21 Stolen Kisses

by Lauren Blakely

  Then his voice veers to sadness. “She was there for me. She helped me get through my mom’s death. She went to her memorial service, and she made sure I was going to be okay. She was like a mom, in a weird way, to me too. That’s why I was there all the time, at your house. Before I even fell for you. I was there, because I guess I needed her to look out for me.”

  And that’s when my world stops moving.

  This is the moment.

  The point in time around which everything rotates. His words are an epiphany. They are the crystal clear realization of one cold hard fact—my mother is the epicenter of us. We don’t exist because of us. We exist because of a reaction, a chemical, chain reaction to her. We could never have come to be without Jewel Stanza. But more so, if she wasn’t who she is, we wouldn’t have needed each other. Had she been a normal woman, a regular mom, any other TV writer client, Noah and I would not have become misfit puzzle pieces furiously seeking the missing one that fit.

  She’s a mom to me, and she’s a surrogate mom to him. She is the force of our lives, the hurricane that threw us together, and we’ve been caught in the eye, fooled by the calm of our secret hideout.

  We are too similar, too connected to her. Our love affair started in her shadow; it would always be shrouded in the half-light of my mother. I look at Noah, at those dark-blue eyes I’ve loved getting lost in, at his brown hair that’s so soft under my fingers. I am peering in a mirror, seeing myself reflected back. But he’s more than just my reflection, because I can finally see what he’s always been—an escape hatch. He’s been the tunnel I’ve been digging for years, he’s been the shield to protect me from her.

  For the first time, I am faced with the truth of this great love. That I don’t even know the why of it.

  I don’t know if I love him for him or because he’s the way I could get away with something finally, after all those years of her getting away with everything.

  She ruined my friendships, and I retaliated. I took her best friend away from her.

  I am no better than she is. I am the same.

  A tear slides down my cheek.

  “I can’t see you anymore,” I say, my voice breaking. “We can’t do this anymore.”

  “Why?” he asks, like he’s croaking out the word.

  “We just can’t.”

  “Why? Tell me why.”

  How do I even begin to list all the reasons?

  I drop my head in my hands. Take a deep breath. He gently smooths out my hair. God, I will miss this. I will miss him more than I ever did before. My heart is gasping inside of me, choking as I look up, finally speaking the truth.

  “Because I don’t know who I am. I don’t even know how to live a life separate from her. I don’t know how to be a friend. I’m not even a very good daughter. I’m just stumbling through everything, and you’re the only thing that’s ever made any sense to me,” I say, as I run my fingers along the collar of his shirt. It’s too hard not to touch him. My leg is pressed against his. Our bodies are magnets, and they seek each other out even as we fall apart.

  “And if we go on I’ll never know who I am without this love,” I say, my voice breaking as a new round of tears rains down. At least I’m finally being honest. At least I’m telling him the big truth as the fountain patters behind us, and crowds walk by, coming and going in the middle of the day. “I love you more than I ever knew I could, but I don’t know what the hell I’m doing with life or anything. I’m a mess. And I can’t have you be the only thing in my life that’s right. That’s not fair.”

  “I know who you are,” he says firmly, his dark eyes on me, the look in them resolute. He lifts my chin gently with his fingers, so the hold between us can’t be broken. “You’re the girl who loves musicals, even the ones that didn’t make it. You’re the woman who looks for hearts in the middle of a messy world. Who admires her father and wants to study art because of him. Who laughs at my jokes. Who loves to hear stories. Who seeks out absurd humor and overwhelming beauty.”

  I bring my hand to my mouth so all of Lincoln Center won’t see my lips quivering with tears as he keeps talking, his voice softer now.

  “You’re the one person who needed nothing from me but me. You’re the person who sees beyond the surface at what’s inside. You’re smart, and kind, and sarcastic and sexy,” he says, then slows, his breath shaky, as the last words come out in a painful rasp. “And you are unbelievably heartbreaking. And if you don’t know those things about yourself, you’re right. I can’t show them to you. You have to find them.”

