Better Than the Movies

Perfect for fans of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood, this "sweet and funny" (Kerry Winfrey, author of Waiting for Tom Hanks) teen rom-com is hopelessly romantic with enemies to lovers and grumpy x sunshine energy!

Liz hates her annoyingly attractive neighbour but he's the only in with her long-term crush...

Auteur
Lynn Painter writes romantic comedies for both teens and adults. She is the author of Better Than the Movies, Mr. Wrong Number, The Do-Over, Betting on You, and Nothing Like the Movies, as well as being a regular contributor to the Omaha World-Herald. She lives in Nebraska with her husband and pack of wild children, and when she isn’t reading or writing, odds are good she’s guzzling energy drinks and watching rom-coms. You can find her at LynnPainter.com, on Instagram @LynnPainterKirkle, or on Twitter @LAPainter.

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Perfect for fans of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood, this “sweet and funny” (Kerry Winfrey, author of Waiting for Tom Hanks) teen rom-com is hopelessly romantic with enemies to lovers and grumpy x sunshine energy!
 
Liz hates her annoyingly attractive neighbour but he’s the only in with her long-term crush…

Résumé
Perfect for fans of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood, this sweet and funny (Kerry Winfrey, author of Waiting for Tom Hanks) teen rom-com is hopelessly romantic with enemies to lovers and grumpy x sunshine energy! Liz hates her annoyingly attractive neighbour but he's the only in with her long-term crush

Échantillon de lecture
Chapter One CHAPTER ONE
“Nobody finds their soul mate when they’re ten. I mean, where’s the fun in that, right?”

—Sweet Home Alabama

The day began like any typical day.

Mr. Fitzpervert left a hair ball in my slipper, I burned my earlobe with the straightener, and when I opened the door to leave for school, I caught my next-door nemesis suspiciously sprawled across the hood of my car.

“Hey!” I slid my sunglasses up my nose, pulled the front door shut behind me, and hightailed it in his direction, careful not to scuff my pretty new floral flats as I basically ran at him. “Get off of my car.”

Wes jumped down and held up his hands in the universal I’m innocent pose, even though his smirk made him look anything but. Besides, I’d known him since kindergarten; the boy had never been innocent a day in his life.

“What’s in your hand?”

“Nothing.” He put the hand in question behind his back. Even though he’d gotten tall and mannish and a tiny bit hot since grade school, Wes was still the same immature boy who’d “accidentally” burned down my mom’s rosebush with a firecracker.

“You’re so paranoid,” he said.

I stopped in front of him and squinted up at his face. Wes had one of those naughty-boy faces, the kind of face where his dark eyes—surrounded by mile-long thick lashes because life wasn’t fair—spoke volumes, even when his mouth said nothing.

An eyebrow raise told me just how ridiculous he thought I was. From our many less-than-pleasant encounters, I knew the narrowing of his eyes meant he was sizing me up, and that we were about to throw down about the most recent annoyance he’d brought upon me. And when he was bright-eyed like he was right now, his brown eyes practically freaking twinkling with mischief, I knew I was screwed. Because mischievous Wes always won.

I poked him in the chest. “What did you do to my car?”

“I didn’t do anything to your car, per se.”

“Per se?”

“Whoa. Watch your filthy mouth, Buxbaum.”

I rolled my eyes, which made his mouth slide into a wicked grin before he said, “This has been fun, and I love your granny shoes, by the way, but I’ve gotta run.”

“Wes—”

He turned and walked away from me like I hadn’t been speaking. Just… walked toward his house in that relaxed, overconfident way of his. When he got to the porch, he opened the screen door and yelled to me over his shoulder, “Have a good day, Liz!”

Well, that couldn’t be good.

Because there was no way he legitimately wanted me to have a good day. I glanced down at my car, apprehensive about even opening the door.

See, Wes Bennett and I were enemies in a no-holds-barred, full-on war over the one available parking spot on our end of the street. He usually won, but only because he was a dirty cheater. He thought it was funny to reserve the Spot for himself by leaving things in the space that I wasn’t strong enough to move. Iron picnic table, truck motor, monster truck wheels. You get it.

(Even though his antics caught the attention of the neighborhood Facebook page—my dad was a group member—and the old gossips frothed with rage at their keyboards over the blights on the neighborhood landscape, not a single person had ever said anything to him or made him stop. How was that even fair?)

But I was the one riding the victory wave for once, because yesterday I’d had the brilliant idea to call the city after he’d decided to leave his car in the Spot for three days in a row. Omaha had a twenty-four-hour ordinance, so good old Wesley had earned himself a nice little parking ticket.

Not going to lie, I did a little happy dance in my kitchen when I saw the deputy slide that ticket underneath Wes’s windshield wiper.

I checked all four tires before climbing into my car and buckling my seat belt. I heard Wes laugh, and when I leaned down to glare at him out the passenger window, his front door slammed shut.

Then I saw what he’d found so funny.

The parking ticket was now on my car, stuck to the middle of the windshield with clear packing tape that was impossible to see through. Layers and layers of what appeared to be commercialgrade packing tape.

I got out of the car and tried to pry up a corner with my fingernail, but the edges had all been solidly flattened down.

What a tool.

When I finally made it to school after scraping my windshield with a razor blade and doing hard-core deep breathing to reclaim my zen, I entered the building with the Bridget Jones’s Diary soundtrack playing through my headphones. I’d watched the movie the night before—for the thousandth time in my life—but this time the soundtrack had just spoken to me. Mark Darcy saying Oh, yes, they fucking do while kissing Bridget was, of course, as swoony as hellfire, but it wouldn’t have been so *oh-my-God-*worthy if not for Van Morrison’s “Someone Like You” playing in the background.

Yeah—I have a nerd-level fascination with movie soundtracks.

That song came on as I went past the commons and made my way through the crowds of students clogging up the halls. My favorite thing about music—when you played it loud enough through good headphones (and I had the best)—was that it softened the edges of the world. Van Morrison’s voice made swimming upstream in the busy hallway seem like it was a scene from a movie, as opposed to the royal pain that it actually was.

I headed toward the second-floor bathroom, where I met Jocelyn every morning. My best friend was a perpetual oversleeper, so there was rarely a day when she wasn’t scrambling to put on her eyeliner before the bell rang.

“Liz, I love that dress.” Joss threw me a side-glance between cleaning up each eye with a cotton swab as we walked into the bathroom. She pulled out a tube of mascara and began swiping the wand over her lashes. “The flowers …