Page 205 of Promising You
“Garret! Someone could hear you.” I look around to make sure nobody’s there.
He rolls his eyes and shakes his head. “I’m still waiting for an answer here.”
“Okay, I’ll have an omelet.”
He whips up two omelets and some toast and we sit and eat breakfast at the kitchen island.
“You’re a good cook,” I tell him.
“Thanks,” he says, biting into his toast.
His cooking reminds me of our plan to live together and a wave of disappointment goes through me. “I just thought of something.”
“Let me guess. Now that your stomach’s full you want to go have sex again.”
I punch him. “No! That’s not at all what I was thinking.”
He shrugs. “Yeah, whatever, my little nympho girlfriend.” He tenses up, preparing to be punched again but I leave him alone.
“What I wasreallythinking is that now we can’t get an apartment together next fall.”
“Why not?”
“Because people would think it’s weird if bad-boy Garret went from having a different girl every night to living with just one.”
“I’m hoping by then people will have lost interest in me.” He gets up and takes the juice carafe from the fridge. “You want some more?”
“Sure.” I hold my glass out. It’s fresh-squeezed juice, not the canned stuff I had as a kid that wasn’t even juice but more like orange-colored sugar water.
“Besides, I’m not planning on going back to Moorhurst next year.” He puts the juice back in the fridge and comes back around to his seat.
“You’re not? When did you decide this?”
“Yesterday. When we were in my dad’s office.”
“Why you didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m telling you now.” He shoves his plate aside and turns to me. “I think we both should leave Moorhurst and get a fresh start somewhere else. Too many people at school know our history. And if we show up there in the fall, they’ll start gossiping and spreading stories about us and I’ll end up on the front page of a celebrity magazine again. I can’t have that, Jade. When this is over, I can’t reappear in the press. I need to hide out somewhere quiet and let people forget about me.”
“Where do you plan to go?”
“I don’t know yet. But I’m not going anywhere unless you’re going with me. So what do you think? Would you be okay leaving Moorhurst?”
“I’d miss Harper, but yeah, I could leave. It’s a good school but you’re right about the people. They gossip too much and I’ve never really felt like I fit in there. But we’d still go to college, right?”
He picks up our plates and takes them to the sink. “Well, yeah. But we need to find a small private college where people have no interest in me and are more focused on academics than celebrity gossip and reality shows.”
“And we’d still get an apartment together?”
“Yes.” He comes back over and lifts me up and into his arms. “We’ll definitely get an apartment together.”
“And you’ll do all the cooking?”
His eyebrows raise. “I’m pretty sure I never agreed to that.”
I tilt my head. “But you’re so good at it.”
“I’m good at a lot of things, but that doesn’t mean I want to do them all the time.” He pauses when he sees me smiling. “Okay maybe some things I want to do all the time, but not cooking.”
