by Kiara London
I cross my arms and raise an eyebrow, shaking my head in a silent no, Jasper . . . no. He simply wiggles his now visible eyebrows and stares intensely at me behind squinted lids.
“What are you doing?”
Lenny steps around me, his blond hair also tucked beneath a Santa cap. The rest of him is bundled up in something I’m sure his mother made him throw on before he left the house. A bubble vest over his ugly red Christmas sweater, a knitted scarf that looks like it might have pink in it, and bulky gloves. I can’t tell which one of them looks more ridiculous.
Jasper still holds his flexed-arm, squinty-eyed, pouty-lipped pose but looks to Lenny instead and replies in a theatrically deep voice, “Being a chick magnet. What the hell are you wearing?”
“I regret letting my mom drive me to school, okay,” Lenny says defensively, and then makes a pinched face and tacks on, “Quit looking at me like that. It’s creepy.”
“It’s smokin’.”
“No.” Lenny shakes his head urgently and grabs my sleeve. “Because I love you, June, and we’ve been friends for ages, I’ve got some advice I want you to take very seriously because I’m afraid you’re on the receiving end of some creepy seduction tactic.”
I giggle at the tone of his voice, which sounds like he’s trying really hard to be serious but a laugh is trying to intervene. Still, I turn to him, alarmed, and ask, “What is it?”
He leans in close to my head and whispers directly into my ear, “Run, run far away from this guy.”
With that, he tugs hard on my sleeve and we both take off down the nearly deserted hallway toward the student parking exit. Jasper calls after us and Lenny pulls me closer, dodging stragglers while shouting, “Sorry! Pardon me! Coming through!”
I can barely run because I’m laughing hard and my legs feel like they’re made of nothing. Once, I hear Jasper’s hysterical, high-pitched laugh when he’s managed to catch up. He tries grabbing for my waist, but Lenny reaches back and swats him off.
People are throwing us looks of complete disgust, beyond annoyed with our antics. Someone spews a mouthful of profanity at us when my backpack brushes up against him in our mad rush to get outside. I hear Jasper mutter a quick apology, but then Lenny and I are at the door and slamming our bodies at it, shivering when the cold air hits our skin.
The ground is covered in a thin layer of crunchy snow, and I know patches of ice are hiding underneath it. I pull back on Lenny a little and we slow down, but still rush across the parking lot to Jasper’s car, knowing that he never locks it and we could break in and lock him out long enough to adjust things—which he hates. We’re almost there, his tiny blue junker is sitting patiently, begging us to attack, and Jasper is screaming something like, “You idiots can walk home!”
Then Lenny slips on a thin sheet of ice that cracks under his weight, I trip over him, and Jasper lands on top of me in a series of stumbles and cuss words. My whole body stings, and I think I hear several bones in my body crunch under Jasper’s weight. Dizzy, I groan and lift my head, seeing Jasper has fallen sideways across my torso and my legs are tangled with Lenny’s.
“You guys suck so much! I hate you—oh my God, I bit my tongue! Kissmas can’t happen without this tongue! You’ve killed the magic, you jerks! You broke the moneymaker!” Jasper carries on, slowly pulling himself up.
Lenny just mumbles something incoherent about his ankle and covers his face with his hands. All of us flinch when someone’s horn blares at us. We’re fallen soldiers smack-dab in the middle of the battlefield. Slowly, we move out of their way. They blare their horn the entire time we’re picking ourselves up, and even though he’s limping, Lenny flips them the bird.
“That was not a good idea,” I moan while we’re piling into Jasper’s car. Once seated, I pull a banged-up elbow close to my body and feel around the sore part, hissing when all I feel is throbbing and stinging.
“You’re so gonna get it tonight for Kissmas,” Jasper threatens, starting his car with a flick of his wrist.
Lenny groans beside him and pulls his right foot into his lap. He then proceeds to remove his wet shoe and sock to poke at his hurt ankle. This makes Jasper swat at him, grumbling something about smelly feet and no sympathy.
