“I’m kissing you.” I move one hand from the collar of his shirt to the back of his neck and into his hair. I want to burn every texture into my fingertips. “Should I stop?”
He skates his thumb along my cheekbone. Despite how light his touch is, I feel like I might detonate. “No. Absolutely not,” he says. He traces my nose. My lips. “I just wanted to make sure—I don’t know. That you realized it’s me.”
The uncertainty in his voice unstitches me. All the books in the world couldn’t have prepared me for this moment. There aren’t enough words.
“That’s the best part,” I tell him.
No, this is the best part: when we lean in again and it turns wilder. With one hand in my hair and one on my hip, he spins us so I’m pressed against the railing. Our mouths clash together, teeth and tongues arguing with each other. Trying to win whatever new competition this is. I run my hands over his chest, up the arms I’ve been staring at all day, overwhelmed by how much of him I want to touch. I underline and then scribble over that dorky Latin phrase with my fingertips. He’s so solid beneath my palms, and I can’t help gripping the fabric of his T-shirt a little.
His hands find their way back to my hair. And his lips, beckoning, taunting, daring me. Because fuck, Neil is hot. It’s absurd, and it’s true.
“You like my hair,” I tease between kisses.
“God. So much. It’s fucking phenomenal hair.”
Now I’m even more certain why I couldn’t picture him kissing anyone else: because it was always supposed to be like this. With us.
He keeps me pinned to the railing, kissing my jaw, my neck, beneath my ear. I shiver when he lingers there.
“Is this okay?” he asks against my skin.
“Yes,” I say, and he stamps my collarbone with his mouth. I’m addicted to the way he asks me that. How he wants to be sure.
This has to be the earth-shattering feeling he was talking about. This: his hands sliding down the sides of my body. This: his teeth grazing my clavicle. And this: the way, when he moves back to my lips, he kisses like I’m alternately something he can’t get enough of and something he wants to savor. Fast, then slow. I love it all.
Since we’re the same height, our bodies line up perfectly, and—oh. The proof of how much he’s enjoying this makes me feverish. I rock my hips against his because the pressure feels amazing, and the way he groans when I do this sounds amazing too.
I drop my hands lower, to his belt. My fingertips graze the soft skin of his stomach, and he lets out a quiet, involuntary laugh. Ticklish. Distantly, I’m aware that we’re in public. That we have to stop before we go too far. But I’ve never felt this wanted, and it’s an intoxicating, powerful feeling. I’ve never lost myself in someone like this.
With every molecule in my body, I force myself to pull away.
“That was… wow,” I say, breathless.
He leans his forehead against mine, still holding me around my waist. “ ‘Wow’ is not an adjective.”
In four years, I have never heard his voice like this. This ragged, this spent.
I’m not sure how long we stand there, breathing each other in, breaking the relative silence every so often to laugh like the love-drunk loons we are. His cheeks are flushed. I’m sure mine are too.
“I was so sure I’d ruined everything,” he says after a while. He reaches for my hand, and it’s so easy to thread my fingers with his. “I wanted to kiss you on that bench so badly. But then we were interrupted, and I got… scared, I guess. Scared you didn’t feel the same way.”
It’s a relief to hear him say it. “So that’s why you said it would have been a mistake.” I trace his knuckles with my thumb.
He nods. “I thought, I don’t know, that you regretted it, and the best way for me to get over it was to pretend it was a mistake. I didn’t want it to make you uncomfortable.”
“A defense mechanism.”
“Yeah,” he says, bringing up his other hand to cup my face.
“I guess I have a few of those too.”
When we kiss again, it’s softer. Sweeter.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see D. B. Cooper watching us, reminding me why we came here in the first place.
“The game.” I use all my willpower to stop kissing him. We’re so close to that five grand, to Neil potentially being able to change his name. To some freedom from his old life—whether I’m part of that new life or not. “We should go.”
“I, um. Need a moment,” he says, glancing down sheepishly. Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I can’t help grinning again.
With some effort, we untangle ourselves and reach for our phones. No Howl updates, meaning no one’s won yet. Slowly, I feel myself slide back into competitive mode. Westview is less than fifteen minutes away. Howl is nearly ours.
We weave our way out of the museum, hiding our flushed faces from the woman at the front desk. When I glance back, I swear I see her smile.
* * *
I’m not sure if I reach for his hand first or if he reaches for mine, but it immediately feels natural. He brushes his thumb across my knuckles on the way to my car, and when we get there, he pushes me up against the driver’s side door like a bad boy in a teen movie.
“We have a whole summer to do this,” I say, even as I’m grabbing his T-shirt and tugging his mouth to mine. “I mean—if you want to.”
And although his yearbook confession is stamped behind my lids whenever I blink, his response sends sparks down to my toes.
“Do I want to kiss you all summer?” He raises his eyebrows, mouth quirking to one side. “Is Nora Roberts prolific?”
“More than two hundred books,” I say. Then, with some reluctance: “But we’re so close. We’ll come back to this.”
One long kiss, and then he groans. “Fine, fine. You win.”
“Can you say that again? I like the way it sounds.”
