The Summer of Me & You

by Rae Hachton

  I hadn't meant it. What I said to Kaleb. I hadn't meant.

  I was terrified of being that close to someone. I knew from our kiss, and because of the way he made me feel, if I allowed myself to fall for him, I would be giving him the power to rip me open and tear out my heart.

  When he was kissing me, I didn't want him to stop.

  When he was inside of me, I didn't want him to stop, or pull away from me either.

  I was afraid of feeling like this, or letting him this close to me. But at the same time, I wanted to. I pulled the cover off my bed, wrapping it around me. I grabbed a pillow, buried my head in it, and screamed as loudly as I could. This was the only way I could let out what I felt. And letting it out was liberating. I screamed again.

  A minute later, someone snatched the pillow from me.

  I jumped, turning around. When I looked up, my mother was standing there.

  “What in the world are you doing, Kayleigh Jamison? And why are you soaking wet?” She crossed her arms over her chest, demanding answers.

  “You're home early,” I said.

  “I want to know what's wrong with you, and where you were. You're acting like a child.”

  “I got caught in the rain, mom. That's all.”

  She gave me an evil eye. “You were with Kaleb, weren't you?”

  “No.”

  “Don't lie to me. Up on your feet, now!”

  I leapt up, tossing my cover back on the bed.

  “You're in your room screaming like some crazy person and I want to know why. Did that boy hurt you?”

  “No, mother. And if he did, I wouldn't tell you because you're counting on it.”

  She looked like she wanted to hit me again. But she didn't.

  “Pull yourself together and change your clothes. You're a mess.” She stormed out of my room and headed back downstairs.

  I peeled myself out of my rain soaked clothing and redressed. I spritzed my hair with styling gel that smelled of bamboo. I dried it with a towel, turning my straight hair wavy.

  I checked my phone, thinking that he'd call me. I wanted things to be okay between us. Actually, I wanted everything to be more than okay.

  No call. No message.

  I still couldn't believe that'd happened, or that I'd passively let it go that far. Maybe I wanted it to? Maybe I wanted to do more with Kaleb than just kiss him. Maybe I'd been wanting more with him for a long time. And it scared me. Because what now? We'd only begun to kiss. But after what happened in the junkyard? There was no going back. We couldn't just go back to just kissing. He completely slid past doing only that, literally. After this, every time I'd kissed him, I'd think about how he'd breathed hard, the way he felt, the heat, how he said please, begging for more and the distinct memory of how I wanted to give him more, too.

  God, and I'd said all those mean things to him. Things I hadn't meant. If I hadn't said any of those things, or pushed him away, we would've definitely gone all the way. It was my only way of escaping. I couldn't say no to him. I just couldn't. All of this time I'd been waiting for a simple kiss, and I'd gotten so much more than that. The sparks between us just zinged. If I wasn't careful, I'd end up losing control.

  My mind swirled with so many thoughts. It hadn't hurt like I thought it would. And oh my God, was I still a virgin, or no? Because we hadn't really done it, we almost did. Right? And how could I be near him again without either of our minds going there. It wasn't like we'd planned it. It just sorta happened. Totally unexpectedly.

  I replayed everything in my head. Why had he waited so damn long to kiss me? Each time he'd waited, it'd added emphasis, making the kiss more important. Had he wanted more than a kiss? Was that the reason? He didn't trust himself with me? Maybe he'd wanted to avoid doing this. What if he'd imagined something like this happening? I didn't know, but even when I thought back to our first date, and how he'd made me feel during that dance, without having to really do anything at all but just gaze at me, run his hands along my body, I shivered. Kaleb had become aroused then, too. So this incident, if I should even call it that, really shouldn't be so shocking.

  Another thought zapped me. What would it have been like if he and I would've kept going? What will it be like when we do?

  I perked up when I heard my mom's keys jingle. “Kayleigh, I'm leaving,” she called up the stairs. “Lock up.”

