I close the distance before he can say another word. My lips land on his, and my arms wrap around his neck. It doesn’t take him long to catch up. His hands push my hair back as I melt into him.
“Sophie, your grandmother is seeing this,” Jake yells from the front porch.
I pull slightly away from Wes, then hide my face against his neck. “They’re all watching us right now, aren’t they?”
“Yep.”
I push him. “Go get dressed. We have places to be.”
He starts to walk away but then pulls me back in and kisses me quickly on the lips. “Be back in five minutes.”
Randy opens the back car door for us, and Addie and Danny yell, “Surprise!”
I throw myself into the car and give her a big hug. “So this is why you haven’t returned my calls all day!”
She laughs. “I knew if I talked to you I would spill everything. Radio silence was the only way to go.”
I hand her their tickets, and Wes and I crawl into the backseat. He took a shower in record time and now we’re on the way to pick up everyone’s plus one. Well, everyone but the Evil Joes’ dates. They accepted the tickets from Nonna but opted to drive themselves in casethey want to come home early.Whatever.
Charlie keeps turning around in the middle-row seat and looking at us with a confused expression. He finally faces Olivia and points back at us. “Did you know about this?”
She lifts that eyebrow. “Not as soon as I should have.”
I’m a little nervous. This is Wes who I’ve known my whole life, but this is also new.
Wes links his hand with mine and tilts his head close. “We have lots to talk about, Soph.”
“Good thing we have a couple of hours until we get there.”
He smiles. “Freshman year. October. The haunted corn maze,” he says.
I nod. I have no idea where he’s going with this. “Um…Yeah?”
“Do you remember that night?” he asks.
I blink. “Kind of.”
He gives me a small smile. “I had been there the week before, and there was this hidden space I found. I told you to take the first three right turns.”
“I remember. I thought you were telling me a shortcut, but I got lost and thought I was going to die in the maze. Were you waiting for me?”
Wes nods. “For over an hour. I was going to make my move. But you never showed. And by the time I finally gave up, you and Charlie were getting popcorn from the concession.”
My eyes get big. “I had no idea. I thought you liked Olivia.”
“And I thought you didn’t like me. That night at the corn maze wasn’t the first time I tried to tell you I liked you. But it just never worked out the way I planned.”
“I really had no idea.”
He laughs. “I know that now, but I was a dumb fourteen-year-old who had no idea how to tell you I liked you. And then I tried to make it work with Olivia, but we all know what a disaster that turned out to be.”
I bite my lip and glance at Olivia, but she’s in deep conversation with Drew. “We both liked you, but she swore she liked you more, so I stepped back for her.”
He tilts his head forward until his forehead is resting against mine. “So we were both dumb fourteen-year-olds.”
“It seems like we were.”
“One last confession,” he says in a whisper. “My favorite cookies are those Key-lime-pie ones you made with Nonna, and I was the one who wrote you that love letter when we were in middle school.”
