"Not to be rude or anything, but I thought you said your cousin George was coming to visit," Bobby said to Alex as he sidebarred him for more information. Luke checked his forearm, the skin grazed from falling over. He'd tripped over his own feet when he'd pulled Georgie to the curb and had hit the sidewalk hard. But not nearly as hard as she had. She was sitting on the couch, icing her knee with a bag of peas that they'd gotten from in the house.

"Yeah, I said Georgie," Alex reminded him. But there was no getting around the fact that he hadn't mentioned his cousin was a girl. Not that it mattered all too much, but they'd planned a few trips for the summer break that would be a little harder to do with a girl. They wouldn't be able to go camping, have all-night movie marathons. Luke couldn't see her parents being okay with her sleeping over at a guy's house with four boys in attendance.

"You never told us Georgie was a girl," chimed in Luke, glancing over at the girl wincing as she put the peas on her wrist. "I don't remember you mentioning it at all."

"What's the big deal? So she's not a fifteen year old boy, she's still cool," Alex insisted, shrugging his shoulders and trying to play it off like there wasn't anything wrong with it. They wouldn't have cared had he told them she was a girl, they would have just preferred to have been warned.

"She's a chick, Alex," Bobby retorted and Luke hit his shoulder, making his hand sting in the process. "She is. We can't spend all summer with a chick. The only chicks we should be hanging around with are groupies, and your little cousin does not meet the desired requirements."

"Spell requirement, go on," said Luke, waiting for his friend to either brush him off or make an attempt at the spelling. "We'll wait."

In his opinion, Georgie was kind of…cute. Luke wouldn't have said that he had a type but that would have been a huge lie, because he did. And…Alex's cousin fit the bill. She had pretty eyes, which he'd noticed when he'd pulled her off of the road. The shock made them go wide and it was like he was staring into two big pots of honey. It actually made his heart race a little. She had a sort of sweet face with small impish features but a fiery temper underneath, which he'd seen when she snapped at him for surprising her.

"Unless I've sprouted a couple wings and a beak in the last half hour, don't refer to me as a chick," Georgie called from the couch. She had a thick accent and it left Luke trying to figure out just where the accent was from. Alex hadn't told them anything useful about her but at the very least, it'd be rather fun figuring her out.

It wasn't as cool as Bobby thought it was to be an asshole about girls, it didn't make him any more desirable to the arguably fairer sex. It just made his friends hit him and tell him off for it. He was opinionated and that wasn't always a good thing. Luke couldn't count on one hand how many times he'd intervened and stopped Bobby from having his face pummeled for saying something stupidly opinionated to or about someone's girlfriend, typically some popular guy who was bigger and stronger than both of them.

"Honey, you're in California, guys call girls 'chick' all the time," Bobby said, stepping around Luke to talk to her face to face. But unfortunately for Bobby, Georgie had gotten to her feet and she looked ready to start fighting. "You'd better get used to it."

"I know you did not just call me honey," she said with an exasperated laugh. "You had best backtrack and think about whether or not this is the hill you want to die on," she very obviously warned Bobby, but he did not backtrack. No, in fact, the boy stood his ground and it did not bode well for him.

"Why? Do you prefer sweetheart?" Bobby tested his luck, of which he had very little left of. "Tell you what, you can pick your own nickname."

"I'd thank you kindly to call me by my name." Georgie's jaw went tense as she stared Bobby down, her eyebrow arched. Her words may have sounded sweet, but there was no denying that she was ready to spit poison if she had to. "My momma didn't give me it for no good reason," she went on, her jaw relaxing as her eyes moved to Alex.

Alex was one of the softest people in the world, he couldn't do harm to anyone. But he would definitely give it a try to put Bobby in his place. No one wanted it to come to that, and Bobby was only teasing…badly. He just didn't know when the right time was to tease.

"So…the skatepark?" Reggie interrupted, before Bobby could say anything else. And Luke was thankful. "Alex promised Georgia we'd─"

"Just Georgie, not Georgia," he was interrupted by both Alex and Georgie. The cousins let out a small laugh before Reggie corrected himself.

"Alex promised Georgie we'd swing by there," he finished, waiting for the remainder of the band to go along with it.

Luke agreed. He hadn't been down to the skatepark in a while. The last time, his bike had been run over by some idiot in a truck. The guy driving made it obvious he didn't like the kids at the park by running over bikes and boards whenever any were left unattended near the parking lot. And the cops didn't do anything because they just saw the kids at the skatepark as being a bunch of punks. Luke had had to rely on the guys to get him around on their bikes until his parents gave in and bought him another. They had given in because the guys backed up his story that what had happened was a pure accident. The bike they'd bought him, though, was secondhand, had seen better days, but it still rode as good as any other. And he had spruced it up a little to make it look less…pre-owned. Kids could be brutal and he didn't want anyone making comments about it at school.

