The Art of French Kissing

by Brianna Shrum

  I look up at the sky, silently asking whatever deity may be responsible for this, “Are you serious?”

  Then I grind my teeth together and take a step back.

  “Don’t leave on my account,” he says without looking up.

  I consider leaving anyway. I don’t think I want to be down here with him, especially since it’s basically him keeping me awake. But . . . I kind of don’t want to leave either.

  So I just freeze there. My shadow is awkward, completely tall and immobile on the rug.

  After about four seconds, Reid says, “Carter, come on. I’m not going to bite. Common room isn’t mine.”

  Now I can’t leave. It will look like an intentional retreat, which I guess it always would have been. But . . . I don’t want it to look that way. I don’t want him to know he’s won. So I pull a random book off the shelf and head into the room.

  He looks so relaxed here, in the dark with a book. Like . . . a human. Just a boy who can’t sleep.

  He looks up and doesn’t say anything, just moves his feet from the cushion where they were planted. Giving me room to sit.

  There are three other possible places to sit in this room, all comfortable, none of them near him. But that end of the couch is closest to the fire. And he moved so I could sit there. Like maybe . . . like maybe he wants me to?

  Anyway. I do.

  “What did you pick?” he says.

  I’m actually not sure what I picked. I look down at it, as curious as he is. Oh. Somehow I landed on a book I actually do love. “Star Wars? It’s about Ahsoka.”

  His face lights up in a way I have literally never seen it do. “Oh man, that’s so kickass. Have you read it before?”

  I smile against my will. “Yeah. Twice.”

  “I saw The Force Awakens in theaters a solid four times.”

  My mouth turns up. “Five here.” I spent so much tip money on it. And it was worth living in a few more of Jillian’s old jeans.

  He gives me a little bow, conceding the victory, and I find myself turning toward him on the couch, legs criss-crossed on the cushion. His legs are too long to do that. But he rests his knee on it, the other leg planted on the floor, throws his arm over the cushion to face me. There are several inches of space between our laps, on that middle cushion.

  I am aware enough of them that I almost want to back up, but I don’t want to acknowledge it, any of it, at all. So I talk.

  “What’s in your hands?”

  “Howl’s Moving Castle.”

  Oh no, I think.

  “Why?” he says, and apparently after two a.m. my filter just disintegrates into the ether because I guess I expressed my dismay out loud.

  “Uh,” I say. I’m creasing a page in my book now, and he is looking at my fingers like he wants to snatch them away. Like honestly, how dare I do that to a book? I think he might actually be half a second from physically grabbing my hand and tearing it away from the novel to rescue it, so I say, and his attention blinks back to my mouth, “Oh no. It’s too perfect.” Because it’s what I am thinking. And it’s too late-slash-early for rational thought.

  Coming down here was a terrible idea.

  He smiles, then, and sets the book to the side. “I mean, yeah. Have you seen the movie though?”

  “Of course. What do you take me for?”

  His teeth are at his lip and he scoots forward almost infinitesimally. The only reason I can even tell is just . . . I’m just hyper aware of it.

  “Miyazaki is a legend,” I say.

  “That’s an understatement.”

  I blink down at his knee and it’s—it’s close to mine. Really close. I don’t move back, though, and I don’t think he’s the only one who’s been closing that distance. It’s like a magnet. Repellant and drawing all in one pair.

  “How often do you come down here?”

  He swallows and shifts, arm scratching over the fabric. “A lot. I’m not a great sleeper.”

  “No?”

  “Nah. Stressed.”

  My eyebrows jump up. “You? Stressed?”

  “I’m not a robot, Lane.”

  “Yeah but I guess . . . well. I guess that’s true. Allegedly.”

  I really look at him then, in this thin V-neck I can basically see through, these drawstring pajama pants no one was supposed to see. His eyes are lined with red, his hair smudged, rumpled, like maybe he was sleeping and woke up. I wonder if he spent a night like this when I screwed with his alarm.