  He stops and takes a deep breath, then taps his chest. “But I know who I am. I know what I want. I knew what I’d risk. And I’ve done it. My boss could fire me today and I wouldn’t care. I’ve always been certain. I will always be certain. You were worth it. You’ll always have been worth it.”

  “So are you,” I say, pushing past the relentless slide of salty tears.

  He puts his big hands on my cheeks, gently pulls me to him, and kisses my forehead. I want to melt into his arms, I want to slide back next to him, to let him hold me, to fall asleep curled around him again. Instead, I let myself savor the last time his lips will touch me, the last time I will feel him on my skin.

  “You were worth everything,” I say, into his neck. I want to kiss him there, to tuck my face in the soft and safe crook of his neck, and escape. But I can’t use him for escape anymore. I have to escape myself first.

  He stands up. “Good-bye, K.”

  “Good-bye, Noah,” I say, and then I watch him walk away. He reaches into his pocket for his phone and pops the earbuds in his ears. I know he’s toggling over to Sweeney Todd. He only listens to Sondheim when he’s sad. I watch him the whole time, watch him walk away from the fountain, down the steps, onto Broadway, away from me, through the crowds, until I can no longer make out the outline of his broad shoulders, his back, his soft thick hair, until he fades into a sea of New Yorkers. Gone.

  I sit on the steel edge of the fountain for another minute. I hear a song from the Vivian Beaumont Theater drifting out. I turn, and a few actors are leaving the theater, singing the chorus to “Best of Times” as they go.

  How I would have loved to slow dance with Noah to that song at prom, to have the lyrics guide my heart with their urging to seize the moment, to seize love, because who knows what tomorrow brings.

  Who knows, right?

  I wipe my palms across my cheeks, erasing the tears. I check the time on my phone. I can’t linger here nor do I want to, so I take off for the final game. I make it to Randall’s Field in record time, then proceed to whale on our opponents, slashing with abandon, scoring like it’s breathing, winning the championship trophy like it’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done.

  I cheer loudly with my teammates and we jump up and down and we scream and we shout. For a moment, I’m fully seventeen and loving it. I’m a girl in high school, not an almost woman lost in time, trying to attach herself to a man, or fighting to detach from her parents.

  As we hoot and holler, I’m not defined by my mistakes or my lies. I’m just an athlete who likes scoring goals and who loves winning, and hanging out with her friends.

  I’m me.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Kennedy

  It’s still party time for my mom, even a day later. We’ve won the championship and she wants to celebrate, since it’s a Saturday. But I don’t. If I’m going to live the life I want, if I’m going to become the person I want to be, I have to start by telling the truth.

  I knock when I reach the door because this home doesn’t feel like mine anymore.

  She answers and chides me, telling me I never have to knock, that I’m always welcome, and that she has baked seven-layer bars yesterday because she knew we would win.

  “I wanted to have your favorite dessert ready and waiting.” She scurries into the kitchen and brings a plate to the table. “Coffee?”

  “I always want coffee.”

  “Espresso. Double?”
<
br />   “But of course,” I say, wishing our relationship was a simple as her knowing my favorite drink, and my favorite dessert. But she’s not my regular waitress. She’s my mother, and we need to go deeper than desserts and shirts and coffee.

  We sit down and I take a sip, and it’s the best double espresso I’ve ever had. I tell her this and she beams. But there’s a nervousness to her movements tonight, like she knows something else is happening, like she senses an undercurrent. It’s not about whether I fell in love with her agent anymore. Even so, I want her to know it’s over.

  “I broke up with Noah.”

  “Me too!” she says, like we’re sisters sharing secrets.

  “But not because of you. Not because you were mad at him.”

  “Mad doesn’t even begin to explain it,” she says, and she is back now to in-charge Jewel. She is a chameleon, my mother.

  “It doesn’t matter, Mom. I broke up with him because I was involved with him for the wrong reasons. I wanted to have something you would never know.”