The one who put up resistance was Bobby, going on about how they had to rehearse. But for what they had to rehearse for…Luke had no idea. They didn't have a gig any time soon. If they were lucky, they could maybe get one of the skaters to hire them for a party. He only relented and agreed when he was reminded that some of the girls that hung around the skaters were cute…and they were his type.

He loved alt and grunge girls, a group of girls that Luke could picture Georgie fitting in with, style wise. One look over what she was wearing and she could have been one of the girls from that clique at school, ignoring the lot of them.

Bobby went inside the house to get a change of clothes, leaving his bandmates with Georgie in the garage.

"Don't you want to go get some clothes?" she asked Luke, drawing attention to the fact that he still didn't have a shirt on.

"The water!" he exclaimed, running out to the sidewalk and seeing the four bottles of probably very hot water. "Aw, man," he groaned, picking them up and bringing them back down. "Anyone want a hot bottle of water?" he offered, Reggie and Alex sighing, and Georgie scrunching her nose.

"I'll go grab some cold ones from the house, you get a shirt," Alex told Luke, patting his shoulder as he passed him, Reggie following after him, stating that he had to take a leak really bad. They left him standing with Georgie, still with her nose scrunched up as she stared at the ground.

∞༺ ༻∞

Oh man, why did they have to leave? Georgie had thought that her luck had been bad earlier when she almost got run over but now? She was stuck in an incredibly hot garage with an incredibly hot boy, who was still as shirtless as the day he was born. Her face was on fire, but she couldn't tell anymore if it was because of the heat or because she was blushing.

She'd snapped at him earlier, she'd been so rude and that was probably how he'd forever think of her. A rude girl who yelled whenever she got the chance. She didn't want to look at Luke, so she stared at the floor, her nose scrunched up as she mentally yelled at herself for how she'd acted.

"You okay?" asked Luke, making her look at him. He was rummaging through a black bag that she could have swore was full of trash. But it wasn't. He pulled out a sleeveless shirt, sniffing it and shrugging before he pulled it on. "Probably clean," he told her.

"Probably?" she questioned him and he nodded with a grin on his face that made her stomach do flips. "Why not just get one from inside?" she asked.

"Cause I don't have any," he explained, sitting down on the couch beside her and pulling on a pair of Vans that had been hidden to the side. "I don't live here," he added as he leaned over his left knee to make sure his laces were tucked in. Georgie instinctively leaned away from him.

"Oh, I thought…you came from the house…and I just assumed─"

"Where is that accent from?" he interrupted her, glancing up with his head at an angle as he tucked the laces away. "You sound…well, not from Cali."

She wondered just how much Alex had told them about her, if they didn't even know where she'd come from. And if they hadn't known she was a girl. She was starting to think he hadn't told them that much.

"I'm not from California," she confirmed, leaning against the arm of the couch, trying to find something that looked interesting enough to focus on. Luckily for her, there were guitars and a drum set that she could look at. She didn't want to trip over her words because the cute boy was looking at her. "I'm from North Carolina. I mean, I was born in Alabama and that's why I sound, you know, like I sound, but I lived in North Carolina before moving here."

"'Born'..." Luke said as he mimicked her accent with a small chuckle. "You have a real drawl, you know that?" Was he making fun of her accent? She turned to him with her eyebrows knitted, almost growling at him. But his expression made it melt into bewilderment. "I like it. Charming."

He liked her accent? He thought it was charming? Georgie's face burned hotter than before and she had no idea how to respond. He must have been one of those hot California guys that Max always mentioned, only…he was probably ten times better. Cute, hot, musician, how could it get better?

"Is something wrong? Are you okay?" he asked, suddenly looking very worried as he reached across her to get something. "You must be really hot. I mean, you are…I mean, it's hot and therefore you must be too, I'm not saying…you know, you are hot… I mean, you're not not hot…" He had been stretching across to get to the cooler by her legs and he was practically hugging her legs as he stretched.

When Alex and Reggie returned, Luke sprawled over her legs, Georgie's body tense and her eyes about as wide as saucers, the pair stared at them like they'd been caught in the middle of something. "Whoa, should we have knocked?" Alex joked, before catching a glimpse of his cousin's face.