Foes & Cons by Carrie Aarons (i am malala young readers edition .txt) 📗

Foes & Cons

Carrie Aarons

Copyright © 2021 by Carrie Aarons

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Editing done by Proofing Style.

Cover designed by Okay Creations.

For every girl who thought she loved a boy, until he broke her heart.

I hope you found someone so worthy of taking care of it.

Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Epilogue

Do you want a free book?

Also by Carrie Aarons

About the Author

Prologue

Blair

Two Years Ago

There is a very real chance that my heart may just pop right out of my throat.

As the bottle spins around and around, my fate hanging in the balance, I nearly watch my life flash before my eyes. Okay, so maybe not my life, because that’s a bit dramatic for a sixteen-year-old at her first real drinking party, or whatever you could call ten kids splitting a thirty rack of cheap beer in someone’s basement.

But if this was the only fight-or-flight situation I’ve faced in my short years, it would be a pretty decent excuse to see the whole timeline laid out before me. Because of the ten people who sit in this circle, five could be the boy to give me my first kiss. When someone jokingly brought up the idea of playing seven minutes in heaven, I laughed it off.

Until, of course, I was sitting in this stupid circle awaiting the verdict of who I’d go into that closet with.

There was Jimmy, the cute but cocky smart kid who sat behind me in math class. Or maybe it would be Scott, the junior varsity quarterback, who would plant one on me.

But, since fate was a cold-hearted bitch, I knew who would be on the other side of the bottle when it finished spinning.

Sawyer Roarke. The green-eyed, dark-haired boy who was growing into a man before my eyes. It was like puberty hit early for my childhood best friend, and every girl at our Chester, New Jersey high school had taken notice.

His arms were no longer that of a lean, skinny teenager, but growing muscles and veins in places that I had never before been attracted to on another person. Something had happened with his jaw, drawing my eyes to the sexy tic it does every other minute. For some reason, a simmer has ignited between us, one I never noticed before. I’d even had a dream about licking the dimple in his right cheek the other night and woken up with flaming hot skin on my face and chest.

Secretly, I’d been waiting most of my teenage life for him to be my first kiss. Having been best friends since before I can remember a time when we weren’t, our fathers ran an architecture firm together in our hometown. Our families were extremely close, we spent Thanksgiving together most every year, and it was a known inside joke between our mothers that we’d end up married someday.

That was, however, until two days ago. When I’d found the one thing that undid every school girl crush and daydream about our romantic future. When I’d stumbled upon Sawyer’s list of pros and cons about whether or not he could ever date me, or make me his girlfriend.

It was a humiliating piece of notebook paper, with each one of my biggest flaws laid out before me. There was no telling exactly when he put pen to paper, but by the descriptions in both columns, it had to be fairly recent, since “Hotter since her braces came off” had been on the pros side and I’d only gotten them off a month ago.

I found the list sticking out of one of his summer reading books, A Catcher in the Rye, to be specific. It was scribbled in his oh-too-familiar scrawl, and I shouldn’t have been snooping, but he was taking too long with grabbing popcorn for the scary movie marathon we were about to start. What I’d read was a list divided into two columns; reasons to date me and reasons to keep me in the friend zone.

Both of us had felt it this summer; the hazy, humid flirting on the line between friendship and love. It hadn’t always been this way, but as we hit puberty, it felt like our relationship was a speeding train heading for a breaking point. So apparently, Sawyer had decided to debate what it would mean to either be with me or not.

As we stared at each other across the circle, a snarky, cocky grin on his too full lips, I’m devastated by the emotion that grips me. What should be elation, or nervous wonder, or maybe even terrifying hope is just pain and anger. Because I know his innermost thoughts about me, the real way he feels about me when no one else is listening.

I know that a pro of dating me would be that I’m the funniest person he knows. Other positives included that I had a hot body, even if my rack was small—those were his words, verbatim. That I can tell what he’s feeling when no one else can, and that I’m the easiest person to talk to. Sawyer wrote that we had the same taste in movies, so going to the theater together would never be a fight. And he acknowledged that our families got