“You’re broken,” I shoot back. “I’m not getting anything.”
“Maybe I’ll make you kiss it better,” he snaps, and lifts his eyes, making eye contact with me in his rearview mirror. I glare back at him and shake my head.
We sit like this for a couple of minutes, all groaning over one thing or another. It’s not until we’re too far to turn back that Lenny realizes he lost his Santa cap sometime during our wild escape, making him sink into an even fouler mood. He doesn’t realize, however, that Jasper stole it as payback for plotting against him. After Jasper drops Lenny off at his house, he pulls a red-and-white hat from under his legs and dangles it before me.
“Think I should tell him?”
“You kicked him when he was down,” I say flatly, body stiff both from our fall and his cramped car. “Don’t give it back to him and I’ll give you a reason to complain about your barely damaged tongue.”
He seems intrigued by this and drops the hat in the passenger seat before completely twisting around to look at me. His eyes twinkle and his lips quirk upward. “And what is it you would do?”
“Don’t you worry about it,” I say simply, and run a hand through my curls.
“Kiss me better, and I’ll go and give his hat back,” Jasper offers, chin lifting as he awaits my response.
I tilt my head a little in confusion and raise an eyebrow at him. “I’m already kissing you later.”
“No, like right now,” he says.
I try to laugh, but it comes out as a startled gasp, like I’ve lost the ability to make normal-sounding noises. He just looks at me with the same waiting expression. “Aren’t you sick of kissing already?”
He laughs—a proper chuckle—and shakes his head. “June, I will never get bored of kissing.”
“Maybe it is weird that we do this,” I say after a pause.
“C’mon,” he begs, and reaches over to brace himself on the passenger seat while he wiggles closer to me. “It’s not weird unless you’re feeling—”
“I’m not,” I interrupt quickly, feeling the need to clear that up before he gets any ideas.
“Well then, what’s the big deal?”
My arms are crossed in my lap, legs crammed up against the back of the passenger seat, and he’s practically stretched across the middle of his car, lower lip jutting out pleadingly. It looks like a truly desperate situation.
“It’s not a big deal,” I say carefully, and his face lights up. “I just think that it’s excessive.” The pout returns.
“Lenny’s waiting . . .”
“Jas—”
“Is one measly peck too much to ask?”
I groan, knowing Lenny will find some way to make me feel guilty for not winning back his hat because I didn’t feel like giving Jasper a little peck on the lips. He’d shake his head and joke about how our friendship wasn’t worth saving for one little kiss—how unfortunate for me. He’d hold off giving me my Christmas gift or something of the sort. He’d never let me forget.
Jasper’s muttering a chorus of pleases, so I finally just roll my eyes and lean forward to shut him up. My lips catch his on an intake of breath between words, and I make sure it’s short enough that he can’t savor anything. However, just as I’m starting to lean back, the hand bracing him on the passenger seat breaks away and braces itself on the back of my head instead to keep me stationary. Startled, I try to pull away, but he laughs and keeps pressing repeated kisses all over my lips—whether I kiss him back is completely irrelevant.
“All—better,” he says around two final lingering kisses and then grabs the Santa cap and bolts from the car to Lenny’s front door.
I’m too dizzy to say anything back.
When Lenny sees me later that night, he’s got his hat back�
�and he’s also limping, but he told us not to worry about it. I guess he twisted it, but it doesn’t look bad. Anyway, before we start the ninth day of Kissmas, he hugs me to his side and plants a kiss on my cheek.
“Thank you,” he sings into my ear. “How about we try that again when it’s not icy outside?”
I think about all the kisses Jasper stole a few hours back and understand Lenny’s desire for revenge.
“Deal,” I whisper back, bumping my fist against his.
My dad is waiting with drive-through fast food when I get home later that night. I know because the moment I walk through the door I can smell burgers and hear him breaking my mother’s No Eating in the Living Room rule. I quickly pull off my boots and hang up Jasper’s Santa cap (which I’d removed during Kissmas and hid under my hoodie—winning a little revenge for Lenny) and jog into the newly claimed man cave.
