by S. L. Naeole
“Yes.”
No. Of course I didn’t have to kiss her.
No. That was a lie.
I was lying to Brenda and I was lying to myself.
I did have to. I needed to kiss her. I needed to kiss Fallon.
The minute I saw her in Kimble’s with her boyfriend, the minute I smelled her, heard her heartbeat, her voice, I had to kiss her. I had to feel her mouth and taste her. It wasn’t like anything I’d felt before. It felt like an ocean current that was pulling me away from shore. I know that feeling. I know what it feels like to be pulled so far under that you believe you’re about to drown.
And like an idiot, I thought we’d both sink to the bottom, where our words toward each other would turn heavy and everything we saw in each other, everything we knew about each other would finally give in to the ugliness and hate that brewed between us every single time we crossed paths. I thought by drowning, by finally giving in that I’d get over this…this stupid infatuation.
But what I saw made my throat tighten and my stomach drop to my feet. She’d always been strong and hard, her anger hot and burning. I’d never seen her crack or fall apart when we’d argue. Instead, it seemed like each time we clashed she became stronger and fiery. But I saw what my words did to her through her eyes. The once rich brown rings turned muddy and plain against the endless black of her pupils. The whites of her eyes somehow grew whiter while the red lines that crisscrossed over them had grown darker and deeper, like scratches.
She could have been a ghost if the color of her skin didn’t look so beautifully golden, and her head wasn’t held up so proudly. She spoke to me with a voice that didn’t tremble or show an ounce of fear. But her eyes…they told me she was hurt. I could even smell it wafting up from her skin, drifting along with her breath.
It was like seeing what being stabbed was like. It was like feeling the cold edge of glass slice through my skin again and again. I didn’t want to feel it, but as I watched her, listened to her, there was no escaping it. The brutal truth in her words was every slap, ever stab, every cut I’d ever experienced meeting up with my chest and ramming into it. Over and over again, I felt it.
And then she said it. She spoke, her words sharp and deadly.
“God, you know what? I wish I hadn’t come to this stupid island. You know what else? I wish I’d never met your sister because then I’d never have met you and then I-”
Words were always just words. They’d never really meant much to us; we were all about doing. We showed how we felt; we didn’t say it. We didn’t…write it out and let someone else read about it. If we couldn’t express our feelings, we didn’t do anything at all. We were empty, smiling only when we needed to, speaking only when it was required. There was no in-between and it had always been enough for us.
But Fallon’s words weren’t just words anymore. They weren’t words to me. They were actions. They were knives to my stomach and glass to my heart. She was saying she wished she’d never met me. She hated me.
Nothing had ever hurt that much before.
How could she hate me when I felt…when I…
I couldn’t hear her finish. I wouldn’t let her finish.
So I kissed her. I grabbed her with more force than I should have and crashed into her, mouth first. Everything she had said up until that moment was forgotten. All I knew, all I felt, all I smelled, all I tasted was…her. Fallon was the problem and the fix and I didn’t want to accept it until my lips could feel the way her skin vibrated against mine.
This wasn’t just a kiss. This wasn’t some stupid, clumsy, awkward thing that made me feel more embarrassed than horny. This was what feeling alive was like. This was greater than that first taste of blood after you’ve captured your prey. My heart had never raced so fast or so hard.
This was the world spinning just for you. No one else mattered. No one else existed. This was all that there was: this fire, this burning, this overwhelming hunger and need for more of her, for more of everything.
This was electric.
This was life.
This was l-
No. It wasn’t. It couldn’t be.
I broke away before I let the word fall out of my thoughts. If I didn’t think it, it wouldn’t be real. It wasn’t real. The possibility that…that…I would feel…THAT… It wasn’t possible. It was stupid, is what it was. How could anyone feel…that when they didn’t even know the person? What did I know about her? What did she know about me? No.
There were a lot of screwed up things in this world that seem to like spending time hanging around my life, but this wasn’t gonna be one of them. How could it be?
The restaurant was quiet, as if the kiss itself could stop time and freeze everyone in place, cutting off their voices and even their thoughts as I looked at Fallon. I could see the shock in her face, the complete and total surprise that took away her rejection and left only feeling. For a moment, I was afraid that she’d somehow managed to hear the beginning of that horrible thought.
Would she be disgusted?
That thought felt even worse than the first one. I could feel my face pinch up at the idea, at the fear of it. And then…
She touched her mouth. It was a simple gesture, meaningless except that it meant everything. She didn’t have to say anything to me to tell me that what had just happened had affected her just as much as it affected me. Part of me wanted her to kiss me back. Okay, most of me did. And when she looked at me with her mouth parted, her lips almost bruised from the force I’d used, I knew she would.
But I’m not as good at reading humans as I thought I was.
And I’m not as good at blocking their punches either.
What I know now is that Fallon has an incredible right hook, and she’s even faster with her left. And she did not want to kiss me again.
“You jerkoff! Don’t you ever put your hands on me again or next time my aim will be lower.”
