by Kiara London
Kiss Cam really is taking us for a whirl.
That evening, I recline back against Jasper’s legs while he plays with my hair. Lenny sits on the floor with me, hiding in the curve of his living room’s massive couch. He’s got his computer in his lap and throws out suggestions for the Twelve Days of Kissmas—which happens in about two weeks. Until then, he figures we should hold off on the regular Kiss Cams. We’re spoiling our viewers, anyway.
“On the first day of Kissmas, my true love gave to me a hickey for the Jasiper Team.”
Jasper laughs at this and twirls one of my blond curls around his finger. “Wait, who’s giving who the hickey?”
“Good question.” I nod, raising my eyebrows a little at his point. After thinking the stanza over in my head again, I tack on, “A bit oddly phrased, but kudos to using the Christmas rhyme.”
Lenny shrugs and goes back to scrolling down the list, eyes reflecting the bright screen. Jasper continues to run his fingers through my curls, ruffling them up and pulling them straight. I rest my head back against his knees and look up at him. From this angle his nose seems large and his eyes small underneath thick eyelashes. He removes his hands from my head and sticks his tongue out at me. I mimic him and then turn back to Lenny.
“Mistletoe kisses . . .”
Jasper bumps me with his knee. “Looks like we’re gonna have to invest in some mistletoe.” I elbow him back and shake my head.
“Snowball-fight kiss . . .”
Jasper jostles me with his knees again and I slap at his shins, rolling my eyes at his immaturity.
“Oh, look, try on different festive lip balms and guess the flavor off the other’s lips.”
This time Jasper shakes my shoulders so hard I almost get whiplash. I know what he’s thinking—and it’s not good. Is that even an ethical thing to do as best friends? I mean, sure, I guess Kiss Cams aren’t. But, this . . . Well, this is voluntary tasting. And that’s where I draw the line.
He’s still shaking me, making the idea bounce around in my head without rest. Finally, I snap, “Would you knock it off?”
He doesn’t let up, so I pull out of his hold and crawl over to sit on the other side of Lenny. Lenny turns to look at me with a goofy half grin as Jasper leans back with a pout.
“That one’s a good one,” Lenny says impishly, and I cover my face with my hands, groaning at the idea.
“I say that one’s definitely a possibility,” Jasper adds in a teasing manner, and I know he’s leaning forward again, waiting for a reaction.
“We have two weeks before Christmas.”
“Then we’re already behind,” Jasper exclaims, and bounces across the couch to get behind Lenny and me. Lenny nods thoughtfully.
Making an exaggerated motion, I turn around to look at Jasper. “That idea is disgusting.”
“Are you kidding, babe?” Jasper scoffs. “That’s totally hot.”
My eyelids droop along with the rest of my face as I stare at him, completely unamused. For a moment there is nothing but the soft whirring of Lenny’s computer and the muffled voices of Jade and Ruby upstairs. Jasper stares back at me challengingly, waiting for a smile to peek up through my weighted-down expression. I just find a point on his face, like the light splatter of freckles across his nose, and let out a deep breath.
“You’re despicable.”
“Me?” he gasps in horror. “Despicable?”
“No class . . . whatsoever,” I deadpan.
Lenny, for whatever reason, finds this absolutely hilarious and throws his head back in laughter.
“But slamming me against my front door and shoving your tongue down my throat was classy?” Jasper asks with a devilish twinkle in his eyes. His hair is in such disarray I can practically complete the image with a pair of horns.
Lenny laughs even harder, stuttering out, “Oh, burn.”
The expressionless composure I was able to act out earlier wavers when my skin tingles with heat and my mouth drops open.
“I did not shove my tongue down your throat!” I claim feebly, feeling mortified when the statement only causes Lenny’s face to redden more with cackling humor.
“Oh, you did, and it was great. Now, back to the matter at hand . . .”
“I hate you.”
Jasper puts a finger to my lips and quietly shushes me through a large smile. “Hush, good-lookin’, you didn’t let me finish.”
