My heart is beginning to know you.
What are you thinking?” Alex wants to know, driving down the lonely highway at a quarter to ten, moonlight a web between flecks of dirt on his windshield. “I know I just asked you that, but I like to refresh my data every two seconds, so I’ve gotta ask again.”
“That you’re cute. Ugh. It stresses me out. Do you know how hard it’s been to ignore your face?” I angle toward him, cheek on the vinyl seat, and smile at his posture: relaxed, fluid. He’s been tense this whole time, every minute we’ve spent together. I never knew exactly how much he was holding in until he let go. “You have thebestface.”
“I don’t want to hear about it. You only had to suffer for a few days.” He goes silent for a moment, thinking. “I always had a crush on you—can’t remember a time when I didn’t—but the crush grew into this uncontainable monster freshman year. I stared at you in biology while you stared at Corey Muskingham, feeling like my skin was so hot that it would start peeling right off me.”
I pat his cheek lightly, my face cracking into a smile so widethat it hurts. “If it makes you feel any better, I spent so much time memorizing your profile in eleventh grade that Mr. Broeckhart wrote a note of concern to my parents in my report card. In pencil, thankfully. What a snitch.”
“Corey sent me a friend request a couple years ago. I ignored it.”
“Haaaa! You did not!”
“Didn’t want to decline because it wasn’t as if he’d personally done anything wrong to me, but I couldn’t forgive how many pencils you loaned him that he didn’t return. Even your fuzzy pink one with the charms on it! Asshole. I couldn’t stand it. I remember walking about fifteen feet behind him one day after baseball practice, glaring at the back of his head, so jealous that I felt waves coming off me...” He talks with his hands, fingers spread. “Radioactive. I didn’t know what to do about it, so I threw my baseball into the creek as hard as I could. Then I had to go get it, like an idiot. Mom asked why my jeans were soaked. I told her the grip of my shoes was bad, that they made me fall into the creek. Brand-new shoes.” He sighs. “She made me wear my dad’s old sneakers until she could buy me a different pair—these ugly, bulky ones with ridiculously bumpy treads. My new terror became,What if Romina thinks my shoes are ugly?Which would be even worse than my usual terror:What if Romina never notices me?”
“Young Alex and his new hormones.” I laugh and laugh. “I forgot all about Corey. Hmm. Maybe I ought to look him up. You think he’s still got that hot pink skateboard?”
He slides me an amused grin, then returns his focus to the road, shaking his head. His left hand drums the door handle continually. And then, much too quickly, we’re rumbling down the alley behind the carriage house.
After he parks and the headlights shudder out, we sit in the pitch-black car for a quiet, loaded minute.
I turn toward him. “Tell me honestly.” Alex’s finger-drumming stills.
“Do I look like someone who just sixty-nined in a field?”
His eyes are sparks in the darkness of the cab. A flash of white teeth. “Nah.”
Before I can say anything else, he unbuckles and springs across the seat, lips crushing mine. He kisses me until my mouth is swollen, one hand roving up my shirt, cupping a breast, lightly pinching a nipple, his touch desperate right up to the point when I begin to reciprocate in frenzied kind—and then he withdraws instantly, leaving me disoriented. Out of my mind with need.
He musses my hair until it’s scandalously sexed-up. “There. Now you do.” Then he jams the button of my seatbelt, opening my door for me from the inside. Starts the engine again.
“You’re not coming in?”
He smiles at my disappointment. “I want to give you time to miss me.”
“Where will you go?”
“Home.” He shrugs. “Oreton isn’tthatfar away.”
I shove his shoulder. He laughs.
I slide out of the truck, smoothing my clothes. “Not even gonna walk me to my door. I see how it is.”
“Walking you to your door is boyfriend business. You want me to be your boyfriend, Romina Romina?”
I’m so flustered by this blatant teasing that I bump my elbow into a telephone pole.“No.”Before I unlock my back door, he calls my name.
I turn.
He leans his head out the window. “You never answered my question.”
“Which question is that?”
“What’s viscaria for?”
I stare at him, open-mouthed, trying and failing to remember. Before I can come up with an answer, he drives away.
It’s the day of the wedding.
