Melt With You Read online

  Melt With You

  A Totally ‘80s Romance

  Addison Moore

  Contents

  Copyright

  Books by Addison Moore

  Introduction

  Dedication

  1. Hit Me with Your Best Shot

  Joel

  2. West End Girls

  Joel

  3. Head Over Heels

  Joel

  4. Love My Way

  Joel

  5. Girls Just Want to Have Fun

  Joel

  6. We Belong

  Joel

  7. Like a Virgin

  Joel

  8. Owner of a Lonely Heart

  Joel

  9. Things Can Only Get Better

  Joel

  Epilogue

  A Note from the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Edited by Paige Maroney Smith

  Cover Design: Gaffey Media

  Copyright © 2015 by Addison Moore

  http://addisonmoorewrites.blogspot.com/

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination. The author holds all rights to this work. It is illegal to reproduce this novel without written expressed consent from the author herself.

  All Rights Reserved.

  This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase any additional copies for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Copyright © 2015 by Addison Moore

  Books by Addison Moore

  Young Adult Romance

  Melt With You (A Totally ’80s Romance 1)

  Tainted Love (A Totally ’80s Romance 2) Soon!

  Hold Me Now (A Totally ’80s Romance 3) Soon!

  Ethereal (Celestra Series Book 1)

  Tremble (Celestra Series Book 2)

  Burn (Celestra Series Book 3)

  Wicked (Celestra Series Book 4)

  Vex (Celestra Series Book 5)

  Expel (Celestra Series Book 6)

  Toxic Part One (Celestra Series Book 7)

  Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 7.5)

  Elysian (Celestra Series Book 8)

  Ephemeral (The Countenance Trilogy 1)

  Evanescent (The Countenance Trilogy 2)

  Entropy (The Countenance Trilogy 3)

  Ethereal Knights (Celestra Knights)

  Season of the Witch (A Celestra Companion)

  Romance

  3:AM Kisses (3:AM Kisses 1)

  Winter Kisses (3:AM Kisses 2)

  Sugar Kisses (3:AM Kisses 3)

  Whiskey Kisses (3:AM Kisses 4)

  Rock Candy Kisses (3:AM Kisses 5)

  Velvet Kisses (3:AM Kisses 6)

  Wild Kisses (3:AM Kisses 7)

  Burning Through Gravity (Burning Through Gravity 1)

  A Thousand Starry Nights (Burning Through Gravity 2)

  Fire in an Amber Sky (Burning Through Gravity 3)

  Beautiful Oblivion (Beautiful Oblivion 1)

  Beautiful Illusions (Beautiful Oblivion 2)

  Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion 3)

  The Solitude of Passion

  Someone to Love (Someone to Love 1)

  Someone Like You (Someone to Love 2)

  Someone For Me (Someone to Love 3)

  Celestra Forever After (Celestra Forever After 1)

  The Dragon and the Rose (Celestra Forever After 2)

  The Serpentine Butterfly (Celestra Forever After 3) Soon!

  Perfect Love (A Celestra Novella)

  Introduction

  The following is a true story. The places, names, and names of places, and locations of broken limbs have all been scrambled to an unrecognizable oblivion to protect the not-so innocent. The premise, the heart, the nexus of the story remains the same. It all happened just this way, almost, roundabout, I promise. I was there. I swear it, I was. In the end, it was pretty bitchin’.

  To the real Joel Effing Miller,

  we’ll always have Ozzy.

  1

  Hit Me with Your Best Shot

  Melissa

  September 1984

  OMD blares over the radio as both Jennifer and I ponder who or what the hell Enola Gay is.

  “Like who cares? I love this song!” She makes a heroic attempt to sway her heavily permed hair from side to side, but it’s frozen stiff, sprayed to a crystalized perfection, smelling slightly of Aussie Sprunch.

  She’s driving, or sputtering as it were, in a fit of staccato starts and stops all the way up Western Avenue as we head toward Glen Heights. Jen has had her license for almost a year now and still has yet to have mastered the fine art of vehicular maneuvering—in fact, I’m pretty sure down the road she has a vehicular manslaughter somewhere on her roster, but I’m not saying a word.