  “Darling, we don’t need to keep secrets from each other. You can tell me anything.” She reaches her bejeweled hand across the table, her sparkly sapphire threatening to blind me as it catches a beam of the setting sunlight from the living room window.

  “Mom, listen to me. You asked me to keep secrets my whole life about your relationships. You asked me to keep secrets and you asked me to tell lies. And I hated doing it. So I went out with Noah.”

  “Hayes,” she says quietly but insistently.

  “Noah, Mom. He’s Noah to me. But the point is, that’s how deeply it affected me, how you lived, what you did. I can barely have a normal relationship with anyone, not a boy, not a girl, because all I know is how to cover up.” She starts to protest, but I hold up a hand. “I broke up with him because it was the right thing to do. And I told Lane the truth about how I felt, or didn’t feel, about him. And I told dad the truth when he asked me about Noah. And it felt great not to lie.”

  I grip her hand tighter, like I can channel into her some of this strange newfound courage I’m gaining as I try to live without a safety net. She squeezes back, like she wants it, like she wants what I have now. The capacity to change. “What I’m trying to say, Mom, is I want you to change too. I want you to stop messing around with married men. That’s why I sent those letters. But now I’m asking you directly.”

  I stop talking. I wait to see something in her eyes, maybe an acknowledgment, maybe a willingness to hear me. It’s not there yet, so I ask a question. “Can you do that, Mom? Can you please do that?”

  Her face is stony, but behind her facade I can see cracks and fissures. Maybe I’m getting through to her. Maybe all I had to do was ask. The strongest sense of hope fills me and I’m flooded with reminders: how she helped me with homework, how she went to every lacrosse game, how she cheered the loudest, turned off her phone and only had eyes for me. How she was there for me. I hold on tight to that hope. I hold it close in my hands, like it’s a delicate baby bird.

  My mom shakes her head and her voice is weak, like a child’s. Because she is the child. “I can’t stop,” she says. “I don’t want to stop.”

  I put my head in my hands, and press my thumb and my middle finger against the corners of my eyes.

  A voice inside me, maybe in my head, maybe in my heart, says Let her go.

  I push back from the table. I give her a kiss on the forehead.

  “Good-bye, Mom. I love you,” I say quietly, pushing past the lump in my throat as I stand to leave. She stays seated at the table, and this is it. This is the end.

  A tear slides anyway, as I shut the door behind me.

  On the stoop there is another letter waiting for me. It’s under the doormat again. I pull it out and open it quickly. It’s the Beethoven this time, “Immortal Beloved,” again. There’s a new line that’s been added to it, written out in pen by the sender.

  Everyone wants to know who she was—this “Immortal Beloved.”

  Do you want to meet? There is a lot to say, I think. How about we meet by the Rembrandts at the Met. Tomorrow at 3:00? I was never a fan of English painters, incidentally, or English history either.

  I fold the paper and jam it down into the front pocket of my backpack.

  I have a feeling I know who it’s from finally, and I let myself feel a small spark of excitement in my heart. I lift my bike and walk down the steps, knowing this is the last time I’ll carry Joe from the inside to the out. I won’t be living here anymore. I’m okay with that, I think. I have to be.

  I see a cab stop on the other side of the street. I watch as a man pays. Something about him looks familiar. I straddle my bike and wait. He opens the taxi door, then closes it, and the cab zips off. He looks over and up at the door to my former home.

  It’s Amanda’s father.

  My heart splinters as I push down on the pedals and ride away to find his daughter.

  *

  “That thing is like an extension of you.”

  “I like to think of it as an extra limb,” I say, petting Joe appreciatively.

  “Yeah, what would Freud say?” Amanda teases, as I wheel my silver bike beside her as we walk up Fifth Avenue, Central Park on one side of us.

  “I don’t know. What would Freud say?”

  “Heck if I know. I don’t put much stock in him. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, you know.” She waggles an imaginary stogie.

  “Speaking of,” I start, sensing an entrée, a way to slide into the most awkward of all possible conversations I could be having on a Saturday afternoon, one day after a massive lacrosse victory, “I see one. A shrink, that is.”

