He steps forward, and I take a breath that feels hot and tight. He’s staring down at me, looking even more hollowed out and dangerous than usual in the low light.
“Don’t.” The word comes out of me soap-opera breathy, and the shame of it warms my cheeks. I sound like a victim, and I’m not.
“Don’t what?” he asks, tilting his head. Too-long hair slides to cover one gray eye, but the other holds me hostage. “What do you think I’d do?”
My throat clicks when I swallow, but I don’t respond. Because he wouldn’t do anything I didn’t ask him to do, and I know it. I walked into this conversation with my eyes wide open, just like I walked onto Sophie’s deck this summer. He’s waiting now. He waited then too.
We’ve been half an inch apart for a year. A century maybe. Lucas chuckles, and I feel it on my lips like electricity.
“I’m taking forever to do this,” I say, laughing. “Can you do it?”
“Yeah.” Then his hands are on my jaw, cradling my face like I’m made of something expensive. His voice drops low. “Hell, yeah.”
Lucas leans in, and I try to do everything my friends talked about, but he isn’t pressing as hard as me or using tongue or doing anything they said. Maybe I’m doing it wrong. It’s not like I have a reference for comparison, but it’s not what I thought kissing would be.
I ease back and feel him smile against my mouth. And then it’s magic.
Lucas goes so slow, a brush at my top lip. My bottom. He tilts his head and threads his fingers into my hair, and my hands finally unclench when he grazes both lips at the same time.
“This OK?” he asks.
I nod, though OK doesn’t even touch what this is. After a second or a minute or a lifetime, his mouth shifts. He makes a sound that I will hold in my memory forever. It feels perfect, all of it, and that’s how I know it’s wrong.
Because when you’re chasing a perfect moment—losing yourself in the perfect guy—before you know it, you’re throwing the rest of your life away.
His mouth is every bit as pretty as it was that night, but he’s frowning now.
“I’m sorry,” I blurt out. He knows why.
“You didn’t say one damn word to me after we kissed.”
I don’t know what to say, so I nod. I bolted half a minute after, lipstick smeared and knees wobbling. I confessed to Sophie on the drive home, but that wasn’t what I expected either. I didn’t feel giddy; I felt wrecked. No, worse than that. I felt as foolish as my mother.
I still remember flipping down Sophie’s passenger-seat visor, staring at my smeared, traitorous reflection in the tiny mirror. My hair was shorter, my makeup was lighter, and my acting days were traded in forever. I had changed everything that made me like her.
It didn’t matter, and it still doesn’t. No matter what I change, when I look in the mirror, I will always see my mother looking back.
Is that who my father still sees?
Is that who I really am?
“What are you thinking?” Lucas asks.
“I don’t know,” I lie.
Lies are part of the game I play with Lucas, and my heart told the prettiest ones of all. All those weeks that led up to kissing him, I inched my way from one flirtation to the next, convincing myself nothing would come of it. Until it did.
I guess I lied to him too. I made one silent promise after another, knowing I’d break every one. God, that’s so not fair to him.
“So what was it, Sera? Get tired of slumming it with the white trash boy from—”
My heart snags like a hooked fish. “Lucas, no.”
“Or is that just your act—the virginal, never-been-kissed bullshit.”
“It wasn’t an act.”
He steps forward and tilts his chin. My heart is climbing so high and beating so hard, I’m sure it will fly right out of me. God, I hate this feeling. Even the steady pulse of my body—inhale and exhale and over again we go—it’s all affected by him. I can’t think straight, and I want to. I don’t want to follow my heart—I want to be so different from my mother that one day, she disappears from my head. Just like she did from my life.
“What am I supposed to think, Sera? You came to my shop every day for three weeks. And every time, we talked a little longer, and you sat a little closer.”
“Stop.” My face is going hot.
“Stop what? Stop rehashing the fact that you literally asked me to kiss you, and now I feel like I misinterpreted or—I don’t even know! I feel like I wronged you on that deck.”
“You didn’t! I never, ever felt wronged!”
He throws up his hands, looking twice as big as usual. “Then what the hell was with the silent treatment? What did I do wrong?”
Nothing. My insides are breaking apart. My mother is winning, isn’t she? I push my hands into the center of my chest and beg my ribs to hold true. “Can we just let it go? It was one kiss. One night.”
He moves in until I can see lighter flecks in his irises. “You made it clear that kiss was a really big damn deal for you, that whatever it was between us was worth that deal.”
Shame burns up my throat like acid. “I know that.”