Chapter Nine
We all headed over to Starbucks, where Keiko was working. As we walked through the door we saw her flirting with a guy our age at the till, and started wolf-whistling and trying to embarrass her. She looked over, gave us a rather rude gesture and proceeded to give the guy her number. He grabbed his coffee and went to leave, til Jared called him over. "Hey Kyle, who knew you'd pull already?" The guy named Kyle laughed and said "I know right? Lucky me." We all sat down at a table and a few of us went to order our drinks, and we started chatting again. We had our drinks, and after a while most of them needed to get back to college for their next lessons. Gee, Jared, Frank and I didn't have a lesson now, so we decided to head over to Jared's place where he said Gee and Frankie could practice a new song they were working on. He had a large back room where he kept his guitars and Shannon's drums, so Frankie borrowed one of his guitars and they started working on the song. Jared and I watched for a little while, then I went to his kitchen to grab myself a drink. I started looking around for cans of Coke or something.
"Need a hand there?" I jumped out of my skin and swore at him. "Jared that is not fucking funny, you trying to send me to an early grave?" He laughed at my scowl, then walked over to me and gave me a hug. I stood there awkwardly; I don't usually let people hug me until I'm really comfortable with them, so getting a hug off someone I'd known for a couple of hours? Not so good. He noticed I wasn't returning the hug, and murmured "What's up?" in my ear. "Uh, I'm not really a hugging kinda person." I said quietly. He moved as if to stop, so I started to relax, and then I felt him very lightly kiss my cheek.
I completely froze, felt my heart start beating twice as fast and the adrenaline rush through my veins. What was going on? I felt him pulling away from me and look me in the eye, and I immediately looked away. I mumbled something, I don't even know what I said, and I got myself out of there before he'd try something else. I yelled up to the stairs "Gerard, Frank, I'm going home, I'll see you later." And I walked towards the door without even looking at Jared.
As I was leaving, another girl was standing outside the door with a key in her hand, and we both jumped when we saw each other. She had long brown hair, was slightly taller than me and wore a black vest top with grey skinny jeans. I muttered "Sorry," and looked down. I could see Jared standing behind me in the corner of my eye. "Oh hey Lyra. Chlo this is my twin sister Lyra, Lyra this is Chloe." I nodded my head. "Hi, sorry I was just leaving." "Oh sure, nice to meet you Chloe." I saw her giving Jared a stern look, and I walked out the door.
"Jared, what the hell have you done now?" Lyra seemed pretty pissed at me. I pulled my best innocent expression. "What? I haven't done anything! Why do you always assume I've done something?" "Well when a girl is trying to get out of the house with an expression like that, what am I supposed to think? Did you try something with her again?" I looked away refusing to say a word. Not that I needed to. "You did, didn't you? Jared, you've gotta learn to keep that thing in your pants, remember how many close calls you've already had?" She slammed her books down on the kitchen worktop as I just walked away ignoring her. "Jared, I swear I'm gonna KILL you one day!" She screamed after me.
