“No. I mean, yes, but I kissed him first.”
Ty chuckled, then pulled me into a hug. “Oh, my baby brother.” The grip he had on the back of my head forced my forehead onto his shoulder. After all of it, my energy flagged, and I crumpled into him.
“What have I done?” I whispered. “That was so stupid.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Ty patted my hair. “It’s really okay, Jack.”
I shook my head, still using him to hold me up. “He freaked at the end. He kissed me back, but I think it hit him what he was doing, and he freaked.”
“That when you hit him?”
I nodded. “Before he could hit me.”
“Hopefully, it knocked some sense into him.”
I chuckled, then sniffled away angry tears. “I hate myself right now.”
“Why?”
“I forced him to kiss me. It was so wrong.”
“Hey, stop. Cal’s a big guy. Not saying you aren’t strong, but I doubt he’d let anyone force him into anything.” Ty stepped back,then smiled at me when I lifted my head to read his face. “Don’t do this to yourself. Things got out of hand, maybe, but you didn’t do anything wrong, okay? He kissed you too, and he had been begging for that hit.”
I snorted a laugh and nodded. “Yeah.” I rubbed over my eyes with my arm, then shook my head to clear the last of my tears. “Think he’ll hate me even more now?”
“Do you want him to?”
“No, but he should.”
“I dunno, Jack. He might. You need to be ready either way. Maybe he’s hated you this whole time for the same reason you’ve hated him.”
“Life is not that good to me.”
“All the more reason for it to throw you a fucking bone. You’ve dealt with shit before, but not everyone is like that. Cal’s an all right guy. I don’t think he’d do anything like those assholes before.” After a pause, he added, “Nothing you can do about it now. We got a match tonight. You gonna be ready?”
I wasn’t the same person I was the time before either. Ty was right, of course. Cal was a big guy, but so was I. I wasn’t afraid. Not of him hurting me. No, I was afraid I’d made this thing between us completely irreparable.
“Yeah.” Maybe. “I’ll be ready. Thanks, Ty.”
Ty laughed, then slung an arm around my shoulders and turned us toward the school. “You surprise the hell out of me sometimes. Though I’m not sure I’d ever want to watch you make out with anyone, I would’ve killed to have seen the look on his face when you sucker punched him.”
“I knocked the breath out of him. It wasn’t pretty.”
Ty threw his head back and howled his laughter at the sky.
The guys from school who were also on the FC team with us were in the locker room when we got there. Ty acted even more boisterous, taking any would be attention off me. We got dressedin our Stewart United kits, then headed to the pitch for a warm-up before the match. Mom and Dad waved at us from the stands, but I kept my eyes trained on the game.
It wasn’t until afterward, when I was walking off the field with a win, that Cal, his big frame standing out from the crowd, stepped off the bleachers. He didn’t hold my stare as he had last week, but he held his left side as if it still hurt.
The next day, the bottom right edge of my lip had a little spot of blue. I grazed it with my tongue every time I thought about our kiss, which was nonstop. When I was really in the mood—again, all day—I raked my teeth over the soreness to refresh the pain of it and chuckled to myself. He’d fucking apologized. That was kind of cute.
When the normal lunch period rolled around on Thursday, school was dismissed, and the masses left for the day. Food trucks provided pretty much anything and everything on a stick. Corn on the cob, corn dogs, chicken, meatballs, potato cakes, fruits dipped in chocolate, and candied apples.
Most of the games were geared toward kids, but a few, like the dunk tank and pie toss, were for olderkids. The festival was impressive for the size of the town.
Among the crowds weaving this way and that was a scattering of football players. And like ants, where there was one …
Nick and Michael stood near a bean bag toss. Cal leaned one muscular shoulder into a post, arms over his chest and head down, frowning.