She left quietly, her boyfriend following after her. No one stopped her, no one said a word. It was only after she was gone that I recognized the familiar taste of blood. And, as I licked at the tear in my lip, I realized that the blood that tingled my tongue and made my veins almost jump out of my body wasn’t just mine.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FALLON
The last ferry out was pulling into its slip while around us the nervous and excited energy of the people waiting to board it grew. I looked at them, saw their faces light up underneath the overhead fluorescent lights, and felt instantly jealous.
“Take me with you,” I said softly.
Josh was holding my hand, his fingers twisted around mine, his palm meeting my own. His duffel was sitting by our feet as we waited, our last, precious minutes together slipping away far too quickly.
“I would if I could. You know that.”
I felt my head flop down, defeated without even trying. “I know.”
“Fall…”
“I don’t know how much longer I can do this, Josh. Everything here just sucks. And now they’re gonna get worse. I’ve got almost two months before school starts, and I don’t want to spend all of that time hiding at home. Mom and Dad don’t understand what it feels like for me here. They grew up here. This is their home. Before, it used to be okay, you know? Every time we moved, we were all strangers together; I’m the only stranger here.”
Josh’s mouth turned down at the corners. “You’ve made at least one friend. Audrey might be the best this island has to offer, but it’s a pretty great best if you ask me.”
The fact that I felt like an absolute turd couldn’t keep me from smirking at his comment. “You like her. Your little date to the movies must have been a hit.”
The false light above us flickered, but even when it returned, its unnatural hue couldn’t hide the blush that crept up his face like a blanket being pulled up. “It wasn’t a date.”
“Lies. You two were alone, you were in a dark movie theater together, you watched some kind of romantic drama-type-thing.
That’s a date,” I pointed out with a nudge.
His free hand went to rub his forehead, as if that could somehow stop the reddening of his face. “I don’t know if I’m supposed to talk to you about this.”
My lips puffed out as I sighed. I knew what the problem was and it was stupid to not have realized it sooner. “Oh, Josh, I’m not mad.”
“Or jealous?” he asked cautiously.
Jealous? I should have been jealous. Any normal girl would’ve felt jealous. But how could I feel jealous when everything was so…mixed up inside of me? “Josh, what are we? I mean, are we even together anymore? Do I even have the right to be jealous?”
His face crinkled up at my question. “I…I don’t know. When I left, when we… Look, all I knew then was that we were together. I loved you; I love you. You’re my first everything. But-”
“But I’m not your last,” I finished for him, understanding.
“Yeah. I mean, no! I mean…yeah. Look, Fall, when I left for boot camp, I didn’t go thinking that what we had was gonna just…end. If I had, what happened with you…well, none of that would have happened and maybe things would have been different between us. I left thinking that we were gonna be forever.”
It wasn’t that hard to nod in agreement. I’d felt the same thing. Fifteen and stupid. That’s what I’d been. Fifteen and stupid and completely dumb to everything that could go wrong when all you see is how much you love someone.
“I still think that,” I admitted. “But…I know that’s it different. It’s not like it was before you left.”
“A lot of things aren’t like how they were before I left.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes, and I tried to think if maybe that’s how I wanted it. It would’ve been easier if things hadn’t changed. It was easy to love Josh. It had been pretty easy to hate him, too. “A lot of things happened since you left, and not just the abortion. Even before you left, things were changing. And now things are just…crazy.”
“Tell me about it. What happened today was mental. I’ve never seen you act like that before,” he said with snort.
“I never needed to act like that before,” I countered. “I can’t believe that walking ball-sack did that.”
“What’s the big deal? He kissed you. Did it suck that badly?”
“What? Yes! No! I mean…”
Oh, my head hurt. Why did this have to happen now, on the day that Josh was leaving me? Who else would I be able to talk to about this?
What the hell was I thinking – like I could talk to him about this. How do you talk to your boyfr…ex-boyfriend about a guy who never leaves your thoughts? Who’s in your head like some kind of infection?
“You like him.”
“Wh-what?” I sputtered.
“Admit it. You like him.”
My head twisted back and forth in denial. “There’s nothing about him to like.”
The pier shook as the ramp of the ferry slammed down. The first of the cars began to pull out and the people sitting next to us stood up, ready to board with their bags and their memories clutched closely to them.
Josh’s mouth was pulled up at the side in an obnoxious smirk as he stood up and moved in front of me. “Fallon, I know you, and I know that if you didn’t like someone, you wouldn’t care what they said about you. Come on. You’re an Air Force brat; this kind of stuff is the way of life for you and me. What he says matters, and it only matters because for some reason, he matters.”
“No, he doesn’t. Well, okay, maybe he does. But it’s only because he’s Audrey’s brother. That’s it. I don’t care about him. In fact, I don’t even think about him.”
The sound of his laughter seemed odd against the clomping of feet on the wooden pier. “You’re such a crappy liar, Fallon. If you don’t think about him, then why did you scratch a giant ‘L’ into the bench?”
Anyone else would have immediately looked down beside them. Anyone else would have instantly denied that they’d done anything. But me, I just moved my hand over the scratch. I didn’t need to see it to know that it was there. The raw feeling in my fingers already told me that it was.