Since my dad started his vacation, he’s been doing nothing but sitting on his butt in front of the television watching ESPN and munching on whatever he can find. Yesterday, I witnessed him eat an entire bag of potato chips as soon as my mom left for work. For the first time in my life, I was the one who had to play bad cop and remind him of Mom’s No Eating in the Living Room rule and call him out for acting like one of his heart-attack patients. He didn’t look the least bit guilty. In fact, the satisfaction on his face reminded me of a toddler who smiles at you the whole while they’re being scolded for drawing on the wall or eating cookies before dinner.
When I enter the room, I find him ripping the wrapping off a cheeseburger, with his feet propped up on the coffee table. The television is flashing football highlights while an annoying voice makes comments. I can tell he’s been in the same spot most of the day when I notice the ratty nightshirt and sweatpants combination he’s wearing.
When he sees me he pauses for a moment, long enough for ketchup to drip from his burger to his lap, and then, as if I’d barged in at an inconvenient time, he sighs, “I wasn’t expecting you.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“There’s no school tomorrow.”
I shrug and lean against the entryway. Sure, I would usually sleep over at Jasper’s, but I wasn’t going to let that happen tonight after Kissmas. That idea just screams trouble.
“I thought we’d hang out since I never see you,” I tell him. It’s only partly true. I’d rather sleep over at Jasper’s like I usually do, but after all that kissing, it didn’t feel appropriate. Plus, when I thought about sleeping over, I felt guilty knowing my dad would be all alone.
His lips purse a little, eyes narrowing as he considers this, and then he shrugs and pats the cushion beside him. When I seat myself, he pulls another burger from the bag beside his feet on the coffee table and turns the volume on the television down. I can feel his eyes on me while I unwrap the burger. It’s something I’m used to, because my parents always look at me for long periods of time—like they’re trying to soak me in or something—but then he pushes some of my curls away from my face and I freeze. Jasper’s hickey is on the side of my neck that’s facing him.
“Have you been kissing somebody?”
I turn my face toward him, which probably doesn’t help, and try my best to make a face that suggests I have no idea what he’s talking about.
He chuckles and points to my lips. “This is how I found out about your last boyfriend, remember? Kiss-swollen lips and”—he pushes the neckline of my hoodie down and pokes at the bruise there—“hickeys.”
I can feel the blood rushing to my cheeks and my face warming, but I don’t know how to stop it. I feel dumb, like I can’t come up with a coherent sentence without stuttering. The embarrassment numbs my entire body. Still, I attempt to defend myself somehow by saying, “I wore some tinsel as a scarf today, and it irritated my neck.”
He looks skeptical and then moves his finger back up to point at my lips. “Explain that.”
“My lips get chapped in the winter.”
It doesn’t look like he’s buying a single thing. Instead, it looks like he wants to laugh at the pathetic excuses I’m trying to get him to believe. He’s silent for a moment, eyes moving around the room as if searching for something. Then I watch him glance back down at my neck, shake his head and then turn back toward the television.
“Tell Jasper to stop eating your neck and come over to dinner sometime.”
At this point, I’ve gone ahead and taken a bite of my burger. Upon hearing that sentence, however, I promptly spit it into a napkin and start coughing up the pickle I inhaled when he said it.
“What?” I sputter, and dive for his soda to stop the coughing.
“Tell Jasper to stop eating your neck—”
Slamming his cup down, I look over my shoulder and snap, “I heard you the first time!”
He scratches his stubbly chin, trying to hide a smile. “I know it’s Jasper.”
“I’m not dating Jasper!”
He grins. “I work in a hospital, June Bug. I know when someone is bullshitting me.”
“I’m not—” I stop and bury my face in my hands to allow myself a deep breath. How could he have possibly noticed my lips are a little red from kissing? I’d kissed Jasper over twenty minutes ago in a game we invented called Kiss Pong, where we threw candy cane Hershey’s Kisses across his kitchen table into each other’s mouths. Every time we were successful, we locked lips. To be honest, it was kind of fun—but that’s not the point.
