I Love You Just the Way You Are (Book 1- Rock Canyon Series)

Chapter 4 - Kellan

Chapter 4 – Kellan

There. That's as close as I can get to your beauty... though I still don't think this does you any justice.

I put the final touches on my latest drawing of Maddie and then admired it.

"Bruh," my phone said. I smirked. I'd recorded my best friend Tyrell's voice saying bruh and made it my alert sound. He said it so much that his mom even bought him a dictionary last Christmas, telling him that there were other words he could use to express himself. I grabbed my phone and checked it.

Tyrell: "Hey bruh are you partying with us later tonight or what? You've been MIA for a minute."

My shoulders fell as I cringed. I had been blowing off Tyrell for most of the summer. He was self-absorbed, so he didn't ask too many questions, which was good because I would be far too embarrassed to tell him the truth; that I was blowing him off to draw a girl who kept rejecting me and refused to be my friend.

It had been, what, six weeks of this? And almost my entire world had become her. What had started with an "oh my god, she's so hot, let me get that number," had blossomed into wanting to know everything about her. What her favorite color was, what she did in her free time, where she went to school, how she looked when she woke up in the morning.

I had to wonder on because the truth was plain–I wasn't getting any answers out of Maddie. Every time I tried to ask her about something other than the café there would be the obligatory eye-roll and puff.

Suffice to say, I had learned a great deal about the food and beverages at The Resca. It wasn't that I wanted to know–it was my only option to hear that sultry voice of hers.

I picked up the new set of colored pencils that had finally come in the mail from Europe. Her eyes were such a specific color of enrapturing blue and only this particular set of pencils had the special shade I needed. There was no way that I was going to settle for anything less than the real deal.

I looked around my tiny bedroom and wished that I could plaster my walls with drawings of her instead of the silly sports posters and video game characters that stared back at me. But I wouldn't know how to explain that to other girls I might bring in here.

I looked at my unmade bed and found it hard to imagine wanting any girl other than Maddie in it. I wondered if she would think my retro lava lamp sitting on the nightstand next to it was cool. Kate just made fun of it.

I stood up and stretched slowly. My eyes happened to fall on the calendar tacked to the wood paneling next to my door. Football would begin in earnest tomorrow and my time for drawing would be cut short. That hurt more than I wanted it to. A big part of me wanted to say the heck with football and invest all my time in drawing. I wanted to pretend that I lived in a world where people celebrated art as much as they celebrated the ability to throw an oddly shaped leather ball.

But football was my way out of town. My GPA was atrocious, hovering around 2.0 in the easiest classes I could find. I showed up to school, chased skirts, and played sports. Sometimes I worried about my lack of academic credentials, but Coach Baker always told me not to worry about all that. Many times over the past two years I'd heard Coach saying to me, "USC scouts aren't going to give a shit whether you have a 4.0 or 1.0 when they see you can light up the scoreboard. Forget about class, you don't need it."

Yeah, football was going to be my life whether I liked it or not. I kicked myself for not focusing more on film study over the summer, knowing that the college scouts would begin actively recruiting me this year. I sighed and looked down, realizing I was still in my underwear. I moved to grab a fresh shirt and shorts from my closet.