“There’s nothing wrong with liking him, you know.”
A grunt came out of me; the kind that comes out when you’ve just heard the dumbest thing ever spoken. “You think that it’s okay for me to like him? That nothing he’s done so far makes him, oh, I don’t know…wrong?”
Josh looked at the ferry and at the crowd of people slowly shrinking as they boarded before turning to look at me. “Do I think Liam’s an ass? Yeah. I think that the guy deserves to get the crap beat out of him every single day for the way he’s made you feel. But some of the other things he’s made you feel aren’t exactly bad either.”
He grabbed my hand and pulled me up before bending down to pick up his duffel. “I’m not saying go out on a date with the guy. I’m not even saying to consider it. Hell, I hope he asks and you turn his ass down with a broken nose to match his fat lip.
“What I am saying is that you shouldn’t feel bad about liking someone else. Even if it is someone like Liam.”
We began to walk toward the ferry, our steps in time with each other like we were marching. He was still holding my hand as we got in line, and his face looked suddenly sad.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“I…I didn’t want to tell you until the last minute. This training I’ve gotta get to, it’s required before deployment.”
My feet froze, locking me to the wooden planks as he continued moving. Only when he felt my hand tug his did he stop. He didn’t turn around to look at me, and I was pretty sure it was to keep me from seeing his face just as much as it was to keep him from seeing mine. “You’re being deployed? Like…‘to war’ deployed? Josh, answer me!”
I yanked my hand free from his and rushed to face him. He looked stricken. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“Because I didn’t want to ruin anything. I only had a day to spend with you and the last thing I wanted was make you worry. I’m sorry, Fallon. I’m so sorry.”
He dropped his bag and grabbed me. I went from looking into his eyes to breathing in the smell of his skin in the blink of an eye. It was against his neck, feeling the slow rhythm of his pulse, that I finally felt the weird, wet trickle of tears down my cheeks. I realized that in the past six months, I hadn’t once cried for Josh or for anything that happened between us, and the minute the tears began I couldn’t stop them.
“Don’t die. Don’t you dare leave me here and go off to fight in some stupid war and die. I’m strong enough for a lot of things but if you leave me, I’ll have no choice but to kill you,” I sobbed into his shoulder.
He squeezed, his hands pressing my head even closer to him than before. He sighed, and I felt the wet drip of moisture on my own shoulder. “I’ll make you a promise. I won’t die if you promise not to let your heart get broken.”
Stunned, I pulled away. “And how would I do that?”
His face was red and blotchy, his eyes two puffy balls of sadness and concern. “Just don’t be afraid to take risks. You’ll race on your bike and dive off of rocks, but when it comes to us guys, you’re as careful as a nun,” he said in a low voice.
I frowned. “I wasn’t so careful with you.”
His lips, puffy and stiff, pulled up in a smile. “You were the one who would take any dare, any challenge. You didn’t care what anyone else thought and you always plunged headfirst into everything. You could have had anyone that you wanted because of that, but you waited for me because I was the safe choice and you know it.”
I wanted to argue with him, but I couldn’t. Josh was right. I wasn’t as brave and fearless as I thought I was, and despite what happened between us, he was still the safe choice; he always would be.
“Was I the safe choice for you?”
My question brought his lips over his teeth. “You’re never the safe choice. I knew the minute I met you that you’d be trouble and I was right.”
He threw his head to the side and laughed with me as the ferry’s horn gave one final warning blare. “So why am I late for my boat back to the mainland?”
“Shit,” I hissed before grabbing his bag from our feet and running toward the end of the pier, pulling a laughing Josh behind me.
He ran up the ramp, our fingers slipping apart as the gap of space between us grew wider and wider. He stopped and turned around. He took quick steps back to me as the dockhands grumbled at yet another delay. “I love you, Fallon. Safe or trouble, you’ve always been my best friend. That’s what’s gonna keep me alive, you know.”
“It better.”
He bent down to kiss me, and I leaned forward to meet him. It was sweet and soft, and made my heart fill with an overwhelming sense of warmth. It was everything that Liam’s kiss wasn’t. It was everything that Liam’s kiss should have been.
If it had, I wouldn’t have been able to notice a difference. I wouldn’t have been able to think about Liam’s kiss and feel…charged. I would have been able to forget it and only keep Josh’s kiss in my memory. Instead, even now, even with warm lips pressed against mine, and familiar scents and feelings blanketing over me, I could only think of him…
Josh pulled away and the ramp was lifted. “Tell Audrey I’ll write to her,” he shouted just before the final blare of the ferry’s horn sounded.
“Are you really?” I shouted back.
He answered, but I couldn’t hear him. I waved, and watched as he disappeared, fading away into the dark like a dimming light. “Be safe, Josh,” I whispered. “One of us has to.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
LIAM
I don’t know why I followed him.
I should have just turned around and gone home the minute I saw them. Maybe then I wouldn’t have seen the way they looked at each other. Maybe then I wouldn’t have seen him kiss her. And maybe then, I wouldn’t have been disappointed when she didn’t punch him in the face.
