That day, as I watched him, I found myself thinking that Romeo was a kaleidoscope, always turning, changing colors with the season. Always different. Never static. The only thing that remained constant was his eyes. Those never changed. Dreamy glass-bottle blue that somehow managed to be light and ethereal and intense at the same time. Irises so pale that sometimes, when I saw him at a distance, he looked like an overexposed portrait someone had smudged an oil pastel across.
After a while, he put his book down and moved to the pool, sitting at the edge and dipping his feet in the water. He blew out a long sigh in three or four separate stages. I could tell what he was going to say next from the way he did it.
“Did you hear Ollie kissed Willow at the movies last night? Like properly. With tongue.”
I had heard that. Ollie texted me the second he got home to tell me and then called when I didn’t reply to the text fast enough.
“Is that right?”
It wasn’t that I didn’t like where the conversation was headed so much that I was bored of it. Romeo tended to be repetitive about things that bothered him, and he’d been bothered by this topic for well over a year. I knew exactly what I was in for. I swam another couple of lengths as he droned on about how unfair life was and how everyone except for him had been kissed.
“I haven’t been kissed either,” I reminded him from the deep end the third time he said it.
“Yeah, but you know that doesn’t count.”
“How come?” I asked to be difficult. We’d had this exact conversation so many times I knew the answer by heart.
“Because,Jude, tons of girls have tried to kiss you.” He raised a hand and counted off angrily on his fingers. “Allison, Carrie, Olivia Swales, Olivia Romero…”
I cut him off before he could ask the question I knew was coming next. “Too loud. Too quiet. Smells like ChapStick. And, I dunno, looks like she’d taste minty, I guess.”
“Taste minty? Smells like ChapStick? Seriously? What’s wrong with ChapStick? It smells nice.”
It wasn’t so much that there was something wrong with the way ChapStick smelled as it was that I didn’t want ChapStick that had been on a girl on me. It was hard to explain, soI didn’t bother.
“You’re messing up, Jude.” It wasn’t the first time I’d heard this either. “Seriously, you are.”
I placed both hands on the edge of the pool and hoisted myself out of the water, turning and sitting next to him as water ran off me and formed a pool around me.
Our feet were distorted by the water, looking bigger and then smaller depending on how the light hit them. We both watched them for a while, and I wondered if Romeo would start complaining about the size of his feet again. He didn’t. He moved his legs slowly as if trying not to cause a ripple in the water. As he did it, the polyester of his swim shorts made a soft, synthetic sound against mine. It was one of those things that had happened a hundred times before, but it felt different that time. Closer. Louder.
“How am I messing up?” I asked when I realized he wasn’t going to change the subject and was still waiting for me to reply.
He rolled his eyes. “I’ve told you a thousand times. Seriously, how many times do I have to explain it to you? You have the perfect opportunity here. Lots of girls like you. You could kiss a bunch of them for, for practice or whatever. That way when you meet one you like a lot, you’ll know what you’re doing. You’re lucky. You have options. I’m in deep shit here. I’m going to be twenty by the time a girl finally likes me, and I won’t know how tokiss. I’ll literally be the only twenty-year-old ever who’s never been kissed, and it will show. I’ll blow my chance. She’ll probably laugh and tell all her friends, and, and I’ll never get kissed again, and my entire life will be ruined.”
Romeo had a major tendency to catastrophize. “I’m sure yourentirelife won’t be ruined,” I teased.
His eyes flashed in annoyance. “You don’t think messing up a kiss with a girl who’s my soulmate will be a disaster?”
“Nah, you know I’m not really sold on soulmates. There’s no way there’s only one person for everyone. It’s wildly improbable. Impossible even.”
“More than one soulmate?” His mouth turned down at the corners. “Don’t be disgusting, Tiger.”
Romeo had some very fixed notions about what being soulmates involved, and I loved riling him up about it. I really loved it. I got a big kick out of hearing him talk about things like that in those days. His whole face would become animated and he’d move closer to me so I’d be in no doubt about the strength of his opinion.
He glared at me, so I caved and said, “It won’t be a disaster, Romeo.”
“It will be. Of course it will be. This is serious, Jude. My entire future happiness is at stake, and you’re making jokes. I’m falling behind. You are too, but you’re too dumb to notice.”
It was one of those times I started talking without thinking through what I was saying. It happened sometimes, but usually, I had a vague idea of what I was going to say beforehand. You know, an inkling, an idea of the direction I was headed in, at least. Not that time. That time, I didn’t have a clue. In fact, I hardly even recognized the sound of my voice when I heard it.
“I’ll kiss you.”
6
“Dreamers often lie”
Now
