Hints of cinnamon in the oak brown.
Those eyes meet mine, stare into mine. Then, glance down—I’m still holding his hand.
I drop it abruptly, shake my hand out as if burned.
He reaches out with both hands and takes both of mine. “Take a deep breath, okay? It’s fine. You’re fine. Everything is fine.” He holds my gaze. “Deep breathe with me for a second, okay?” He inhales, and I mirror him.
His eyes flick down, back up.
Did he just…
Did Westley Britton just…check out my chest? No one’s ever done that before. Weird.
Is it supposed to make me tingly in my stomach?
I mean, sure, my headlights are probably pretty prominent. This is a thin shirt, and my breasts are almost more nipple and areolae than actual breast. Meaning, calling them small would be generous.
Why am I thinking about this?
Deep breath.
He wasn’t checking me out—just noticing something he can’t help but notice. It was a nice little fantasy while I allowed it, though. There’s just no sense working myself into a hyper-romantic tizzy over nothing.
Mom reappears on the stairs, now more appropriately clad in khaki capris and a T-shirt with a cardigan. “Hi.” She breezes in beside me—this foyer hallway isn’t big enough for two people abreast, but here we are. “Jo, why don’t you go get dressed and I’ll make our guest some coffee.” She smiles at him, now competently in charge. “Would you like some coffee, Mr. Britton?”
“I would love some, Mrs. Park. Thank you. I know I’m probably intruding, I just…I wanted to meet Jolene in person.” His expression suggests that this statement covers a lot more territory than merely meeting me in person.
Mom turns to face me. “Go put on some clothes, Jolene.” Her eyes flit meaningfully to my chest.
What’s so embarrassing about free-boobing it in front of one of the most famous humans on the planet, and a man I recently proposed to on a global social media platform?
What’s that you say? Everything?
Oh, right.
I sneak a glance at him, and then turn and head back up to my room. Change into jeans and a T-shirt, with a bra, this time. I don’t really wear makeup, and it would be weird if I went to that extent when I don’t normally, so I compromise with myself and put on some lip gloss. My hair is still short enough that all I have to do is mess it up a little more, and I’m good to go. Some deodorant. Mouthwash. I draw the line at perfume.
I pause, in my bathroom. Westley Britton is here. In my house.
He didn’t respond on social media—he came to my house.
I let myself feel giddy, for a moment. Squeal—albeit silently. Jump and flap my hands and do the whole girly freak-out thing.
Just…get it out of my system.
Thusly expressed, my need to freak out and embarrass myself subsides. Hopefully I can interact with him like a normal person, now.
Mom is on the other side of my bedroom door when I open it, about to knock. “Jo. Why is Westley Britton at our house? Why does he need to meet you in person?”
“Um.” I wince. “I may have done something. On, um…TikTok.”
“That’s the one with all the short videos? Where people do the weird dances?”
I roll my eyes. “Yeah.”
“Explain for me how that leads to him showing up at our house at eight thirty in the morning.”
I didn’t think my parents would ever see it.
My dad still carries the same Nokia he’s had for twenty-some years—carried, as aforementioned, in a clip on his belt. He uses T9 for texting. Enough said.
Mom has a smartphone and Facebook and IG, but the former is mainly for keeping track of old high school friends and exchanging, like, casserole recipes, and the latter one is primarily the digital equivalent of motivational cat posters, except instead of cute little kittens in, like, flowerpots, it’s flexible girls a quarter of her age doing impossible yoga poses with pithy captions about seizing the day and living your best life and no filter and I just woke up like this.
I follow her, and I like her posts, because I’m a good daughter.
But the point here is that I assumed they would never catch wind of what I’d posted. Obviously, I had no way of knowing it would go viral the way it has, much less that Westley himself would show up at my freaking house because of it.
“Just a…um. Just a TikTok thing, Mom. I didn’t know he’d show up.”
She doesn’t buy it. “Show me.”
“No! He’s out there in the kitchen waiting.” I shake her by the arms. “Mom—Westley Britton is in our kitchen. Alone. Waiting for our four-thousand-year-old coffee maker to slowly percolate freaking Maxwell House coffee. It sounds like a steam engine having a seizure.”