“Shameless,” he says, but there’s that lazy-sweet-sly smile again, the one I’d never seen before tonight. The one I know now is solely mine.
But something tightens in my throat. A whole summer. Suddenly, it doesn’t sound very long at all.
“Hey, lovebirds. You guys finally figured it out, huh?”
Across the street, Brady Becker is unlocking a little white Toyota, pausing to wave at us. The paper with his name on it burns hot in my pocket.
Stronger than the shock of star quarterback Brady Becker realizing we’re together is the sense of dread creeping up my spine.
Neil blinks a few times, as though trying to process what Brady’s doing here. “Hey,” he says quietly, voice laced with uncertainty. We haven’t talked about how to announce ourselves to the rest of our graduating class, if that’s something we even want to do. I twine my fingers through Neil’s, showing him exactly how I feel about that. His features relax, and he wraps his fingers around mine again. “Yeah, we, um… yeah. We did.”
His nerves are too adorable.
“Cool museum,” Brady says, and I force my oxytocin-addled brain to remember where Brady was in the most recent blast of Howl standings.
Fourteen.
He had fourteen, just like we did. And if he’s leaving the museum, that must mean—
“See you back at school,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the five-thousand-dollar check.”
DRAFT: (no subject)
Rowan Roth
to: [email protected],
[email protected]
Saved Saturday, June 13, at 12:32 a.m.
Dearest Mom and Dad,
This is scary, but here are the first few chapters. Be gentle with me.
Love,
Your favorite daughter, cream cheese enthusiast, and potential one-day romance author
Attachment: chapters 1–3 for mom and dad.docx
2:04 a.m.
I DIDN’T THINK Howl would end with a car chase, but I’ve been wrong about a lot of things today. To be fair, it’s a chase between two used ca
rs with decent fuel economies and five-star safety ratings. The Fast and the Furious: Sensible Sedans.
The streets are deserted, nighttime lights smudging the skyline with gold, and my heart bangs against the seat belt as we trail Brady to the freeway.
“I didn’t realize he was so close to us,” I say, changing lanes and hitting the gas. We remain parallel with the Toyota, even as I accelerate up to 70 mph.
Neil stares down at his phone. “D. B. Cooper must have been his last one too. I guess we were… distracted.”
“Right,” I say, my stomach dropping. If he regrets what happened at the museum…
“Even if he wins,” he says, as though he can detect the insecurity in my voice, “I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I want you to know that.” He sounds more solid than he has all night, and it fills me with a fierce determination.
“Don’t worry. We’re not going to let him.”
We’re neck and neck until we approach the exit, where I have to switch back into his lane. Behind him.
“A for effort!” Brady yells out his window as he sneaks through a yellow light the moment before it turns red.
I hit the brakes. “Shit. What now?”
“Turn right,” Neil says. “He’s probably taking Forty-Fifth all the way. If we take the backstreets, we won’t hit any more lights.”
“You sure?”
“No,” he admits. “But it’s our only chance.”
I flip on my blinker and swerve right, taking us into a residential neighborhood. I circle a few roundabouts, white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole time.
The school parking lot is just up ahead, and Brady’s white Toyota is approaching it from the other side of the street. There’s Logan Perez, standing at the entrance to the gym with Nisha and Olivia, holding two black-and-white checkered flags. There’s a grassy field between the parking lot and the gym. We can get close, but we’ll still have to make a run for it.
This is it.
“There’s two of us, and only one of him. You have to go for Logan,” I say. “I’ll park as close as I can and try to stop Brady. All I have to do is grab his bandanna.” A laugh tumbles out. “It sounds easy when I say it like that.”
He reaches over to brush my wrist with a few fingertips. Even his lightest touches feel impossibly intense. “Okay. We’ve got this. Then—then we’ll figure everything out later?”
Our bet. Splitting the prize.
I’ve already conquered more tonight than I ever thought I would. Second place has never sounded so great.
“Yes,” I say, following Brady to a parking spot at the edge of the lot and throwing the car into park. “Go!”
Summoning any latent athletic ability I left on that soccer field in middle school and any strength gained from carrying a massive backpack for the past four years, I throw open the door, launching myself at Brady. On the other side of the car, Neil leaps onto the grassy field and heads for Logan.
“Rowan—what the—” Brady asks, but I’m clawing my way toward his bandanna, capturing it in my fist, ripping it off. “Oh, shit.”
We tumble to the pavement, legs tangling. Brady cushions me to some degree, no doubt experienced when it comes to tackles, but I still manage to smack my knee on the way down. I’m too amped on adrenaline to care, especially not when I hear the whoops and cheers from a few yards away. The blow of a whistle. Neil’s stunned laughter.
Breathing hard, I thrust Brady’s bandanna into the air like a victory flag.
We did it.
“Fuuuuck,” Brady groans from beneath me, and I’m not sure if it’s pain or the agony of losing.
I scramble to a sitting position, then try to stand—ow. Not bleeding, but that’s definitely going to bruise.
“I’m so sorry,” I say to Brady. “Are you okay?”
“Gonna have a bruise on my ass the size of Jupiter, but yeah. You?”
“Yes,” I say with a wince, hobbling toward the gym.
