21 Stolen Kisses

by Lauren Blakely

  Untethered to him.

  He’s never looked at me like this, and I’m honestly not sure I want him to. I don’t even want to know if Lane sees me in another light. I am only in one light, and it’s not lit by a boy. It’s lit by a man. A man I shouldn’t have.

  A boy my age would be better for me. I should try to like a boy my age. I know I should.

  When the fries arrive, I hold one up playfully for Lane, offering it to him. He takes it happily, and we continue on like that as I try and I try and I try.

  Our Stolen Kisses

  Someday in London. Someday in Paris. Someday in Amsterdam. That’s what you said one evening when we were eating French fries at a diner after a show. You told me that someday you’d kiss me in all those cities. That you’d take me around the world. No one would care. No one would notice. “I’d hold your hand, and we’d walk down the street, and you’d laugh at something I said, because I always like making you laugh, then when you stopped laughing, I’d kiss you.”

  “But can you kiss me if I’m laughing too?”

  You raised an eyebrow, rising up to the challenge. “I would never back down from kissing you.”

  “Then kiss me now,” I said in a hot whisper.

  You looked down, shook your head, but you weren’t saying no. You were saying yes. You were always saying yes. Is it so wrong that I always want you to say yes? Some days, I feel so selfish to want you this much, to make you bend, to ask you to kiss me all the time. But you never seemed to mind. You slid into the booth next to me, brushed my hair from my ear, and whispered, “Diner kisses.”

  Then your lips met mine, and I shivered, as sparks raced across my body from your lips on mine. Your soft kisses sent me into a dreamlike state where my world was nothing but bliss and joy and pleasure.

  I suppose, in retrospect, it’s safe to say we were never very careful in public. Maybe we wanted to be found out.

  I think I do. I do want to be found. Because I don’t want the way I feel for you to be a secret.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Noah

  Jonathan marches into the doorway a few days after the event at MoMA. He holds his hands out wide and raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

  “Well?”

  Damn. He must really want the guy if he’s willing to speak first. Jonathan rarely goes first. One of his golden rules of business. Whoever speaks first loses the negotiation.

  “I met him. He’s a nice guy.”

  He stares daggers at me as he steps into my office. Parking himself on the couch, he plants his hands on his knees and widens his icy eyes. “And?” he asks, as if he’s hanging on the edge of the word.

  For some reason, I feel like toying with him. “And he enjoyed the polenta cups,” I say wryly.

  “C’mon, Hayes. Did you get him?”

  I tilt my head to the side. “It was one event. We spoke for three minutes, Jonathan. He’s not a “Wham! Bam! Thank you, Ma’am” kind of guy.”

  Jonathan rolls his eyes. “Then what of guy is he?”

  “He needs to be wooed. Romanced. We need to let him know what we can do for him.”

  “Well, get on it. That’s your mission. Jewel won’t be on top forever. You need another big whale.”

  He stands and walks out. He’s done with me for the day.

  Everyone is disposable in this world. One of the things I always liked about working with Jewel was her pure love for the story. Lords and Ladies became a hit because she put her whole heart into it. That’s why it grew like crazy.

  And as it soared, I fell in love with her daughter. I didn’t expect that to happen. I didn’t map out a plan to romance Kennedy at all. It simply happened thanks to the show’s runaway success serving as an unexpected wingman to us coming together.

  When Lords and Ladies skyrocketed last year, I licensed it to countries all over the world, so Jewel was always signing contracts and papers. She had so many papers to sign, she started sending Kennedy over to my office to drop them off.

  One fateful afternoon last June, I was wrapping up a deal for Lords and Ladies in Brazil, and the receptionist escorted Kennedy to my office.

  “How are you?” she asked, as she plunked the papers down on my desk and helped herself to a chair, her brown hair looped in a loose ponytail at her neck. She had on lip gloss, and that was it for makeup. Her directness threw me off, but it was refreshing that she didn’t ask how business was. I’d been talking business all day. I didn’t want to talk about business.