  “Oh, cool,” Amanda says, unperturbed. “That’s so Upper East Side of you.”

  I laugh. “She almost asked me if I lived off Fifth Avenue when I started seeing her. Imagine her shock when she found out I’m a West Side gal.”

  “And she still admitted you into her practice?”

  “I’m a pity case,” I say, but I know we need to move past the jokes and the banter. I can feel my heart beating faster, my nerves skating back and forth under the surface of my skin. This must be what it feels like to open yourself up, to let someone see who you really are. “So, Amanda, that’s where I go on Mondays. When I just take off after school and don’t say a thing,” I admit.

  She stops walking and tilts her head to the side. “That’s okay. I get that you weren’t ready to tell me. That it was personal.”

  “You do?”

  “Of course,” she says, all nonchalant. Then she plasters on an overeager face and pretends to beg. “But now I get to be super nosy and ask you why you go. Tell me everything. Everything.”

  I gesture to a bench.

  “Uh-oh. This is serious. You’re making me sit down.”

  We sit and I tell her everything about my mother, and my father, about how I grew up, the role I played. It’s like stripping bare. I feel naked and exposed, but even so I start at the beginning and I finish with her dad, who’s at my house right now.

  Correction. My mom’s house. I don’t live there anymore.

  Amanda stares at me, mouth agape. “Son of a bitch.”

  She doesn’t stand up or run away or leave. Not yet. There’s time for that.

  She leans her head back and pulls her loose hair into a ponytail with her hands. She shakes her head. “He is such a bastard.” She sits up straight, lets her hair go. “Shoot, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean he’s a bastard for being with your mom. I mean, he’s a bastard for cheating on my mom.”

  “It’s okay, Amanda. We don’t have to defend my mom here.”

  She breathes out hard. “Good. Because she’s a bitch too,” she says, but I can tell she’s not mad at me; she’s mad at my mom, but mostly at her dad. “Parents are so awful. They don’t get it, do they? They just don’t get it.”

  I shake my head. “Nope. They do not. They do not at all.”

  Then she snorts, this time combining it with a huff. “Hey!
I invented another one! It’s the can-you-believe-our-lame-ass-parents-are-diddling-each-other snort!”

  I laugh and snort too. “Who would ever have thought we’d need that one?”

  We laugh more, and we snort more, and then her arms are around me, and mine are around her, and we’re laughing so hard we can’t breathe. The situation isn’t truly funny, but the laughter is necessary. It is the only way through the absurdity. When we both finally calm down, Amanda holds a finger in the air. “Let the record reflect that my reportorial skills are officially awesome. Did I or did I not predict he was having an affair?”

  “You have a nose for news.” Then I turn serious. “Are you going to tell your mom?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe I need to see a shrink too to figure that out.” We sit in silence for a minute, and in the quiet my brain goes haywire and I picture that this is the last time we’ll hang out, that this is not just the beginning of the end, but that it is the end.

  “Are we still friends?” I ask nervously.

  “Of course.”

  “Good. I’m glad.”

  “Me too. I’m glad too. Hey, do you want to go get gelato and celebrate our championship or what?”

  “Absolutely,” I say, and as we walk to the nearest shop, I tell her about Noah, and her jaw drops. Then I tell her an idea I have for prom and her mouth forms the biggest grin I’ve ever seen, and finally I tell her about the letter I found on my porch and she agrees that it has to be from Catey.

  “I’ll go with you to the Met tomorrow and wait outside while you meet her,” Amanda says.

  “That would be awesome.”

  I buy gelato. It tastes great. So do the amends. The real amends.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Kennedy

  The first thing I notice is the ponytail. High on her head and white-blond. Her back is to me, her arms are crossed and she’s staring at a Rembrandt. As the sound of my shoes echoes across the museum floor, the girl turns around and shoots me a smile. In some ways, she looks the same, and in other ways she’s totally different. I am nervous because I have no clue what to expect, but even so there’s a warmth inside of me too that comes only from friendship; I am happy to see her.