Page 91 of Wrecked

He wiped his mouth with a napkin, his lips quirking into a smile.

“What?” I asked, touching my face to see if there was something on it.

He leaned back, took my feet, and placed them on his lap. “I love you. That’s all.”

I blushed ten shades darker than the booth in the pizzeria. “You should.”

“I should?” He laughed.

“You should.”

“I should.”

The strip mall we used to hang out in is still standing strong. The pizzeria is there, but the arcade is long gone. In its place is a pottery studio, the type of place where you pick out premade items and paint them. Brad would have liked that.

“Do you think there’s really a heaven?” Laying on the wooden floor of the tree house in my parents’ backyard, I turned to Brad, who was drawing on a large white pad. A piece of charcoal was in his hand, the dust all over his fingers.

He paused, his light eyes roving over his work. “No.”

I lean up. “That’s morbid.”

“You asked.” His face was pinched in, and the deep lines by his brows were thick.

Rolling over, I crawled over to him and took the sketchpad from his hands. It was a drawing of me. He drew me often but was never satisfied. He captured the almond shape of my eyes, the lashes bending at the ends. My heart-shaped face was shadowed beautifully, making me look prettier on paper than I was in real life.

“This is gorgeous,” I praised.

He looked annoyed, his grimace unavoidable. “I can never get your lips right.”

I looked back at the picture. “What’s wrong with it?”

“You have this Cupid’s bow at the top of your mouth. That dimple, I can’t get right. Never. I mess it up every damn time.” Brad was agitated, and it was unlike him. He never got upset with the world. Just himself.

“You’re obsessing.”

“If I can’t draw a simple picture of my girlfriend, how am I going to make it through art school?”

“I have a solution!” I declared. I grabbed his hands and put them on the sides of my head. “You’re just going to have to kiss these lips more.”

He tried to move his hands, but I pulled them back onto my face.

“You have charcoal all over you now.”

“Good. I like getting dirty.”

“Your dad’s gonna know I had my hands on you,” he said.

“Then, you’d better make it worth the week’s worth of grounding I’m gonna get.”

I take the boulevard that runs along the outside of town and drive toward the high school. The large brown building looks the same as it did when I went there. The same as when my parents had been there, too. I drive around toward the park where Brad and I had our first kiss and further to the basketball courts where I spent many nights with Adam.

“You mind if Adam and Nina come with us tonight?” Brad asked.

“More, the merrier.”

Adam had just started dating a college girl. It was the first girlfriend he’d had, as far as I knew. Brad and I had been together for ten months, and this was the first time we ever had a double date with Adam.

They met us outside the candy shop on Main Street. Nina had curly blonde hair and was wearing skinny jeans with a red long-sleeved shirt and a Coach bag in her hand.