  “Good. I’m good,” I said. “You?”

  “I’m great. What did you have for lunch?”

  I laughed at the randomness of her question. “Sushi.”

  “Nigiri, roll, or sashimi?”

  “Combo platter, as a matter of fact,” I said, and tapped my pen on the edge of the desk, giving her a curious look, trying to figure her out. We’d chatted at her house, in the park on my morning runs, but this was the first time we’d ever talked in my office. “You like sushi?”

  “As long as it didn’t swim beforehand.”

  I smiled at her joke, knowing she was a vegetarian. “Good one.”

  She gestured to my computer, to the music coming out of the speakers. I was listening to the soundtrack of Anything Goes.

  “I get no kicks from champagne,” she said, the tiniest touch of sultry to her voice. There it was. Like a gauntlet thrown. Some kind of return to the night at her dinner table.

  “Mere alcohol doesn’t thrill me at all,” I said, starting the volley.

  “So tell me why should it be true,” she said, and her lips curved up in the start of a pretty smile. Her eyes met mine, those beautiful green eyes that made my stomach flip. I wanted to serve up the next line, the one that followed: That I get a kick out of you. But it was too soon, too presumptuous.

  “Love that song something fierce,” I said, trying to play it safe. She adjusted with me. Maybe she was tentative too.

  “Do you ever listen to any other music, or is it show tunes all the way?”

  “I would have to say it’d be a rare day if I listened to something that wasn’t meant to be belted from a Broadway stage. What about you?” I asked, eager to keep chatting.

  “I like lots of music, but I like musicals best of all. They’re so … happy, you know?”

  “Yeah, I know. I know what you mean.”

  “What’s your favorite musical ever?”

  “Well, I love Chess, as you know. And Les Miz, and definitely Rent, and of course Sweeney Todd. But my favorite ever is 42nd Street. My mom was one of the understudies for Peggy Sawyer for one of the revivals some years back.”

  “Did she ever get to play?”

  I nodded. “Many times. The lead always had some vocal problems.”

  “Not the kind of thing you want to have when your name’s in lights.”

  “Bad for her. Good for my mom.”

  “Did you see those performances?”

  “Yes, I saw her perform. She was amazing,” I said, remembering some of my happiest moments from when I was a kid. My mom was a moth to the flame of the stage—she adored it. It was her home and her love, and she shared it freely with me. And here I was, sharing some of that with a girl I was starting to feel things for. I’m not even sure I was completely admitting those feelings to myself yet; that’s why I let her keep visiting.

  “Do you have a favorite song from 42nd Street?”

  “Title song. Hands down.”

  “Can you put it on?”

  I nodded.

  She stretched across to the computer, shifting closer, and I didn’t move. I stayed stock-still, careful to not assume, not get too close, not do anything inappropriate. Keep it on this safe level. She clicked over to the new tune. The familiar opening notes sounded, and we sat in my office, quietly, listening to show tunes, as deal making and negotiating and business transpired in nearby offices. But not this office. Not for those few minutes on a Wednesday afternoon.

  When the song ended, she stood
up to go. “’Bye, Noah.”

  It was the first time she’d used my first name. The way it sounded on her lips stripped off another layer of risk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Kennedy

  “Want to go out tonight with me and Holly?” Amanda whispers as our philosophy teacher drones on about Descartes. “After the game,” she adds, because it’s Friday and we have our game against Livingston Prep this afternoon.

  I shake my head. “Can’t. I’m helping Lane with a project. A school project.”

  Fine, she knows I’m friends with a guy named Lane and that he goes to another school, but she doesn’t know where I met him. Because I don’t gab about seeing a shrink. If I tell my friends that I see one, then I’ll have to explain about my parents too—about why they really split. I don’t want Amanda to know about my mom’s habits. I don’t want anyone to know why their marriage ended.

  “A school project?”