  I blame her choppy roadway skills solely on the fact she insists on driving with both feet—as in she brakes with her left foot and hits the gas with her right—usually at the same time, thus the abrupt starts and fits that seem to somehow miraculously transport us from point A to point B. I have my license as well, but no car to drive, so I’m rendered useless as far as any vehicular pleasures are concerned. And believe me, it would be a very big freaking pleasure not to risk a spinal cord injury every time Jen takes the wheel. I have cheer practice in about fifteen minutes, and Jen has been nice enough to haul me around all summer.

  It’s ironically 8:15 as OMD happily informs us. I’ve loved Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark ever since “Tesla Girls” came out last spring. “Enola Gay” is one of their older songs. I’ve heard it before, love it, just have no idea what it means. I’m a lyrics girl myself, so I like to pull the words out of a song and make them tell me their story. Writing is sort of my thing, and, well, I like a good story any way I can get it—even over the speakers of Jen’s hand-me-down Suzuki Samurai.

  Jen takes another sharp turn, and the food in my stomach sloshes with the pull of gravity. Just a few minutes ago, Jen and I each wolfed down a Carnation Breakfast Bar and chased it with bright orange Tang—that’s about as wild as we get. Personally, I’m rooting for my breakfast to stay in my digestive system rather than spraying it over her slightly cracked dashboard.

  “Ask Ben!” she shouts over the music. “He’ll know what it means.”

  It’s true. My little brother is a walking encyclopedia. Music may not be his thing, but it doesn’t stop him from knowing more facts about my favorite bands than an MTV VJ.

  My finger runs along the navy ribbon of my cheer uniform. It’s the very last day of summer practice. My hair is still damp from my early morning shower, and the thick scent of Merci Gelle mousse perfumes me like a halo.

  Outside the flecked windshield, I gaze up at the pristine sky. It’s so clear and vividly blue that I’m inspired to think up descriptive words that might be more interesting than well, vividly blue. Last year, I took creative writing with Mr. Sardona, and if it was one thing he drilled into our skulls, it was to think outside of the descriptive box. I lean my head onto the passenger’s side window just as Jen picks up speed, and the acceleration gives me a dizzying thrill. Flame blue sky—peacock blue. September sky blue—and that’s the one I decide I like best.

  Mr. Sardona was pretty insistent we see the world through an observational lens. He said a true writer could spend an entire lifetime just soaking in the environment. And believe me, I like the idea on paper. It’s just that
I want to do a little more participating than soaking, especially now that my junior year is on the horizon. A swell of anticipation fills me at the thought of everything this year will bring.

  Jen honks for no reason as we drive by Dean Henry Junior High, our old stomping grounds, and I smirk at the sight of the overgrown pink buildings, the flat, cracked blacktop where we ran endless laps while trying hard not to notice Mr. Marinko’s balls dangling from his Dolphin shorts.

  Having a hot Italian teacher for P.E. turned out to be both a blessing and a curse—both the blessing and the curse had a lot to do with the aforementioned hairy balls. As amused as he was by our instant infatuation with him, he was equally eager to see us sweat for an hour straight while prescribing the dreaded mile each and every day. I spent most of my junior high days dreaming of better blacktops, better teachers, dare I say, dreaming of bigger balls. In effect, I was dreaming of high school. Innately, I knew that four-year window would be the best four years of my life. And here it is, slowly coming into focus like a kaleidoscope full of beautiful colors and exotic shapes as one by one the pieces fall into place—or so my fantasies once hoped. I only have two years left to make any of my scholastic dreams come true, and not one of those dreams involves a Trapper Keeper.

  The song ends, and Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf” roars to life, thrusting Jennifer into a Simon Le Bon-gasm. She’s a Simon-ophile—my terminology, not hers. I’m just your routine fan of the band, but Jennifer has kicked it up a notch to stalker mode with the weekly letters she shoots off to their fan club. I tried telling her that nobody reads those bloated bags of mail, but she’s insistent her perfume-soaked tomes—Coty Musk, her signature Sunday go-to scent—will one day be read by Simon the Great himself.