I swat his hand away and narrow my eyes at him in warning. Lenny’s laughter has subsided to soft chuckles, and he looks between Jasper and me in interest. I think he may have moved the laptop away from us for safekeeping and now crosses his legs to make himself comfortable.
“The viewers call the shots—”
“Obviously.”
“Shhh,” he insists, and dives forward to clamp a hand over my mouth. “Help me out, Lenny?”
Lenny looks genuinely confused for a second. Even though Jasper raises his eyebrows and nods for him to finish his train of thought, Lenny shakes his head helplessly.
Sighing, Jasper turns back to me, meeting my eyes. “Look, would you rather act out Christmas Jasiper fanfiction or test lip balm?”
“Who said anything about Jasiper fanfiction?” I mumble under his hand, and he rolls his eyes.
“As if that’s not going to turn up,” he sighs dramatically. From the corner of my eye I see Lenny give a contemplative shrug to Jasper’s statement, and I know that Jasper’s going to win this one.
“Ugh,” I groan, and pull Jasper’s bony hand off my face. “Fine. But you can have fun finding festive lip balm.”
Jasper grins victoriously and runs a hand through his unruly hair as though he simultaneously can and can’t believe I gave in. “Oh, trust me,” he says once his hand has run its course and hangs limply from his neck. “I will.”
When I get home later that night, I’m greeted at the door with giant green Rubbermaid containers and multiple mostly damaged cardboard boxes. On the inside of the door, I’m startled to find a Christmas wreath hanging festively and almost tangling with my hair. When I remove my shoes, I find that our regular welcome mat has been replaced with an Elves Welcome red-and-green one. Looking around, I see tinsel and bows everywhere.
Overwhelmed by everything—including a funny, sweet smell in the air—I look around helplessly for the source of this nonsense. All of a sudden, my mother’s head pokes out from the living room and I remember that it’s her day off. Just a glimpse of her answers all my questions.
She’s 110 percent into the holiday spirit. Her light-brown hair is swept back in a red scrunchie and she’s got this ridiculous striped sweater on. She’s even bothered to apply some bright red lipstick.
This is a fantastic example of my festive mother. It doesn’t matter what holiday it is—she’s gonna get with the season.
Valentine’s Day, for example. For the rest of us, it’s a painful holiday complete with frilly pink ribbon and heart cutouts; but to her it’s the perfect opportunity to wear pink and buy flowers for the house and leave a little handwritten note on my dresser telling me how much I mean to her. Really, you don’t know how to celebrate a holiday until you’ve met my mother.
“Guess what I did today?” she sings to me from her post behind the decked-out living room entryway.
“Taxes?”
But she doesn’t even wait to hear what I’ve said. “I pulled out all the Christmas stuff—can you believe how much we have? Oh, and your father is getting a tree next week. Isn’t that exciting? For now we’re just going to have to spruce this place up with the rest of it.” She nods to the boxes behind me.
I barely have enough time to process what she’s rambled on about before she’s talking again. “Why are you standing in the doorway, June? It’s drafty over there. Come over here. ABC is already airing all the classics.”
I trudge across the fairy-light-lit hall to meet her in the living room. Before I get there, however, she bustles over to turn off “Deck the Halls,” which has been playing on
her iPod dock. Then she whirls around to turn up the volume on the television.
Now I can place the odd smell I sensed in the hallway. While my eyes check out her decorating job, I notice that both sofa side tables have lit cinnamon-apple candles on them, releasing rich, homey aromas.
“C’mere, let’s watch together,” she urges, and takes my hand in her dainty one, dragging me to the sofa.
“Mom.”
“Look, it’s Rudolph. We haven’t seen that one in a while,” she comments as she settles in, pulling the throw blanket down from behind us.
“Mom.”
“Are you comfortable?”
“Mom,” I sigh apologetically, because she looks so determined to spend time with me. “I have school tomorrow.”
She looks surprised for a moment, her blue eyes confused, and then her posture softens and she sinks down into the cushions. “Oh.”