  “Yeah. In history,” I lie, and my stomach ties itself in a knot. While I don’t want to tell her the truth about therapy and shrinks and my parents, I do want to tell her about Lane, what he said last night, and how he touched my cheek, and how we walked arm in arm. I want to ask her what it means, because I honestly don’t know. I’ve only had one boyfriend, and everything else I’ve ever known isn’t normal.

  As our teacher continues on about Descartes’s connection to Spinoza, I decide to go for it, whispering, “I think Lane might like me.”

  Amanda squeals under her breath. “Of course he does! You guys hang out all the time. No boy is going to hang out with a girl as much as you guys do unless he likes her too.”

  “Really?” I ask as the bell rings, and we stand and gather books and bags.

  She nods emphatically and it strikes me as funny, for a second, that in some ways I know so very little about boys, despite having loved a man. I’d never truly dated someone my age.

  “I bet he’s waiting for you to make the first move. That’s why he hangs out with you so much. He’s totally into you, but maybe he’s shy or something. So you should make the first move tonight.”

  “You’re sure? I mean, you’ve never met him.”

  “So? Boys are boys.”

  “What about men? Are men men?”

  She laughs. “Of course. Just bigger boys. They want more sex.”

  I laugh lightly, wondering if that’s what Noah wanted from me, as we file out of the classroom into the hallway. Amanda reaches her hands up to her head, readjusting her dark-blond hair from a proper ponytail, high and bouncy on her head as the school rulebook dictates as the permissible height and style of ponytails, into a doubled-over messy one. Like a missile zeroing in, the headmistress barks at her. “Amanda, you are still inside the school’s halls. Proper ponytail now.”

  Amanda shifts back to the cheerleader look, then gives the headmistress a penitent look before we continue on to our lockers. Amanda swivels the combination on hers and yanks her locker open. It is stuffed to the gills with books and papers and magazines and even newspapers. Amanda is old school and still likes to read the print newspaper because she wants to study journalism in college. A section from the New York Times falls to the floor, so I pick it up and hand it to her.

  “Oh, dude. You should read that,” she says, tipping her forehead to the black-and-white pages in my hand. “There’s this article in the Style section about this couple who just got married. And get this. They met in their kids’ kindergarten class.”

  I hold up a hand. “Wait. Their kindergarten class?”

  She nods several times. “Yep. They were married to other people, obviously. But they met at some kindergarten open house, like when the parents go to see all the artwork and projects and stuff the kids are doing. And they hit it off and then started having an affair.”

  I scrunch up my nose in disgust.

  “Seriously. What is wrong with parents today? I feel like everyone’s parents are having affairs,” she says, then lists the names of several classmates whose parents’ marriages ended in the last few years. Then she leans in to whisper. “Now, I think my dad is fooling around.”

  My eyes pop out of my head.

  “Yeah, he’s always taking phone calls in the hallway, or he walks the dog for two hours in the evening now instead of his usual ten minutes around the block.”

  “Do you know who it is?” I manage to say, even as my throat catches and I have a horrifying feeling that I know the answer.

  She shrugs. “Some loser, I’m sure. Who’d want him? C’mon. Let’s go destroy Livingston Prep.”

  At the game, my mom sits two rows in front of Amanda’s dad. She glances back at him several times, even smiles, even laughs a few times.

  I broil inside. I am a ball of fire, ripped from the sun, as I shoot down the field, because no matter what I do, no matter how I try, no matter what I decide, my mother finds a way to unravel it.

  We slaughter Livingston Prep. I score three goals, Amanda scores two, and I grab my mom’s arm the second I leave the field. I pull her away. “Stay away from Amanda’s dad,” I hiss.

  Her hand flies to her heart. “What on earth are you talking about?”

  “I saw you making eyes at him the whole game.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I roll my eyes like I’m a champion eye roller. “Don’t act like you have no idea,” I hiss, and I am half-shocked, half-psyched that I finally have the gall to talk to my mom like this. “Just stay away from him.”

  “There is nothing going on with Daniel,” she says, and I give her a sharp, knowing look. I point a finger at her. “You know his name.”