  Jen takes the turn too hard and forces her Samurai over the curb, just as the thought of my prospective high school “glory” days sour into the harsh reality they’ve become. In a week, I’ll start my junior year, and I’m no more popular, liked, or invited to any cool parties than I was in junior high. The only difference in that undisrupted run of monotony is the fact I actually made cheer this year. It was my third summer suffering through endless repeated routines, and, this time, the kick pants aligned, my moves were both tight and undeniably agile, not to mention that I nailed those “fucking facial expressions”—Fatima Levitt’s words, not mine. Fatima is the team captain now that an entire rash of “psycho bitches” have graduated—again, I credit Fatima with the colorful descriptor. I get along great with both Fatima and her best friend Trina, but some of the other girls on the team are pretty much, for lack of a better term, psycho bitches.

  Jennifer gives a few nose-wrinkling sniffs as she pulls up in front of the grassy field of Glen Heights High School. The school itself is tucked midway up Glen Heights, or The Hill, as it’s better known—a ritzy neighborhood near the harbor in Los Angeles. It’s where the wealthy families raise their spawn in overgrown split-level homes—the names of their houses just as pretentious as the names of their children—Chateau Chantranelle, Pemberly on the Hill, Clarence House (which took on the unfortunate moniker of Clearance House once its owners put it up for short-sale), Persephone’s Lodge, Essex House (which has been aptly renamed the Sex House and rightly so after hearing the things that go on at the perverted parties there). Each cavernous home boasts an emerald green lawn that butts right up to the requisite sparkling blue swimming pool, warm as tears. I think Mr. Sardona would like that last descriptor—the two prior would have landed him a myocardial infarction. Nevertheless, most of my friends, like me, are from down the Hill on the western side of San Ramos.

  A year ago, San Ramos High School suffered an unfortunate plumbing issue that led to the “Great Crap-tastrophe of ’83” as my father called it, and the good citizens of Glen Heights offered to graft in a portion of the student body with their own.

  I’ll admit that when I heard I would be attending Glen Heights High, I thought my luck had finally shifted, taken an abrupt U-turn, and landed me in the exciting fast lane where I’ve secretly felt I always belonged.

  Glen Heights was my opportunity to reinvent myself, something that I continually aspire to do the way some people strive to stop world hunger or find world peace. I’m what my mother has dubbed a social chameleon, always trying to fit in—but unbeknownst to my mother, never quite succeeding.

  I’m shy by nature, so the fact I’ll be shouting at the top of my lungs and exposing my navy blue underpants to a crowd of thousands every Friday night this fall has turned my anxiety up full blast. It took ten full extra minutes for me to leave the house because I needed to flick on and off the bathroom light sixteen times for no other reason than the fact I’m sixteen—and perhaps unstable belief that this bizarre act of manipulating electricity will somehow bring me luck—each year I add an extra flick. Then I proceeded to make eye contact with the seventeenth century girl my mother has framed in the living room—looking away, then looking back sixteen times to—you guessed it—bring me an irrational run of good luck. I stupidly participated in both of those psychotic pastimes the day I made cheer, and now I’m convinced a cosmic disaster will befall me if I fail to flick and gaze my way out the door. The painting is a reprint of the Girl with a Pearl Earring that my mom snatched up as an impulse buy a few years back at Pic ‘N’ Save. And, oddly enough, I’ve come to think of that wide-eyed girl in the picture as a friend. I never said I was normal—although, I’m convinced that normal runs on a sliding scale, and the only thing that really matters in this life is to be nice.