  I jumped up, and stood by my bedroom window. I pulled back the curtain and peeked out the blind. I waited until she backed out of the driveway, and was down the road a good ways, before I darted downstairs and headed to the garage to get my bicycle.

  I couldn't get him off my mind. Not after what had happened, especially not after what I'd said. There was a great possibility that he didn't want to ever speak to me again. I was the same girl as the one who'd ran away from his kiss a year and a half ago. I was still afraid. But I'd ran away from more than a kiss this time.

  Because wasn't sex a serious thing that two people engaged in when they were serious about each other? Or was I wrong?

  To me, that's how it was supposed to be, even though it'd been portrayed differently in movies a thousand times. Pretty boys like Kaleb Scheffler? Sex was no big deal to them.

  But it was to me, especially sex with him. And I didn't want it to mean one thing to me, and entirely something else to him.

  I wasn't exactly sure how to bring the topic up, but I knew we needed to discuss it. I needed to see him.

  Tonight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  More than

  *

  Right after the rain, a blanket of purple-black clouds covered the sky. I hadn't gone inside. I sat atop the hood of my car, leaned back against the windshield, peering up into the chaos of the storm. Even though it'd rained, the heat was still stifling, the air heavy. The world was still spinning, I was certain of it, but it didn't feel that way. Not to me. It was as if someone had hit pause-play. If Kayleigh really felt that way about me, there'd be nothing I could do to change her mind. My body felt sore, like I'd been in a marathon run that'd gone into overtime.

  I didn't want to admit it, but what she'd said stung. I didn't want to call her if she thought that. I didn't want to see her. I just wanted to forget.

  The sound of water swirling around tires caught my attention and I jerked my head to the side. Kayleigh was biking up the road.

  Shit.

  This was too soon. Too much to deal with. I wanted to vanish. I wasn't going to look at her. I kept my eyes focused in the sky, keeping my emotions as steady as I could as she swung off and crashed her bike onto the lawn.

  “What'n the fuck d'you want, Kayleigh? Here to say more?”

  “I don't wanna be just another girl you've kissed, Kaleb.”

  You more than just kiss me, Kayleigh. I wanted to say. It's more than that. But how was she to ever understand when she'd so clearly made bold assumptions about me and my intentions from the get go? There was no point in trying to explain all of what I felt to her, and plead my case. It felt too much like begging.

  “Kayleigh, maybe I was wrong. Perhaps you're right. We shouldn't do this. It was a bad idea, and...I'm sorry.” I hopped off the hood of the car. “Go home, Kayleigh.” I walked toward my house. I wanted to dart up the steps and close the door in her face.

  “No, I don't want to go home.” She chased after me.

  “You're gonna have to.”

  She reached out and grabbed my arm, nearly yanking me to her, tears forming in her eyes. For a girl her size she was pretty strong. I jerked away.

  “Kaleb,” she said. “Are we breaking up?”

  “We're not together. Summer will be over soon and this'll all be forgotten about.” I kept my gaze focused in the tree top.

  She panicked. “No it won't! You were the first guy, Kaleb.”

  I kicked at the wet dirt, making my toes muddy, avoiding eye contact with her. It was too hard. Much too hard. “We didn't have sex, Kayleigh. Get over it. Whatever that was, wasn't it. I can assure you.”
/>
  “Oh,” she flared. “I bet you could.”

  “It didn't mean the same for me, as it meant for you.” I knew exactly how to choose my words. I knew from the moment I said that how Kayleigh would interpret it. For her, it'd mean that she was just another girl, just another conquest. That all I wanted was sex, but in my world, in my mind, it meant the exact opposite. It'd meant more to me than that, it was Kayleigh who thought I was just trying to screw her over the summer. In her eyes, I was a pig. A guy who wanted to bang as many girls as possible. Didn't matter where. Okay, so it'd almost happened in a junkyard, but that was my place. It was a special place to me where I thought about her a lot. But of course she'd never know that because she didn't take the time to realize.

  “I figured that,” she said, almost inaudibly.

  “Yeah, I knew you would.”