  “Of course I know his name. I was talking to him because he is the father of my daughter’s best friend. Now, enough, Kennedy. Enough. Let’s head home and have a nice Friday dinner. Do you want pasta primavera or shall we go out? Let’s go out, why don’t we?”

  I shake my head, then wave a hand dismissively. “I have plans.”

  “Kennedy,” my mom calls out, and her voice quivers. I feel a sick sort of righteousness at the sound. She’s scared. She wants me. She needs me. But I’m not going to budge, not on this count.

  “Can’t, Mom. Why don’t you see if Warren is free?”

  I shower, catch a cab back to Grand Central Station, and somehow manage to race down the track, fly through the doors, and slide into a seat next to Lane on the 6:20 train.

  “We won,” I say breathlessly.

  “Of course you won. You rock.”

  “You should come to our next game.”

  “I should. That is true.”

  We ride in silence for a bit, but as we pull into Scarsdale, I suddenly have cold feet about leaving love letters outside the clothing boutique owned by the former Mrs. Pierre LaGrande. She’s divorced from him now, the man my mom took to the movies with me back in junior high. I run my fingers across the letter I wrote as we walk down the street. I’ve written her name already, sealed the envelope, and placed a stamp on it. Lane, too, has his love letters ready, complete with words from Woodrow Wilson to Edith Bolling Galt, who became his wife and also the first lady of the United States.

  But now that the downtown, with its quaint shops and cute cafés draws into view, something seems wrong about reminding Mrs. LaGrande. I stop walking and place a hand on Lane’s arm.

  “Maybe I should just buy something from her store.”

  He gives me a curious look and waits for me to say more.

  “I mean, they’re already divorced. Maybe the letter is a moot point. Caroline said amends aren’t supposed to cause further harm. What if this lady is already past it? I could just support her business instead, right?”

  “Then let’s go shopping,” he says playfully, as he holds the door open to the boutique. It screams rich old lady chic, so immediately I model a crazily expensive hat, giving Lane a perfect pout.

  “Gorgeous, gorgeous,” he says, like a high-fashion photographer. “Now try this, darling.”

/>   He hands me a fancy scarf next and I wrap that around my neck. “Perfect, but give me just a little more panache.”

  I make a simmering look with my eyes, then he hands me a chunky gold bracelet that you have to be over seventy and belong to a country club to wear. “Oh, it’s just so you, lovey.”

  Pretty soon, I’m doubled over and so is Lane, and it’s then that a stylish fiftyish woman asks me if I need help. I straighten up and wipe the smile off my face because she must be Mrs. LaGrande. Her black hair is twisted into a clip and she wears cat’s-eye glasses. I’m immediately jolted back in time, remembering the day at the movies, when her husband bought me popcorn and told me to enjoy the show, and then my mom claimed a headache and said she’d pick me up when it ended. They spent the two hours in a hotel room. But if anyone asked, she told me to say she enjoyed the movie with me.

  The memories assault me, as terrible questions flood my brain: What was Mrs. LaGrande doing that afternoon when I was instructed to lie? What was my father doing?

  I try to open my mouth, but no words come. My voice is lost, stolen into silence by the images raining down on me. I’m a fish trying to breathe air, and I’m choking.

  Lane steps in, reaches for her hand like a character from a Jane Austen novel, bends down to his knee, and recites Woodrow Wilson’s words. “You have the greatest soul, the noblest nature, the sweetest, most loving heart I have ever known, and my love, my reverence, my admiration for you, have increased in one evening as I should have thought only a lifetime of intimate, loving association could have increased them … ,” he recites. Then he rises, reaches for an oversize umbrella from a nearby display, and says, “That, and we’ll take this umbrella.”

  She nods and rings him up, and I can breathe again.

  When we finally escape the store, we burst into laughter.

  “You, only you, would do that.”

  “Only me,” he says, then he presents me the umbrella. A red polka-dot umbrella with a curved wooden handle. “For you.”