  Glen Heights High lies sprawled out before me, unfurling into the horizon like a treasure map. I take a moment to soak in the sprawling green field—Easter Sunday green with blades of Irish jade prickling to the sky—and frown on that entire descriptor. If Mr. Sardona were dead, he would have rolled over in his not-so proverbial grave—and the irony that I threw in a cheap cliché to detail his eternal slumber is probably enough to sink him six feet under. He’s not a fan of purple prose and warned it would be the death of me one day—an ominous omen from a man who spends his time dreaming of fictitious new worlds. Regardless, I’m all for poetry in motion when it comes to the push of my pen. Mr. Sardona can kiss my moon at midnight, alabaster, just-this-side-of-Liquid-Paper, snow white ass if he doesn’t like it—besides, our pathways parted last semester at the intersection of three tardies and the B I finally squeezed out of him.

  The sun glowers over the Glen Heights campus as the football team practices in the oppressive heat. A few cheerleaders mill around near the goalpost to ogle the shirtless sight.

  There’s something about seeing both football players and cheerleaders in close proximity that sets my anxiety full tilt, and my body temperature spikes to unnatural levels. I guess some might say my foray into cheerleading is nothing short of a sadistic move on my part. As psyched as I am to have officially—and finally! made cheer, I get so nervous before each and every practice that I could literally puke.

  A waft of that wretched scent my tennis shoes usually reserve for a much later hour in the day seeps into my nostrils. A Mr. Sardona descriptor for this sneaker stench? Doritos dipped in dog shit. How’s that for chips and dip, Mr. Sardona? Still looking like a B to you?

  My mouth goes dry. My throat swells as my embarrassment morphs into a hand and slowly strangles me.

  “Do my feet smell?” This is a genuine concern. My shoes are gross from weeks of sockless practice, and I keep forgetting to toss them into the washing machine. It’s one thing to stink up my bedroom, walking through the house with honest to God fumes wafting off my red, bloated dogs, but here in Jen’s car, before practice ever begins? Unfreakingacceptable.

  “Crap.” Jennifer glances in the backseat as if the offensive odor were strapped in the vacant seats. “Is that really your feet?”

  “Is it bad?” I’ll die if the Beaver Brigade says a single word. The Beaver Brigade consists of Kelly Masterson, Michelle Bates, and Stacey Riley. Of course, there are others on the chee
r squad, but that trifecta of cruelty warrants its own cliquey epithet. Not that Jennifer and I or any of our friends came up with that disgusting nickname, it’s what the surfers call them, and for whatever reason that vaginal-inspired moniker has somehow managed to stick.

  Every single clique at Glen comes equipped with its very own nickname; some of them more unfortunate than others. The Journey girls—their affinity for Steve Perry knows no end. Mostly it’s a group of Italian cousins who wear Journey concert tees religiously. If you walk by them at lunch, you can hear a nice sampling of the band’s recent album. Connie Ferraro, their fearless leader, stuffs a Sony cassette player into her backpack every single day to ensure they get a sufficient dose of Vitamin Steve. Connie is from back East and says wicked awesome all the time. She once complained to me that no one in L.A. ever says it, so whenever I see Connie in the hall I say wicked awesome and she boomerangs it right back. It’s sort of our thing now.

  Then there’s the Soul Patrol—closely associated with the break-dancers. If you want some serious head spinning wicked awesomeness in your life, you trek in their direction during both nutrition and lunch. They’ve got the beatbox doing its thing, and there are always a couple of guys going toe-to-toe in a pop-and-lock challenge.

  The Metal Heads—closely associated with the Stoners—of which I quasi-qualify for the former based on the music my sister Laurie brands over my soul day in and day out. We have one radio between us, and she’s in charge of the heavy metal controls.

  There are the Barbie Dolls—the most powerful, fake, popular girls who can double as super models and most likely will upon graduation. The Charms—really cute bleached blondes who have a habit of attaching themselves to the hip of any available members of the opposite sex and then frequently discarding them. The boys don’t mind being used and abused, for mostly carnal reasons. The Charms are pretty much sluts minus the degrading reputation. I guess when you surf and give head it has the power to wipe away any negative attribute your reputation might have otherwise procured. In other words, surfing plus blowjobs makes you totally cool at this twisted school.