When he spots me, Neil rushes forward, and I practically topple into his arms.
“Your knee,” he says, but I wave it off. He clutches me tighter, his lips brushing my ear when he speaks. “You are amazing. I can’t believe we did it. We won.”
“You did.” I slide one hand around to the back of his neck and into his hair, not caring what Logan or Nisha or Olivia thinks about us embracing like this.
He pulls back and lifts an eyebrow. “Seriously? There’s no way I could have done any of this alone. Guess we make a pretty good team after all.”
And I honestly can’t not kiss him after that.
I believe it now, that this is how we were always meant to be, and yet I can’t quite wrap my mind around everything that’s happened. We won, and I don’t think it would feel nearly as good if I’d done this by myself.
The trio of juniors descends on us.
“Congratulations again,” Logan says, eyes darting back and forth between us as though she knows exactly what was going on with us back at that safe zone. It’s scary how good a politician she might make someday. She turns and opens the door to the gym. “Your party awaits. Well—as soon as we tell everyone it’s happening.” She motions to Nisha and Olivia, who pull out their phones, presumably to send another text blast.
“Our what?” Neil says.
The gym is bright and festive, decked out in Westview blue and white—streamers, banners, lights. There are rows of carnival games and food vendors, a small stage at one end. A few juniors are still finishing the setup.
“We had some money left over, and we wanted to give all the seniors one more thing to celebrate,” Logan says. “We were going to launch it when the game ended, so we’ve just been waiting—”
“—and hoping we can get sleep at some point,” Olivia puts in.
“But it was worth it!” Nisha says.
I can’t stop gaping at the scene in front of us. Maybe I’m delirious, but I’ve never seen the gym look this beautiful. “Thank you. All of you.”
Neil appears mesmerized by the band unpacking a drum kit and loading their amps onto the stage.
“Oh my God,” he says. “Free Puppies!”
* * *
It’s the best party I’ve ever been to. Nearly all the seniors are here, plus Neil’s favorite band, and he’s just won five thousand dollars, half of which I’ll refuse to accept if he offers it to me. A few teachers show up to chaperone, but we’re not rowdy. Maybe we’re all too tired to cause much trouble.
When they see us together, Mara gasps, and Kirby immediately races over to crush us into a bear hug. “I knew it, I knew it, I knew it,” she yelps. Most reactions fall solidly within that range. Neil and I can’t stop grinning, can’t stop touching: hands linked, his palm on my back, a stealthy kiss when we think no one’s looking. Turns out, someone always is.
The walls are covered with posters for events that have already happened, and there’s a sense of nostalgia in the air, but for the first time tonight, it doesn’t feel sad. Howl has always been a farewell to Westview and to Seattle. A last-day tradition that’s about so much more than winners and losers.
Savannah approaches us while we’re waiting for Free Puppies! to start playing. The sight of her makes me tense up.
“Congratulations, I guess,” she says flatly.
“Thank you,” Neil says, ever polite. Always earnest, beneath all that smirking.
But I’m all out of politeness when it comes to Savannah Bell.
“Hey, you know what I’m craving?” I say to Neil. “Bowling-alley pizza. Like at Hilltop. Do you think they have any pizza here?”
“You… had the pizza at Hilltop Bowl?” Savannah asks, brows drawing together in an expression of concern.
“No. But I know you did.” With that, I meet her gaze, unblinking, and I bring up my right index finger to tap my nose once, twice. Her face flushes, and it immediately becomes clear she knows what I’m talking about.
Neil catches on. “I’m Jewish too.” His hand drifts to my
back. “And this might sound odd to you, but that money’s actually going to make a big difference for me.”
I really, really like him.
“That’s—great,” Savannah manages, and she steps backward until she disappears into the crowd.
Kirby and Mara wind up on one side of us, sharing a gigantic sugary pretzel, and Neil’s friends on the other. They seem about as surprised by our romantic development as Kirby as Mara—which is to say, not at all.
“What are you gonna do with the money?” Adrian asks. “And don’t tell me something responsible like putting it in savings. You have to have a little fun.”
Neil glances at me, and I become putty. “Oh, we will. And I already have some ideas.”
McNasty, Kirby mouths to me.
“What was that?” Neil asks.
“Kirby’s being inappropriate.”
“Did you think that would make me less curious?”
“Oh, we’re going to have fun this summer,” Kirby says.
Mara, though, is a bit of a sore loser. “I only had two more clues left,” she laments, half joking.
Still, the three of us and sometimes the seven of us take selfies and make plans to go to the Capitol Hill Block Party in a couple weeks. I don’t know if we’re going to be okay in college. But we have the summer, and after that, we’ll try our best. I can be content with that for now.
A squawk of feedback drags our attention to the stage.
“Good morning, Westview!” shouts the neon-haired lead singer, earning a whoop from the audience. “We’re so glad you stayed up all night for us. This first song is called ‘Stray,’ and if we don’t see you dancing, we’re packing up and leaving.”
They’re pretty fantastic live, like Neil said. He brushes back my hair to plant a kiss below my ear, and as I’m wondering whether he knows exactly how sensitive I am there, he gives me this wicked grin that proves he does.
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 25
