it out tonight, that of course school must have started again. Last week of August and all. It's just that when you aren't going anymore, it's kind of hard to keep track."