This is how it always goes. Whenever she has a day off she makes these huge plans, forgetting that I don’t share the same schedule. The disappointment in her eyes makes my stomach sink, because really, I don’t have to go to bed now. She’s just overwhelming when she’s in these moods—and that’s not a real reason not to spend time with her. So, I compromise.
“One movie,” I say.
When she hears this, she smiles a brilliant smile and wraps an arm around my shoulders. “That’s my girl,” she says proudly, and then presses her forehead to the side of my head. “If only Jas didn’t steal you away all the time!”
My cheeks flush and I squirm away. “Mom,” I sigh, “he’s not stealing me away.”
She leans back and holds me at arm’s length. Turning my head, I consider her motherly gaze and warm smile. “Oh, honey, he’s tryin’.”
I just shake my head while she chuckles and pulls me close to cuddle. “Baby, you are truly blessed to live in a dreamland.”
Even though she holds me tightly and I can’t see her face, I can imagine her red-lipped, all-knowing smirk.
“Maybe you’re the one in a dreamland,” I scoff.
“Maybe,” she agrees, “but then I wouldn’t be the only one.”
IT TURNS OUT that I was wrong about having two weeks until the Christmas special. You see, when your Christmas special is called “Twelve Days of Kissmas,” that means you should probably start twelve days prior to Christmas to really capture the spirit of it all. So when next Monday rolls around and Jasper announces that Kissmas starts today over lunch, I almost do a spit-take all over his face.
Apparently, Lenny did a video announcing what the Christmas special would be. And since I didn’t even bother to check VlogIt to see if any new videos went up over the weekend, I have zero time to prepare. I don’t even know when Jasper had time to pick up festive-flavored lip balms—because I guess that’s what we’re doing tonight.
All of a sudden, Christmas is just around the corner and Kissmas is right after school.
“If we’re testing lip balms tonight, then what are we doing every night after that until Christmas?” I ask in a half panic, trying to piece together when all this planning took place.
Jasper’s eyes hood in a way that seems completely unamused, and Lenny just shakes his head and spoons chili into his mouth like he’s not going to get involved.
“You’re kidding, right?” I meet Jasper’s glare across the table and shrug hopelessly. There is no way I could be any more confused in this situation. He sighs long and hard in the most dramatic way he can muster.
“We discussed it over lunch last week—or was that the one time your headphones were actually playing music?”
I wince slightly, remembering last Wednesday. I have a habit of putting my headphones over my ears even though my iPod isn’t playing any music. That’s how I avoid conversations—so, really, why did he even think trying to talk to me was a good idea? Tuesday night I had downloaded a new album and decided to listen to it at lunch the following afternoon. Any nods I gave him last week were dismissive, not decisive.
He pushes his tray away and buries his head in his arms across the table, groaning.
“I have a list,” Lenny says suddenly, and I nod to him gratefully. “I’ll make you a copy and give it to you tonight so there’s no need to be a drama queen.” He looks at Jasper as he says this and then shakes his head again. “Jeez, like getting her back on track was that hard, man.”
“Not the point,” Jasper mumbles back sharply, and lifts his head to look at me again. “You can’t blame me for any decisions I thought we all made last Wednesday.”
At this, Allison—who has been sitting beside me silently, eating her lunch and absorbing the conversation—now jabs me in the side with her elbow. I glance at her quickly, giving her a short glare before returning my gaze to Jasper. I didn’t need a jab in the side to know that that sentence could mean trouble.
“What are you talking about?”
Jasper shrugs. “I’ve gotta admit, there’s some things on that list I thought you’d never agree to—but then again, we’re tasting lip balm off each other’s lips tonight, so, I mean, what’s worse than that?”
Allison lets her elbow brush against my side again, gently this time, as though trying not to annoy me but also trying to get me to notice what she does. My front teeth find my bottom lip momentarily, trying to bite down any dramatics.
“I don’t know, Jas,” I say steadily, “what is worse than that?”
