Kiss Me Again

by Rachel Vail

  kiss me again

  RACHEL VAIL

  Dedication

  To Mitch, again and always

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  Back Ad

  About the Publisher

  one

  I TRIED NOT to look at Kevin Lazarus’s lips, or remember how they tasted.

  He was not only my former crush but now also my stepbrother, among other complications. I had just deftly dodged the kiss he’d aimed at my mouth by jolting my face up a few inches and kissing his forehead.

  Yeah. Practically a ninja, that’s me. Quite the avoidance maneuver I’d pulled off there.

  Wait. I kissed his forehead? Maybe that was a weird thing to do. Subtly but deeply weird. Like wearing a polo shirt buttoned all the way up.

  A hint of a smile tipped up a corner of his mouth.

  It occurred to me that I must have accidentally been looking a little bit at his lips, to notice that. Also that maybe I had accidentally said the thing about the polo shirt out loud, or that maybe he could read my mind. Or, maybe, he just wanted to smile because he was looking at me.

  That thought made my fingers all go numb. They hung like swelling sausages from my hands. I sent up a silent prayer that he would not notice them and back away into the hallway, horrified, shrieking, “Ack! Sausage fingers!”

  I decided to say a quick, firm good night. Kevin would get the hint and leave without seeing my fingers, and also without any other weirdness passing between us.

  My mouth clearly did not get the memo. Instead of saying good night, it mirrored the semismile on Kevin’s mouth.

  “So … ,” he breathed.

  “Mmm,” I answered, meaning mmm-hmm, as in Yes, like, Wow, this is awkward. But the hmm of the mmm-hmm got cut off, which made it more like a hum, more like Mmm, yes, this is good.

  As I was panicking/overthinking this, a door closed down the hall. “What the …”

  “Their door,” Kevin whispered.

  “Ew,” I said, and then articulately added, “Ew, ew, ew.” My mom and his dad, behind a closed door on their wedding night.

  “Shhh.” Kevin reached toward my head and touched a piece of hair that had sprung out of a twist from my wedding updo. He twirled it around his finger. This was a problem because I am apparently allergic to Kevin Lazarus twirling my hair. It makes breathing very difficult for me.

  “I kissed George today,” I announced.

  “Okay,” Kevin said. His cheeks blazed pink down near his jawline. He stopped twirling but kept hold of that strand of my hair. I made sure my head stayed steady so it wouldn’t get yanked out of his fingers, though a part of me was like, Okay? That’s it? Okay? Because he’d been ready to kiss me on the lips and maybe even tell me he loved me ten seconds earlier. But now he hears I had recently kissed another guy, and all he can say is Okay? Really?

  See, I told myself. This is why I like George so much better. And our kiss, mine and George’s, was actually perfect. Dappled sunlight, under a tree, music playing in the background. No twirled hair. No foreheads. No sausage fingers.

  “At the wedding,” I added, leaving off the dappled sunlight and other details. Overkill, I decided.

  “I figured.”

  “We’re not going out or anything,” I said, cringing even as the hedging words left my mouth. “Officially. Me and, you know, George.”

  “No?”

  “But I really like him. George.” I considered waggling my sausage fingers at Kevin’s blushing face, to drive him away from me. Like a hex. For everybody’s protection. “A lot. I really like George.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Kevin answered. Which I have to say completely pissed me off.

  “So,” I said, willing myself not to add And he really likes me—do you? Or possibly, more honorably, So get your darn non-sausagey fingers out of my hair. “So we can’t, you and I can’t …”

  “Can’t what?” he asked, despite the fact that we were standing so close we could smell the Crest on each other’s breath.

  “This,” I whisper-yelled back. “This, whatever. Don’t act like … This. Together.” If I sneezed, he’d get knocked out from the head clonk. Can’t what? Please. Though, to be fair, I could have just walked away myself. If I fully meant it, about we can’t. But I didn’t want to be rude.

  Or maybe we were magnets, me and Kevin, drawn irresistibly toward each other. Or maybe I was romanticizing and we were just two random ninth graders, overtired and confused and curiously addicted to flirting with each other.

  “Okay,” he said, but didn’t step back, either. He might even have tipped a millimeter closer. If we simultaneously said the word prune, we’d be kissing.

  Don’t say prune, I warned myself.

  “Okay?” I repeated instead. “Just—okay? You keep saying okay!” His hand fell to his side. My hair sagged in front of my eye. “You have to stop saying okay. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Microsmile. Damn.

  “Seriously! I mean, do you, like, even want to kiss me? Or were you just …”

  “Do you want to kiss me?” he whispered back. “You just said you and George …”

  “That’s right! Me and George. Yeah. And he, he, he really cares about me. He doesn’t just twirl my hair around his little finger and make me go all wobbly. He makes me feel … sturdy, in fact.”

  “Sturdy?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sturdy.”

  “Sturdy is good.”

  “Yes, exactly—it is! He also … he listens.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Not really. George is like—I made a random comment once about the weather report. George remembered, and he followed up on it.”