“Jolene Park. What did you do?” She’s wise to my topic-changing ways, blast her.
I huff. Whisper to her. “I may or may not have sung a song to him…and…um…askedhimtomarrymeokaybye.”
I push past her and trot down the stairs before she can call me back.
He’s at our kitchen table.
The same table we’ve eaten every meal at my whole life. There are scratches from when I would bang my fork on the table as a baby. Crayon and permanent marker from preschool and elementary art projects. Places where some kind of paper stuck to the table and never got cleaned off properly. It’s a round table, a few shades lighter than his eyes. It has a gap down the middle where a leaf would go, but we’ve never put the leaf in, and I don’t even know if we even have the leaf anymore.
The coffee maker is slowly and noisily chugging away—half pot done. I pour two mugs and sit down with them, hand him one. He wraps both hands around the small white diner-style mug.
I take a sip. Gag. Spit it back. “I hate coffee.”
He snorts a laugh. “Then why are you drinking it?”
I shake my head, shrug. “I don’t know. I still haven’t quite normalized from the fact that you’re here in my house.”
He rolls his eyes. “Well, don’t drink coffee if you don’t like it.”
I gesture at the mug in his hands. “I’m sorry for that. I don’t drink coffee, but everyone I know who does says that stuff is…not the best.”
He laughs. “Hey, coffee is coffee, you know? Maybe you don’t. But…I’ve been driving for like…” He checks the clock on our stove. “God, I don’t even know. Thirty hours? Is it eastern time here?” He puts down the coffee and rubs his eyes. “I slept a few hours in Lincoln, Nebraska, and had some coffee at a roadside diner, and let me tell you…this?” He lifts the mug. “It’s way better.”
“You…drove all the way here? From LA? By yourself?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” I suddenly remember putting my tea down on the side table near the door where Dad and Mom keep their keys. Wait—Dad and Mom is the wrong order. It just sounds weird in my own head. Mom and Dad. There, that’s better. I bolt up to my feet. “Hold on, I have to get my tea.”
His mouth was open to answer but closes it as I go retrieve my tea from the foyer. It’s still warm, so I’m fine.
I sit back down. He’s looking at me. Studying me. Examining my hair—ginger, short and spiky, messy. My freckles—plentiful, and everywhere. My eyes—green, somewhere between jade and grass, depending on my mood and what I’m wearing.
He’s not just looking—he’s…memorizing, almost. Studying.
Is he looking for signs of illness?
“You can’t see it,” I say, abruptly.
His brow wrinkles. “See what?”
I snort. “Leukemia.”
He shakes his head. “Not…no. I wasn’t looking at you for…” His eyes close, his head drops, and then lifts again. A sigh. “You’re beautiful, Jolene.”
My heart flips, and I look away. “You don’t have to say that.”
He shrugs. “Why not? It’s true.”
“So that’s why you were looking at me like that?”
He nods.
“Yeah.”
No one’s ever accused me of being a knockout. But the compliment, as unlikely as it is, still feels genuine. He is an actor, but I want to believe him. It feels nice.
Weird, and alien, but nice.
“Why are you here, Wes?” I whisper it. “My TikTok?”
He nods. Glances over my shoulder—we have eavesdroppers on the stairs.
He shifts uncomfortably.
“Do you…you want to go for a walk?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I, um. I’m worried I’d attract attention. Having your hood up over a hat isn’t exactly the most inconspicuous thing you can do, especially in the middle of June.”
“Oh, right.” Because, if he walked openly down the street, we’d have a mob of suburban moms and hormonal teenage girls trailing us.
And that’s not a joke. This is a neighborhood where people are always looking out their front windows for something interesting.
“Um.” I gesture at the door to our backyard. “We have a privacy fence.”
“That works.”
I pause as we stand up. “More coffee?”
He nods. “I could almost drink it out of the pot.”
I smirk. “In that case…” I reach up into the cabinet over the coffee maker and pull down Dad’s joke mug. It’s big enough to hold a whole pot, and it says now THIS is a real coffee mug on the side. “Will this work?”