“Why are you so embarrassed?”
“I’m not dating Jas,” I repeat, face still buried in my hands.
“So you’re just kissing him, then?”
When I don’t answer, he lets out a long sigh and leans forward to try and pry me out of my huddle.
“What’s up?” he asks as soon as I’m sitting up again. I can’t look at him, though. My cheeks will only turn a brighter shade of red. I was hoping I wouldn’t have to explain all this to him. My dignity is at stake here.
“We—uh—it’s a long story,” I admit.
“I’ve got more than enough time.”
So I reluctantly go on to tell him about Jasiper, the fans, the dare, the invention of Kiss Cam, and finally Kissmas. He stops to ask questions about things he doesn’t understand, like “shipping” and why we would agree to do something as dumb as kiss each other. He thinks it’s creepy that people want to watch us do that. I explain it to him the only way I can: Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy. He has a soft spot for his childhood hero, Spider-Man, and thinks Gwen Stacy is hot—so he gets the idea of shipping right away. I leave out all the details about the kinds of kisses that happen—but I don’t think he wants to know about those anyway.
When I’ve spilled all my guts to him, he runs his hand over his face and then through his unkempt hair, groaning a little. He doesn’t look mad or disgusted by my choices. Instead, he looks tired.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he says after a moment. I blink in confusion, having thought he understood everything completely.
“What aren’t you getting?”
“Isn’t there some . . .” He stops, and his hands do some weird motions. His face looks strained, but finally he just spits it out. “Isn’t there some . . . tension?”
“Uh . . .” I don’t know what kind of tension he’s referring to, but by the look on his face I can guess he means sexual tension. “Oh my God, Dad! I am not having this conversation with you!”
“Well, what?” he asks, scratching the back of his head. “Do I need to buy you condoms for Christmas? Do you like him?”
“Dad!” I’m horrified. The blush is burning down my neck, and I’m hiding my face in my hands again.
“C’mon,” he groans, and I can tell he’s equally as uncomfortable. “If we’re going to be talking about boys, then I need to ask.”
“We’re not talking about boys. We’re talking about Jasper,” I grind out.
“Who, if you haven’t noticed from waking up next to him for years, has a penis.”
“Oh my God.” I fee
l like sinking into the cushions of the couch and disappearing forever. All these years I’d tried to avoid noticing what the male body does overnight. I do not need it being brought up by my dad.
“Look, I know you’re a smart girl and I trust you, but what you’re doing with Jasper is not smart, June. I’m not talking about sex here. I’m talking about this no-strings-attached kissing show. Do you know how many friends-with-benefits relationships actually work out? Close to none. And, to be completely honest with you, it doesn’t make me feel good about you doing all this with him and then being open to other relationships. It’s dirty.”
“It’s just kissing.”
He must sense the frustration in my voice, because what he says next is gentler. “Somebody is going to get hurt—and he would be one hell of a friend to lose.”
I don’t say anything after that. I know he’s right, because I’ve thought about the exact same things. But Jasper promised me something in the beginning. When I start to get uncomfortable, we stop. And, well, should I be uncomfortable?
When Allison suggested we might have feelings for each other, I did have a moment of panic. And it’s no secret I’m not opposed to kissing Jasper all the time—which is weird, right? But it shouldn’t be, because we have this all figured out, Jasper and I. So, really, it’s nothing to worry about.
Well, except for the fact that everything seemed far too sincere in the back of his car when I “kissed him better.” Was it a possibility? Were there feelings developing? Did we need to stop?
The more I think about it, the more uncomfortable I get with this whole thing. Perhaps we are well into dangerous territory and I’ve been ignoring it for the sake of Kissmas. But we can’t just call it off now. We have to finish it. Maybe after Kissmas . . .
But will it be easy to break off Kiss Cam when it’s now a segment in our videos? What would our viewers think? They’d know something is up and start rumors. And then there’s Jasper. Would he be offended? He has to understand, right?