  “So it's true?”

  “You decide. You've already decided so many things.”

  She sighed. “I don't understand. I want to be with you, Kaleb?”

  “Do you? Didn't seem like it to me.”

  “And why not? Because I didn't have sex with you tonight? Is that it?”

  “Oh yeah, Kayleigh. That's totally it.” Now I was extra mad and even more hurt. My eyes shot away from the world around me and back to her. I blazed. “You've got it all figured out the way you always do.” Trying to hold my composure was proving difficult.

  “Then tell me what it was that made you think I didn't want you.”

  “Gee, I dunno. Probably something along the lines of how I made you feel like junkyard trash? Does that ring a bell? Ding, ding ding.”

  She was crying now. Not just crying, she was bawling. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean any of that.”

  “The damage is already done. I don't know how you really feel now.”

  “Confused,” she wiped her eyes.

  “Yeah, join the club.”

  She sniffed.

  I couldn't hold it in. I wanted her to know exactly why I was mad, angry, hurt.

  “You insinuated that I told every girl I've ever been with the same things I told you. That I brought all of them to the junkyard where I brought you. You made me feel like complete shit during one of the most important and most wished for moments of my existence, so thanks a fucking lot. Oh, and on top of that, I even asked you if what you were saying was true, if that's how I really made you feel, and you said yes. I wasn't with you for the sex. I tried to prove that to you a thousand times over by taking my time and not rushing things. Showing you that I could be with you without anything having to happen. You knew it was a no pressure zone with me. Yeah, I know I fucked up back there, but all you had to say was Kaleb, I think we should wait, or Kaleb, I'm not ready, please slow down or Kaleb, we should talk about this, I've never done this before. Any combination of those things would've worked. But no, you said some hurtful shit instead. Things that you can't take back now.”

  “You know I didn't mean it,” she sobbed. “Please don't do this. I don't understand. I don't know what happened. I was only expecting a kiss. It was the first time you'd ever kissed me, I didn't know what to think.”

  “Yeah, well it could've been our thousandth kiss, but you ran away from me the first time, too.”

  “So what happens now?” She slowed the crying down to a minimum.

  I shrugged. “Nothing happens now.”

  “Can we at least be friends?” Oh my fucking lightning bugs, there went that dreaded fucking stupid ass question all girls couldn't wait to ask after you clearly made it obvious to them that it was over. All of it was over. Not part of it. All of it. You couldn't be friends with the girl you wanted to fuck. If you were me, you wouldn't even be able to sit in the same damn room with her for thirty seconds. They only wanted to ask that so they could see how far they could push you before you couldn't take it anymore. It's like they wanted to tuck you into a nice corner like a stuffed toy and play with your emotions until they made a decision to turn the action on full blast or not.

  Did she really think I'd go for that? Hang out with her and pretend I had no desire boiling rapidly in my blood? How could she even ask me that after what had happened between us this afternoon? How could she want to be only friends with me? It couldn't possibly be that easy for her, and if it was then that added to the theory—she didn't know what the hell she wanted.

  She either had to be mine, all mine in all aspects of the word, or nothing at all. Yes, I wanted it all or nothing at all.

  “No,” I said. “Absolutely not. There's no need for you to hold onto me. And I've already told you that I don't want to be your friend.”

  “Then what is it that you want! God!” She was mad. Hurt. Confused. But so was I. Everything was going so great with us. I'd waited for that kiss and it felt like it'd taken forever to happen. And when it finally did? I screwed it all up, I'd lost control because I'd spent so damn long wanting her, I couldn't hold it in anymore. I know that I screwed up, but it didn't call for what she'd said to me, not when everything about her— especially her body, had said that she wanted me, too. She practically enticed it. She couldn't fuck with my head like that and get away with it. She couldn't want me one minute, knowing that I wanted her, too and then make me feel like complete shit the next by freaking out and running away.

  “I want you to leave. Now.”

  “Fine!” In a mad fit, she stormed across the lawn and jerked up her bike.

