Crush du Jour Read Online Free

my summer. Or at least the rest of the day.
    Not that I was opposed to working in twos, to be honest. It was just sort of jarring to be told that I’d be paired up with some random who’d been hired ages ago. What ifwe hated each other? What if she was someone whose boyfriend I’d actually flirted with at the Cabana Club once upon a time? (This has been known to happen.)
    What if she liked fat-free ice cream?
    I shuddered. The walls were a blur of finger paintings and fliers about racial diversity. I was starting to feel dizzy. Just as I was about to completely pass out, Nora stopped in front of a set of industrial double doors and pulled them open.
    “Here we are,” she said briskly. “The kitchen.”
    Holy heck, she really was going to make me cook.
    It was a good thing I was so comfortable with culinary improv.
    Past the industrial doors, the space was actually a little bit sad. I don’t know what I was expecting, since obviously a community center wouldn’t be tricked out like the set of Iron Chef , but what I found here amounted to several long cafeteria-style tables set up to face a bare-bones facsimile of a kitchen.
    However.
    Dismal as the kitchen itself may have been, there was one thing in that room that was absolutely … breathtaking.
    It was my would-be partner.
    The she was a he.
    A very-super-extra-adorable he.
    Eat your heart out, Laine .
    Even my brain thought he was out of my league, that’s how adorable he was.
    Good grief. How in the name of all that is yummy and fatty and very, very bad for you (e.g., ice cream, cookie dough, and white frosting out of the tub) was I going to be able to audition with this dude evaluating my every move? Nora really should have mentioned his debilitating (to me, that is) level of hotness.
    “Laine Harper, this is Seth McFadden.”
    I sighed dreamily. Even his name was cute.
    “Hi, Laine.” Seth pushed his squeaky folding chair away from the table and stood to shake my hand.
    I quickly rubbed my palms against the front of my jeans to shield Seth from what seemed to be a recent-onset glandular problem.
    “Hi.” I stuck my hand out and grabbed his. He had a firm handshake, which impressed me. I had a sneaking suspicion that my own handshake was more of a deftimpression of overboiled pasta. Everything about Seth was confident and well put together, but not in any kind of aggressive, macho-y way. He was almost perfect, in fact—as near as I could tell. Meanwhile, I was sweaty, scattered, and completely unprepared. Awesome.
    Sweaty, scattered, and unprepared was a familiar sensation. It meant something, beyond the temperature in the room.
    It meant I was crushing, hard.
    This was totally unacceptable. I had officially sworn off crushes for this summer. (Seriously. Anna made me a plaque on her computer and everything. It was official.)
    “What are you going to be teaching us today, Laine?” Nora asked sweetly as she pulled out a folding chair of her own and made herself comfortable.
    This was it. This was the moment of truth. I had perfect confidence that I could teach a class smoothly enough—if only I could decide what I would be teaching. I had visions of tumbleweeds blowing gently across the landscape of my brain. This was ridiculous. After weeks of playing with sample recipes and experimenting in thekitchen, suddenly the jukebox in my mind read TILT.
    Five seconds in the room with a cute guy, and my brain was already mush. Do you see why a crush would be way too distracting? Anyway, how does that saying go? “Fake it until you make it?” That’s what I needed to do.
    I had it. I took a deep breath and pasted a confident smile on my face. “I’ve been a latchkey kid since I was eleven,” I explained, “and I taught myself how to take basic dishes and spice them up—put my own personal flair on them. That’s what I’m going to do with you today!”
    I felt not unlike an idiot, speaking to a room full of imaginary eleven-year-olds, but I forged ahead