He takes it from me and pours the rest of the carafe into the giant mug. “That should do it.” He immediately frowns. “I should have left some for your parents, though. Shoot, I’m sorry. I can pour some back.”
“IT’S FINE!” Mom calls from upstairs. “I CAN MAKE MORE!”
“And this is why we’re going outside,” I murmur.
He just laughs. I lead him to my favorite spot—the bench swing hanging from the thick lower limb of our two-hundred-year-old spreading oak tree. It’s shady, cool, quiet, and the world feels a million miles away, here under the tree.
I only freak out a little when we’re both sitting on the wobbly bench swing. It’s not very big, so we’re close. Hips touching, shoulders brushing.
He smells good. Coffee, deodorant, something else indefinable but essentially and primally male. I want to bury my nose in his chest and inhale. That’d be super weird, though, so I don’t.
He sips. “You okay?”
I nod. “Mmhmm.”
He’s quiet a moment. “Jolene—”
“Call me Jo. Only my grandma calls me Jolene.”
He nods. “Okay.” Another quiet moment. “There are some things I want to say, but…I’m not sure where to start.”
“Should I get some of the obvious stuff out of the way? The awkward questions people always want to know but don’t know how to ask?” I sip lukewarm Irish Breakfast. “I have leukemia. It’s terminal. Which means there’s no cure. I’ve had it since I was eight. I went into remission when I was nine and a half, and it came back when I was eleven. I went into remission again at fourteen. It came back when I was fifteen. The next time it came back, two years ago, it came back…worse. More aggressive. It spread until there was nothing they could do. About two months ago, my oncologist told me there was no point in any further treatment, because it wouldn’t help. I’ll live for another…month, maybe more. There’s no way to know, exactly. When they say time is short like that, they’re just guessing. Stage four is…tricky. I could live another six months, another year, or I could die next week. Or tonight, in my sleep.”
I sigh, and keep going.
“No, it’s not contagious. Some people still think that. I don’t know how I got it, and neither does anyone else.” I play with the string and tab of the teabag, dunk the teabag a few times. “Yes, it hurts. Some days, I can’t get out of bed. Other days, like today, I’m mostly okay.”
He’s quiet a long time. “Are you scared?”
I look up at the canopy of leaves. “Um…sometimes. If I really think about…actually dying? Yeah. Of course. But I’ve had this basically my whole life. I’ve always had to face the reality that I may not—that I likely wouldn’t survive it. Especially because it kept coming back, you know? But day to day? Not really. It’s all I’ve ever known. I don’t really remember not having cancer.”
“I don’t know what to say. Like, I’m sorry? I’m sorry you’ve had to go through that.”
I smile. “What is there to say? But you know, I really appreciate you saying you don’t know what to say. A lot of people just sort of…say something dumb and pitying. I hate pity.”
“What about compassion?”
“That’s different.” I eye him. “Are you here because of pity?” I twist on the bench to face him, to see his reaction. “I’m sorry about the video, Wes.”
He shakes his head. “No, I’m not. It’s definitely not pity.” He holds my eyes. “And Jo? Don’t apologize. It was…beautiful.”
I swallow hard. “It’s embarrassing.” I cover my face with my hands, turn away. “I can’t believe you saw it. I can’t believe you’re here because of it.”
“Jo.”
I shake my head. I’m trying to not cry from sheer mortification.
“Jolene.” He leans over and sets his coffee on the ground, then takes my hands and pulls them away from my face. Holds both of my hands in both of his. “Look at me.” His voice is so gentle.
It’s utterly surreal, this moment. This is him. I’ve watched every YouTube video, every movie, every interview. I doodled his name on my notebooks while watching boring school videos. It’s Westley Britton. Here with me, at my house, in my backyard, sitting in my favorite place with me. Hip to hip, shoulder to shoulder, so close I can smell him, feel his body heat. He’s real.
He has my hands, and he’s demanding I look at him.
“Tell me why you posted it. No bullshit. The honest, real truth.”
I shake my head. “It’s embarrassing.”
“More embarrassing than apologizing for having nipples?” he says, with a teasing smirk.
