Page 67 of Just One More Thing

Not a polite kiss. Not a friendly peck. Not even one of those tentative, testing-the-waters kisses where you spend the next twelve hours pretending it could still be classified as accidental.

Kissed.

Full-on, both-hands-in-his-hair, meteor-shower-as-witness kiss.

And he kissed me back.

If a person wanted to be honest about this, she might admit it was the best thing that’s happened to her in a very, very long time.

I stare at the ceiling. Florida is still there. The alien, if I squint, hasn’t moved. The room looks exactly the same as it did yesterday. There should be some visible evidence that I detonated ten years of emotional repression with my own mouth last night. A scorch mark. A commemorative plaque. Something.

My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I grab it so fast I nearly knock over my bkr in the process, which feels symbolic somehow. Of course the morning after I finally kiss JakeWheeler would be the morning I die because I launch my water bottle into my own face.

It’s Granny.

The whole town knows.

How

Gladys Kravitz has binoculars.

The lighthouse is half a mile away

She’s very committed.

I drop the phone on my chest and close my eyes.

This is Blue Crab Bay. Privacy is not a real thing here. Privacy is a “one size fits all” label on a pair of leggings. A lie that ignores the messy reality of the situation.

My lips still feel warm.

This is not helping.

Neither is the fact that I can still feel his broad shoulders under my hands and the way he kissed me back. Slow and careful at first, giving me time to change my mind. Then, when I didn’t pull away, when I leaned closer instead, the way he stopped being quite so careful.

“Don’t disappear on me,” he said.

The sentence joins the kissed-me-back track running laps through my head.

He wasn’t dramatic or angry. Just quiet and true in a way that hit me square in the chest and has apparently decided to live there now.

I did disappear on him. There isn’t a kinder version of what I did.

Downstairs, something clatters. “Frank,” Granny says, in a tone that tells me Frank dropped a tray, got busted for eating a doughnut, or both.

I should get up. That seems like something a healthy, functioning person would do after one kiss. They brush their teeth. They put on pants. They do not stare at Florida and negotiate with an alien made of ceiling texture.

I throw the covers back before I can talk myself out of it.

In the bathroom mirror, I look exactly the same. Same hair. Same face. Same woman who kissed Jake under a meteor shower and now has to go downstairs and act like she’s completely fine.

“You’re fine,” I tell my reflection.

My reflection appears unconvinced.

“You kissed him. He kissed you. That’s how kissing works. This is a sequence of events that has occurred between other adults. Society continues.”

Still unconvinced.