Page 4 of Sweet Tooth
The next day, the note was up again. I ripped it down.
The day after that, I was late to class, so I only saw the note once half the day was through. By then, people were starting to talk.
“Got a new boyyyyfriend, Jessy?” Mindy McAllister, who had a fake tan, fake teeth, fake lashes, fake hair and one real horrible personality, crooned as she passed.
“Screw off,” Tamara muttered as Mindy and her Mind-ions, as we called them, strut past.
“Although she does have a point,” Tamara said. “God, Jess, are you really going to keep this up?”
Part of me knew I was being stupid not giving Zane a chance. But I barely knew him, and he barely knew me. Barely knew this school. There was no point in me jumping at being with him now, and then him moving on once he got more settled.
Basically, I was a chicken. But at least a sensible one at that. Zane was the kind of guy who it would hurt to lose.
So, on the notes went, and down I ripped them. Zane tried talking to me a few times in the hallways too, and I was polite enough back, but always too nervous to make proper conversation.
As week one went to week two, I kept wondering when he’d find his group, when the notes would stop. When I’d see him walking down the hallways hand in hand with Gillie (who reportedly still had a crush on him, despite his gym stunt) or Mara. Or Mindy. Or any one of the other more popular girls the guys in my school always seemed to go for.
The notes got different too, sometimes clearly jokes, sometimes philosophical rantings, sometimes life quotes. They’d always circle back to that same question though – what are you up to tonight?
Schoolwork, I’d lie. Visiting a friend, I’d lie. Family thing.
But one week became two became three, and the notes kept coming and, one day, there was something else at my locker, waiting for me.
Zane.
I stood there for a full minute, my mind seizing up and refusing to cooperate.
“So I’ll tell you right now, I’m going to leave you alone,” he said, looking at something in his hands. “I thought maybe you’d find the notes funny and want to hang out with me but then Howie said…”
“Howie said what?” I interrupted him, wondering what in the hell that twerp had said to Zane. “Are you and Howie a thing?” he asked me.
It was all I could do not to laugh out loud. Howie Benson had been annoying me since the second grade, and I would have rather stuck a fork in my own eye than go out with him. Not for his lack of trying over the years. “Um, no. Most definitely not,” I answered.
The relief was palpable on Zane’s face. “Really? Well he just told me not to bother with you. That you were taken.”
This would have been a perfect out, the perfect way to get Zane to stop whatever it was that he was doing, and I’d blown it.
Good, I thought to myself. Maybe he does deserve a chance.
“I’m not,” I said.
“But you do want me to leave you alone,” Zane said. “You can’t possibly be busy every night of the week.”
As I lost myself in the browns of his eyes, words failed me. Maybe it was how they didn’t hold the easy confidence they usually had. Or maybe it was what the frog note he handed me said: “Will you go out with me – to a movie/café/park/_____ on (insert date here),” that made me blurt out, “I’m free tonight.”
He smiled at me.
I smiled back at him, my palms suddenly sweaty and my mouth as dry as the Sahara.
Zane leaned in, his breath glancing off my cheekbones. “Tonight then,” he whispered.
2
Zane – Three Years Later
“Remember our first date?” Jess said, face pressed up close to the window.
“The best day of my life,” I said, smirking. “Eh, let me see…”
“Zane!” she cried, twisting around to poke me in the abdomen.
“Ow,” I protested. “Ok, ok, I remember. Why?”
“Just that you took me to this chocolate shop, Godiva,” Jess remembered.
“Is this your way of saying that, on top of the New Year’s gift I already bought you, you want some chocolate too?”
“No.” She giggled. “Just… who would’ve thought then that three years later…”
I swept her cheek to me, kissed it. “We’d be in love and living together.”
When my kiss moved on to her lips, she let herself sink into it for a minute before she pulled away, harrumphing. “At this rate we’ll never get to the party!”
“You were the one who stopped to reminisce,” I reminded her.
“Ok, so maybe you’re right,” she admitted. “But I am hungry.”
She caught my eye, and without a second’s pause, I swept in the store and bought her a box of dark chocolates. I carefully evaded her wad of offered cash as we exited the store.