  “Two to four, like clockwork,” he says.

  “So you just got down here then.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Am I interrupting?”

  “Yes,” he says, but he flashes me a smile.

  This room, in the dark and the fire and all of it, it just feels . . . close. Too close. And I’m interrupting, which is not a thing I want to do. So I move to stand and say, “Sorry. I didn’t mean—”

  “No, stay,” he says, and suddenly his fingers are gentle on my wrist. But pressing them to the cushion. I could move if I wanted.

  I stare down at his fingers and he stares down at them. They’re calloused on my skin. Rough against all these smooth little burn scars on mine.

  “Sorry,” he says, and it’s charged.

  Everything is charged, like if I move the wrong way something will shatter.

  He pulls his fingers back and says, “It’s just anxiety. That keeps me up.”

  He’s giving me this so I will stay. Giving me a sentence about himself that invites a question. And he plays it right, because I relax back into the couch.

  “That is . . . so at odds with literally everything about you.”

  “Is it?” He cocks his head.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Two to four a.m. is the perfect time to replay everything I have said in the past week that could piss literally anyone I know off, and to go over recipes that I have no hope of changing, and over all the shit that could go wrong at judging, or tomorrow during the challenge, and then when I’ve sorted through all that, to cycle through who I’ve probably pissed off this week again.”

  I laugh. “So you think about me a lot between two and four then.”

  The expression on his face shifts, then. It’s a small change. But it’s there. He straightens a little, eyes become more focused. He’s looking at me with the same concentration he uses in the kitchen. And I can feel it under my skin. I flush.

  “If it helps, I was up thinking about you,” I say, like that will make it better. And I resolve, in that second, never to come out of my room again before six in the morning.

  “Yeah?” he says. His mouth tugs up, a dimple I didn’t know he had popping.

  “I was thinking about what on earth you did to me this last week, and how you failed so spectacularly at it because I’m still here.”

  His eyebrow twitches. Then he just starts laughing.

  “Reid, good lord, people are sleeping.”

  He shuts his mouth and throws his head back over the arm of the couch, and his leg stretches out the tiniest bit, calf brushing mine. He’s still shaking, laughing. Just silent this time. I push his leg, and he sits up.

  His eyes are almost literally sparkling.

  “What did you do?” I say.

  “Nothing.”

  He wipes a tear from the corner of his eye and gasps in a breath.

  “Yeah, that sounds truthful.”

  “I’m serious, Carter.”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t do anything to you.”

  He’s calmed down now, leaning over, elbows on his knees, grinning like an idiot.

  “So just out of the goodness of your heart, you—” I stop short. He looks about twice as wicked as he ever did, and I can feel it radiating off him. “You really didn’t do anything to me.”

  He taps his nose.

  “But . . .” I say, narrowing my eyes. “Not out of the goodness of your heart.”

  “Sweet pea, I never do anything out of the goodnes
s of my heart.”

  “You were looking at me all weird, though, and like moving my stuff and . . . that is psychological warfare.”

  He smiles so wide it only makes me angrier, and then he spreads his arms out. Like, Duh, Carter. Know thine enemy.

  I stand, face screwed into something I cannot even imagine the look of, except I am sure it looks pissed.

  “How can you be that mad at me? I didn’t even do anything!”

  “Don’t even start that with me, you asshole.”

  I go to stomp off, and he says, “Don’t forget your book.”

  I flip him off and leave.

  Nothing helps me get to sleep.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  I am still mad when I wake up.

  I have been mad all night, if the strain in my neck is any indication. It feels like I slept on it wrong, but it was just me and this pillow from the time I furiously dove back into this bed, and this is a completely averagely fluffed pillow. So it’s not that. It’s gotta be hypertension.

  I don’t think I’ve ever been this mad this often in my entire life. And now my body is paying for it.

  It is Reid’s fault that I wake up sore. Just add that to the list.