I frown at him. “Are you making fun of me?”
He laughs. “A little. But it’s called teasing. It was cute.”
“I was flustered. I’m still flustered. You’re famous and important, and I’m no one—just some dumb girl who posted a ridiculous, desperate TikTok video. Why it’s viral, I don’t even know.”
“I’m not important, just famous. And you’re not no one, nor are you dumb. You’re important.”
“Why? Because I’m dying?”
“Because you’re brave. And talented.”
I wrinkle my nose at him, and I hate the way my eyes sting. “Talented?”
“Yeah. Your cover of that song was beautiful, Jo. I mean that. Objectively, as a musician, you’re talented.”
“Oh.” I can’t help a little smile. “Really?”
“Yeah, really.” He squeezes my hands. “Now…please, Jo. I drove thirty-something hours for this. Why did you make that video? And no trite, self-deprecating answers. The truth, please.”
“I guess I owe you that, huh?” I smile wryly.
“No, you don’t owe me anything. But it would mean a whole lot if you told me.”
I sigh. Swallow hard. “I…I don’t know. It’s a lot of things.” I close my eyes, because it’s too hard to look at him and speak my truth. “You want the truth, Wes? It’s not pretty.”
“The truth rarely is.”
“It really was an act of desperation. I told you, I’ve had this my whole life. Since I was a little girl. I’m nineteen, now, and probably won’t see twenty.” I swallow hard. “I’ve never been on a date. Never held a boy’s hand. Never been kissed. I never will—none of it. I know that. So, making that video, I guess it was…I dunno. A morbid joke, maybe? Like, I have nothing to lose, so why not propose on TikTok to the most famous and most beautiful and most talented guy in the whole world? And, by the way, I’ve had a monster crush on you since I saw that video of you with Swan Song. You’re my celebrity crush. And I was like, what do I have
to lose? Even if you were to see it, I figured you’d, like, share it. Send me a signed hat or something. So what? I have, like, a hundred followers on TikTok and they’re all friends from various oncology units and infusion centers. I honestly have no clue how it blew up, and I’m freaking mortified that it did. So why did I post it?”
I huff and shake my head, shrug. “I guess to…to express out into the world that I’m sad and angry that I’ll die a virgin. That I’ll die never having been a bride. I’ve always tried to be positive and upbeat, to not let this whole thing get me down, you know? But it’s not freaking fair, and that video was…kind of a tongue-in-cheek way of being like, now what, universe? Your move.”
There’s a silence. Thick and fragile and fraught.
He still has my hands—he twists his palm, fits it to mine. His fingers delve between mine. I force my eyes to his, and his gaze is…deep, chaotic, confused, emotional. Open to me.
“Jo, I…” he trails off. Lets out a breath. “This is crazy, but screw it. I drove all the way here on an impulse, so I’m just gonna keep going with the impulse.”
“What’s crazy?” I ask in a whisper.
He twists toward me, still holding my hand, fingers twined. His other hand reaches up, and his palm is large and rough on my cheek. His thumb brushes over my lips.
“This.”
And
He
Kisses
Me.
I have no breath—his kiss steals it. This isn’t a quick, dry peck, like a grandma kiss except on my lips.
It’s a kiss.
He means it.
His lips soar against mine, and he holds my face in his hands as if to prevent me from pulling away—as if I would.
And he doesn’t stop after a beat.
Oh, no.
He keeps kissing me.
My eyes are closed and my free hand lifts on its own, touches his jaw—it’s hard, angular, stubbled. I whimper in the kiss, a sound of ecstatic disbelief, and the whimper becomes a sigh as his tongue slithers over my lips, asking them to open, and they do. His head tilts the other way, the kiss breaking for an instant as our noses trade places, and then I’m leaning into him and my hand wraps around the back of his neck and I kiss him.
I’ve never done this before, but somehow I just know what to do. Something inside me just takes over. Kissing Westley Britton is the most natural thing in the world. My heart thunders in my chest, my pulse hammers in my throat. He tastes like coffee. His tongue moves against mine, delicious and strong and insistent.
Wish Upon A Star Page 5