  But before she biked away into the distance, she said, “You were also my first kiss. I probably rehearsed it a thousand times in my mind. I always imagined it having a better ending.”

  The kiss had been amazing. Best kiss of my life. It was everything else that happened after that sucked. I watched her disappear before pulling open the door and stepping inside my house.

  She didn't know that I'd seen her. Mom reached quickly for a magazine, arbitrarily ruffling its pages back, feigning that she'd been reading it the entire time instead of eavesdropping. When I stepped into the room, she made a show of being suddenly interrupted by my presence, and “courteously” closed the magazine.

  “Is everything okay?”

  “It amazes me how you ask that as though you weren't listening in through the window the entire time. I know you way better than that, so stop with the games already, mom.”

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” I plopped down on the couch, exhausted.

  “Is it really over for you and Kayleigh.”

  I bit down on my thumb nail. “Yeah, it is.”

  “Well, Kaleb, it's your own damn fault. You knew better than to pull what you pulled with that girl. You've confused her! She doesn't know what to think!”

  “She's always assuming things.”

  “Because you're always leaving her with blanks!”

  “Oh my God, I don't understand women. I thought you fuckers loved madlibs and puzzles. You're supposed to come fully equipped with the mental capacity to fill in a damn blank properly.”

  “Kaleb, let me express this to you in the most firm, yet gentle way possible. If you ever, ever, EVER refer to us women as fuckers one more time, I will beat you with an ugly stick and you'll never catch a girl again. You got it? Good. Now tell me how you're going to get Kayleigh back.”

  “What?!” I flew up off the couch. I already had a headache. “I'm going to my room. If you need me for anything I won't respond.”

  “Okay, but you can't avoid me forever. We're going to talk about this eventually.”

  “Why are you so concerned with my life, anyway?”

  “Because. I live vicariously through you my darling.” She flashed me a smile.

  “Well, if that's true, you have no life, in both senses of the meaning.”

  “I'm about to.”

  “How's that?”

  “I have a mission—a purpose. I'm going to help my idiotic son win back the love of his teenage life.”

  “You pester me too much. Go crochet something or join a damn book club.”r />
  “You shouldn't tempt me, Kaleb. I really do have an ugly stick and it has your name written all over it.”

  “I'll take my chances.”

  “You seem to be doing a lot of that lately. Look where it's gotten you so far.”

  I reached down to the coffee table and scooped up all the magazines.

  “What are you doing!” she cried.

  “Throwing these in the trash. You never read them anyway.”

  “Yes I do!”

  “Oh really? Then tell me, what lovely article were you reading when you eavesdropped on me and Kayleigh?”

  “That's easy. From Parenting magazine: Thirteen signs that there's a good chance your son was dropped on his head as an infant.”

  I sniggered. “You do realize that would involve the high probability that you were a terrible and neglectful mother though, right? I mean, if that did happen, it wasn't my fault. It was yours. So, no offense taken.”

  “Shit,” she said. “Okay, fine. You win this round. But the game is on.”

  “I have the weirdest mother on the planet.”

  “I know. Aren't you just blessed?”

  “Speaking of Parenting magazine, you need to hook Rebekah up with a subscription ASAP, or Alison is going to end up putting powdered sugar in sandwich baggies and handing it out to kids at school to snort.”

  She reached up and snatched the magazines out of my hands. “Speaking of parents and children, you're seventeen, I'm thirty-five. If you do the math, you can see where I might have concerns about you and Kayleigh.” She gave me a knowing look and it took me a minute to register what she was talking about.

  Oh shit. I hadn't thought about that.

  “Don't wanna have the sex talk with you,” I told her.

  “You don’t want to end up with a kid, either, at your age. So either stop having sex, or—”

  I cut her off. “O—kay. Yeah. Got it. Thanks.”

  The conversation between us didn't get any further because Rebekah carried Alison through the front door and sat her down, then raced down the hall to her room like she was in a hurry. Needles staggered in through the door, high out of his mind.