  Riya stays on the other side of the room while she gets dressed for breakfast and keeps sneaking glances at me.

  “You okay there?” she says.

  I grumble, “I’m fine.”

  Riya raises an eyebrow. “You sure about that?”

  “It’s just—” I snort out of frustration and Riya says, “Yes, you sound very okay.”

  “It’s Reid.”

  This Ha! I knew it! brand of smirk lights up her face and I groan.

  “It’s not like that. It’s just he’s . . . he’s been a total asshole to me.”

  The smirk immediately darkens and she says, “Do I need to kill a boy?”

  “Probably not. But I reserve the right to change that answer.”

  “What’s the latest?” she says.

  I open my mouth to give a scathing level of dirt but then nothing comes out because what am I supposed to say? Well, Riya, he did NOTHING TO ME over the past couple of days. A vicious, targeted nothing. Can you believe that? Kill him immediately.

  Riya just waits there, eyebrows raised, expectantly, and I also can’t tell her the actual things he did to me because that would entail confessing that we have both been sabotaging each other, which, when it comes down to it, means that we have both been *epic fanfare noise* cheating.

  “It’s nothing,” I say.

  Riya rolls her eyes. “And here we are again. You guys should probably just make out and get it over with.”

  I laugh. “Okay. When you and—”

  “Don’t say it. Do not. Say it.”

  I grin.

  “We have a challenge in like twenty minutes. We should probably. You know. Focus on that.”

  I say, “Ah, the tables have turned.”

  “Well, I needed to know if I had to commit murder before we went down to the kitchens; that was critical information.”

  “Hm,” I say. “Well. Fair.”

  And now the impending challenge has my stomach all in knots. “Are you nervous?” I say.

  “For today?”

  “Yeah.”

  Riya shrugs and runs her hand through her hair. “I mean, I guess. I’m always a little nervous.”

  “You never seem nervous.”

  A smile splits her face. “No?”

  “Even freaking Andrew is afraid of you.”

  She says, “Oh, please, he’s not afraid of me,” but she tosses her hair while she says it. She should be proud. That douche seems incapable of being intimidated.

  “You know he is.”

  She looks down at her nails and says, “Well. He should be.” Then goes in search of a decent pair of pants to wear downstairs.

  “I’m nervous,” I say.

  “I know.” I raise an eyebrow in response. “You don’t hide it super well.” Riya laughs and I just shrug.

  “That was never one of my strong suits, no.”

  “What are you so freaked out about?”

  “Oh, just . . .” I can feel the dread grabbing at my bones. That familiar thing that says Carter, you want something too much. You want something that everyone else here wants too and what makes you that special? Like I’m arrogant to even go for it. “There’s eleven other people here. And it feels so small now but it feels like so many people, too.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I just . . . damn, I need a break from this place for five seconds.”

  “Tell me about it,” she says. “All cooking all the time, your friends are your competition.” She pulls a shirt over her head. Then says, “It’s . . . a lot.”

  “Yeah,” I say. And I get dressed and go downstairs.

  There’s hardly any breakfast left; most people are putting their stuff up and heading over to the kitchen by the time we get to the cafeteria, so there’s basically just time to grab a couple granola bars and go.

  I snag one for me and one for her, and Reid looks over at us before he leaves. “What happened, Lane?” His long legs carry him close to me much faster than I would have anticipated. “You oversleep?”

  I purse my lips. “No. Some of us know how to set alarms on our phones.”

  He barks out a laugh. “Do you, though? Eleven minutes until challenge.”

  I keep my eyes locked on his while I take a slow bite of my granola bar. Luxuriate in the brown sugar and the oats and chocolate chips. His Adam’s apple bobs when he swallows. “Then you’d better go, Reid. Don’t want to be late.”

  Reid grinds his teeth together for an instant, eyes on my granola bar. Or something near it. “Walk with me,” he says.