Jasper makes a face, staring past me as though trying to remember, and then starts listing. “The classic mistletoe kiss on Christmas, eating two ends of a peppermint stick until our lips meet in the middle, watch a Christmas movie and kiss every time they say ‘Christmas’ . . . Oh! and seeing if we can give the other person a hickey shaped as a Christmas tree.”
“Great,” I say, thinking that that is a lot of kissing. But, really, what did I expect to come from this? It is called Kissmas, after all—and Jasper isn’t exactly a bad kisser. Plus, the requests could have been way worse.
I was expecting some intense kissing from the way he was describing it. But he makes everything seem dramatic.
Jasper finds the sarcasm in my reply and rants, “At least they don’t want you to ride me like Rudolph—goodness, Juniper, they’re mellow requests.”
Allison gasps “Oh, God” at his remark and hides her blushing cheeks behind her hands. Lenny, though, just starts giggling. I stutter at first, but end up managing, “I’m not saying they aren’t.”
“Great,” Jasper says quickly, and gives me a large, stretched-out grin. “Then can we kiss and make up?”
I stand up and shake my head. “Too cheeky,” I mutter, and walk away to take care of my lunch tray, barely catching the way his smile turns into a ridiculous-looking pout.
“Don’t worry,” Allison’s voice trails after me, teasing Jasper. “You’ll be getting plenty of lip action later.”
My head whips backward across my shoulder, jaw slack. Never in a hundred years did I ever think she would say something like that.
Later, at Jasper’s house, Lenny presents me with the full list of Kissmas kisses and I decide that, really, they aren’t bad at all and I should make the most of it. After all, I get to casually kiss my best friend without things getting weird. How many people can say that?
When Jasper presents the lip balms to me shortly after my arrival, I’m startled to find that there are twelve of them—which I guess he found clever, since there’s twelve days of us kissing until Christmas—and he’s picked out the six that he’s going to put on his lips for me to guess and six for him.
He puts my set into my hands and then goes across the room to explain the editing process for the video to Lenny. I go to sit down on Jasper’s vibrant bedding and spread the balms out in front of me. After checking the cute holiday-esque labels, I’ve discovered that he’s given me the flavors hot chocolate, gingerbread, pumpkin spice, eggnog, sugar cookie, and sugar plum. Where he got these flavors of lip balms, I haven’t the slightest idea. I am curious, though, ab
out the flavors he’s chosen.
After a few minutes of Lenny tripping over electrical cords and Jasper almost dropping both the camera and his laptop in an attempt to set up the camera with his hands full, Jasper finally settles down beside me, while Lenny makes himself comfortable on the other side of the room at Jasper’s desk. He’s decided to stay out of the Christmas special unless the moment presents itself. He likes his place as director—thinks it’s an esteemed position, or whatever. I think he likes it because there’s less of a chance of getting nailed by a cannon in a ship war.
Jasper’s got his six lip balms clutched between both hands so that he doesn’t drop them, and nods for me to hit record. Leaning forward—being careful that my lip balms don’t roll off the edge of the bed—I hit the record button, and the little red light flashes next to the lens. When I settle back next to him, Jasper introduces the Christmas special.
I listen to him wish the audience a “Very Merry Kissmas” and proceed to tell them what today’s kiss(es) will entail. He explains that we each have six different flavors of lip balm and that we’ll take turns guessing which flavors the other is wearing by tasting it off the other’s lips. Then he announces which flavors he has that I will be guessing: peppermint, apple cider, cinnamon sugar, chocolate truffle, apple cinnamon, and toasted marshmallow. He lets me tell the camera which ones I have, and then we start.
He decides he’d like the honor of putting on the first lip balm flavor and closes his eyes, shuffling the tubes around in his hands for a second before he picks one out of the bunch and dumps the others next to him on the bed. His eyes snap open and he smiles at the camera as he pops the cap off and begins applying the balm heavily to his lips.
“This tastes really good,” he tells me after he’s taken a practice swipe over his lips with his tongue.
“Does it?” I ask a bit cheekily. He nods and leans forward, and I realize that now I have to kiss him.