  “The weather report?”

  “In a romantic way. Forget it.”

  “He was romantic about the weather report?”

  “Never mind. What I mean is, unlike you, George doesn’t—”

  “Doesn’t make you feel wobbly.”

  I blinked. My eye juice had all dried up. I force-blinked a few more times, even though the insides of my eyelids had become sandpaper, so each blink scraped permanently disabling scratches into my corneas.

  “That’s not what I meant at all,” I whispered.

  “Charlie.” He caught my chin with his upturned right palm.

  My eyes closed.

  I didn’t think, No, no, no, I cannot kiss this boy.

  I didn’t think, Wow, I really like kissing Kevin Lazarus.

  I didn’t, for once, think anything.

  I just felt my lips melting into the heat of Kevin’s lips.

  My eyes, opening slowly, met his.

  His thumb swiped lightly down my cheek. “You make me feel wobbly, too,” he whispered.

  He walked s
lowly, silently down the hall. When he got to his door, he turned his face partway back to me. The smile on his mouth bloomed slowly. I watched it spread across the lips I’d just unforgivably been kissing. “See you in the morning,” he whispered.

  two

  I WOKE UP tangled in my sheets, with morning light slanting through my window, and congratulated myself on the wisdom of waking up early to get ready. I checked my alarm clock.

  10:23.

  What? It didn’t make any sense. I picked it up and shook it.

  Obligingly, it changed to 10:24.

  “You are not helping,” I muttered to it.

  The post-wedding brunch was called for 10:30. I had a big six minutes.

  I slipped into the bathroom, new clothes in hand, and locked the door behind me. Until the Lazarus family moved in, I had never even noticed if the bathroom door had a lock, never mind locked it. I took a really quick shower with a towel on my hair. There was new shampoo in there. Head and Shoulders. Well, okay, so. Kevin has dandruff, apparently. Too much information. His shampoo in my shower. Ugh, too weird.

  I had to dry off all the way. No more air-drying for me. First time I’d ever gotten dressed in the bathroom, and seriously? It was humid.

  I smudged a clear patch onto the fogged mirror to make sure I looked okay. A little discombobulated, but not awful, I decided.

  Not as bad as the night I got home from Darlene Greenfudder’s horrible house party back in early February, when I drunkenly blurted to Tess in front of everybody we were friends with that I had kissed her boyfriend, Kevin Lazarus, while our families were away in Vermont together over Christmas break.

  I never want to look or feel like that again. I obviously should have just told Tess immediately after I first kissed Kevin outside school in October. She was my best friend; we were supposed to tell each other everything.

  Tess said that night of the horrible party that our friendship was basically over, forever. She still wasn’t hanging out with me or talking to me, but she had come by the wedding reception, on her bike. Though she said no to coming in and having something to eat, she did tell me to wish my mom good luck from her.

  I took a deep breath and reminded myself that that was something. And also that I had been in the bathroom for a very long time and my hair was starting to frizz. I smoothed my tight gray brunch dress down in front and took a breath before I flung open the door. I could hear people downstairs and out back already.

  Not good. I never oversleep. I like to have time to myself before I face people.

  As I got to the landing midstairs, Kevin’s aggressively skinny grandmother smiled largely up at me and asked, “Do you know where they keep the bathroom?”

  “Um,” I said, thinking, keep it? Like a horse? Or a mistress?

  “I know,” she whispered conspiratorially. “Can you believe this house?”

  I said, “Yeah.” She had obviously forgotten who I was, despite all the mergers-and-acquisitions photos with both families the day before. “What a house.”

  She smiled even bigger, but just with her mouth. Her forehead and eyes didn’t move one millimeter. “Well, I’ll check upstairs. Are you a friend of Kevin’s?”

  “Um,” I said, since I wasn’t sure I had a good answer to that one, either.

  “Charlie!” Mom yelled from the kitchen.

  “That woman keeps screaming,” the skinny grandma whispered on her way up my stairs. “Poor Joe. Well, his own fault. Made his bed.”

  “Didn’t we all,” I answered, hoping I had in fact remembered to make my bed, or at least close my door.

  “Charlie!” Mom screamed.

  When I got to the kitchen, Mom was standing at the counter, dental smiling—like the pictures after your braces come off, where you show all your teeth but no humor.

  “Hi,” I offered. “Nice party.”

  “Who are all these people?” she muttered.

  I looked out at the deck, which was packed, and then toward the driveway, which was full of cars, mostly SUVs.

  “Your friends?”

  “Ha,” she said. “My friends have never been on time to anything, never mind early. ‘A few people,’ he said.”

  Kevin’s father had come up behind my mother. He mimed Shhh to me, and bent down to kiss my mother’s neck, melting the tension there into taffy.

  “Who are all these people?” he whispered, and she laughed, a more rumbling, low, and, honestly—as gross as this is—sexy new laugh, in response. My armpits burst into a sweat attack.

  “We’re out of coffee already,” my mother whispered up at her new husband. It sounded like some sort of inside joke, some coded thing all cool and private between them, rather than like a grocery issue.