  Heat crawls up my face and I bet I’m blushing and there is just no reason for that. Riya is beside me and I can feel her nearly vibrating.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I’m up for psychological torture today.”

  “I swear I won’t torture you,” he says. “There’s hardly any time for that on a walk this short.” His mouth tips up.

  He’s so adorably adorable right now that I almost give into it, and since when did I start thinking of Reid as adorable? EXTREMELY since when did that matter in any way? Now I’m mad. Mad about the adorableness, I guess, and mad that that thought has even crossed my mind, and mad because I barely got any sleep and I’ve just been mad for a while, and so I say, “Reid.” My voice comes out hard. “I’m walking with Riya. I’m not interested.”

  He blinks. And something in his face falls. “Oh. Yeah, okay. I’ll uh, see you at the kitchen then.”

  I take a very hard bite of my granola bar, hard enough that I bite my tongue, but I have to just suffer it in silence. So I stand there, eyes watering so no one will know that I have legitimately just injured myself on my hatred for that boy. And when he seems like he’s a safe distance ahead of us, Riya and I go.

  She doesn’t ask about it, even though I can see her biting her tongue to keep from it, and I appreciate that.

  Because, frankly, I’m a little confused myself.

  The one thing that’s so very enthusiastically burrowing under my skin is the frustration of all of it, and namely this: walking across the quad, minutes ticking down until challenge time, I realize I didn’t put five seconds of thought last night into today’s challenge. I haven’t been googling technique or streaming cooking shows half as often as I should.

  I’m so mad at myself right now, because somewhere along the line, I started devoting more brainpower to him than to what I actually want. My fingers curl into fists, because this was me. He didn’t crawl into my brain and reprogram it; I did that all on my own.

  Well, no more. If Reid Yamada wants my attention, he can earn it, because from here on out, my brain is nothing but flour and sugar and butter and flank steaks and ten billion different kinds of bizarre reductions. I grit my teeth before we open the door.

  Riya stands beside me in the ki
tchen, which looks so empty now. It’s funny, because I would have definitely thought before that twelve chefs in a kitchen was ridiculously overcrowded, but now my skin practically tingles at the promise of all this open space in which to move.

  We are the last ones here. The judges still wait until the clocks hits nine a.m. to start, and the moment Dr. Kapoor starts talking, I shut my eyes to find my zen. I need it today.

  Today, whatever happens, I will do nothing but focus.

  “Well,” he says. “Only a dozen of you left. I wish to commend you all on making it this far. But there is still a long road ahead to get to that scholarship.”

  My heart sinks at that, hanging out in the bottom of my stomach like lead. The thought in my head that whispers: This is a waste, a waste, a waste. You’re never going to get it. I mentally bat it away and blink ahead at the judges.

  “I assume we’re all comfortable with the way things have worked up until this point. Mystery ingredients and time cut short and judging both individually and in our groups.”

  This feels like a sentence that precedes the word but.

  “But today,” says Dr. Kapoor, and if I wasn’t so freaking nervous, I would be proud of myself for predicting the next word. Like a psychic. “Today, everything changes.”

  A little rustle goes through the group and I glance at Riya, then across the kitchen at Reid, who is very definitely not looking at me.

  I look back up front. No distractions today.

  Even if he does look sad, like a tall, aggressive puppy.

  No. Distractions.

  “Starting today,” Dr. Freeman cuts in, “the individual challenges will be eliminated. To be resurrected at a later date, but from here on out, while there will indeed be two weekly challenges, you will not be performing any of them on your own.”

  Andrew’s smug face pops into my head and suddenly I’m not just nervous—I’m actually worried. If it’s all group stuff from now until who-knows-when, he could completely screw us. Lord save me from overconfident white boys.

  Maybe Riya’s spine of steel will rescue us. If anything possibly can.

  The energy in the room is immediately different—the tension is actually tangible on the air. I’m tapping my fingers on my thigh and have to consciously tell myself to unclench my jaw. It’s sore already.