  “Hey, Joe!” a guy called. He looked like a bald, muscle-bound version of Joe, leaning in from the deck with Joe’s expression mirrored on his face. “Is there more coffee? We’re empty back here....”

  “Working on it, Bill,” Joe said.

  “Uncle Bill?” I confirmed with Samantha, who was leaning against the counter, watching me with her intense, unblinking eyes.

  “My father’s brother,” Samantha whispered. She was chewing her cuticles. “He’s a caffeine addict.” Her eyes widened, as if she were saying he was a heroin addict.

  “Ah,” I said. “Watch out for Uncle Bill. Any of your friends here?”

  Samantha shook her head, her pale face serious. “Besides my Betta fish, I only really have one, and he moved to Japan last year.”

  “Oh, that sucks,” I said.

  “Yeah,” she whispered. “It does.” A hint of a smile twitched her mouth. She was wearing a long black skirt and a lacy-collared shirt, with a zip-up greenish hoodie sweatshirt over it, and tube socks with black suede Merrells. I smiled back at her.

  Meanwhile, my mother’s head was tipped back onto Joe’s shoulder, and they were smiling full out at each other, like isn’t this the most romantic and private secluded beach honeymoon ever?

  Joe said, “Kevin,” without moving his eyes from my mother’s. I half expected her to say, Huh? What? My name is Elizabeth, not Kevin! There has been a horrible mistake—let us annul immediately! But my witty mom had morphed into a romance caricature, so she just smiled dreamily. I suppressed a retch.

  Kevin had a croissant, nabbed from the still-Saran-Wrapped tray, halfway into his mouth as his eyes flicked up to his father at the mention of his name. “Hmgh?” he responded, and a flurry of croissant snow-crumbs confettied out in front of his face like a blizzard.

  Samantha and I both started laughing at that, which made Kevin choke a bit. That just got us laughing more.

  “Kevin,” Joe tried again. “Can you go get more coffee? Here’s forty bucks—get two of those box things from Cuppa, okay? And bring me change. Take my bike.”

  “I hate your bike,” Kevin said, grabbing the cash and shoving it into his pocket.

  “It has a basket.”

  “That’s why I hate it,” he said.

  Mom gave me a look. “Charlie can go with you,” she offered.

  “Mom!”

  “Come on, Charlie,” Kevin said. “Keep the change, you said, right?”

  “Ahhh, no!” his father called after him, but he was laughing, so I couldn’t be sure if he meant it or not.

  I grabbed my bag off the hook and followed Kevin down the stairs through the basement, grumbling, “How did I get roped into this?”

  “Please tell me you wouldn’t rather stay here with all my relatives,” he said, opening the door to the garage.

  I hesitated.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “I’m thinking about it.”

  He gave me a wicked grin and turned away. “Where’s your bike?”

  “In the shop,” I lied, because I didn’t feel like going around back to jiggle it out of the shed. “Also, I’m wearing a dress.”

  “I noticed.”

  When normal people blush, their cheeks pink up a bit. My whole head lit up like a red ver
sion of Violet Beauregarde’s, midmetamorphosis into a blueberry. I could feel it heating up the garage. He noticed. He noticed my dress. He noticed I’m wearing it.

  I tried to talk my head into chilling by explaining to it that he had only meant that he noticed I was wearing a dress, no big deal—he hadn’t, for instance, added that I looked hot in it or anything. There was truly no need for my head to go all aflame over such a thing. The fact that I was wearing a dress was not that huge a mystery to have uncovered.

  “Do you want to take Samantha’s bike?” he asked. “It might be a little small for you....”

  “Whatever,” I said, trying to not look too hulkingly large, in case that was his point there.

  “Take mine,” he said. “I’ll ride my dad’s basket-case bike.” He grabbed his father’s blue, basket-bearing bike and headed toward the open garage door.

  We stood side by side, clicking the buckles of our helmets under our chins.

  “Ready?” he asked. He had already put one foot on a pedal and was zooming down the driveway with his other leg up in the air and then somehow over the seat, onto the other pedal, before he got to the bottom of the hill. “Come on, Charlie!” he called back to me.

  My cell phone buzzed inside my bag. It was George, texting that he was sorry, he’d be a little late to the party but would be there as soon as he could. I texted him back not to rush, because I was heading out to Cuppa to buy more coffee for the caffeine fiends. I didn’t mention that I was riding bikes there with Kevin, who was waiting for me down by the big evergreen at the bottom of the driveway.

  I shoved my phone back into my bag without waiting for a response and slung the strap over my head, across my body. Then I gripped the handlebars and rode down the hill, toward the empty, quiet street and Kevin and everything else that was ahead.

  three

  KEVIN CHAINED THE two bikes to the bike rack together outside of Cuppa.

  “Hey,” he said when I started on shaking legs toward the door. I turned around to see what was up.

  As a response, he touched my elbow.

  “Kevin,” I answered, my eyes darting around. “What are you—”

  “Chuck,” he whispered.