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He opened his mouth for mine. I swept my tongue inside. He didn’t pull away, but he didn’t reciprocate, either. I knew I could kiss. Aidan and I had had plenty of practice. But I felt as if I was initiating Sawyer in a decidedly unsexy way, like when DeMarcus had taught me to French kiss in front of an audience of our peers at his Halloween party in seventh grade, directly after Tia had taught DeMarcus.
I broke the kiss and pulled back until I could see Sawyer. His face was mostly in shadow. I wished yet again that I could gauge the look in his eyes. “I feel like I’m taking advantage of you, which is no fun at all. You don’t want to kiss me?”
“I do.” He swallowed, and he actually looked like he was in pain as he said, “I don’t want to get hurt.”
“This won’t hurt.” I slipped my hand into his hair and kissed him.
Again I felt that I was leading the dance. I was about to give up on him. That lasted about five seconds.
Then he was kissing me back. He pulled me closer, deepened the kiss, and explored my mouth. He bit my lip, almost hard enough to hurt. As I opened my mouth wider to protest, he gave me a taste of what other girls were talking about when they said Sawyer turned them on. In one minute he had controlled me completely.
He took his hand out of my hair and placed it on my breast. I broke the kiss to gasp at the intensity of tingles racing through me.
Just as suddenly as he’d started, he let go of me and backed away, his shoulders rising and falling rapidly as he panted. He said hoarsely, “We just can’t. I want to, but I know this isn’t going to work out.”
I gaped at him. I could not believe, after everything we’d been through to get to this point, that he was dumping me when we’d hardly gotten started.
I’d heard so many reports of him having trysts like this with different girls. Strangely, those accounts included the beginning, and the good stuff, but never the ending of those relationships. Maybe that’s because they all ended like this.
I jerked my pillow out from behind him, then grabbed my bag from the floor.
“Kaye.” His hand circled my wrist.
I glowered at him. I wasn’t sure he could see my face in the dark, but he knew what the sharp jerk of my head meant. He let me go and put his hand up, surrendering.
I stood and shuffled to the back of the van. Normally I was the one who told the other girls to treat their pompons right, leaving them in clean places rather than in pools of half-dried Coke on the concrete steps of the stadium. This time I was the one who unceremoniously knocked Sawyer’s costume bag and a pile of pompons to the floor in a hiss of plastic streamers. I lay down with my pillow underneath my head and closed my eyes, listening for Sawyer over the drone of the van motor, and hating him.
What I heard was a grunt near the floor. After a few seconds I realized it wasn’t a rogue bullfrog that had found its way onto the van but my phone vibrating in my bag and bouncing against the van’s carpeted bottom. I snatched the phone out. I knew Sawyer was texting me.
Sawyer: I never had a chance to tell u what ur stupid abt.
I waited. I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of prompting him: What’s that, Sawyer? But he’d heard me take my phone out. He knew I was hanging on what he would say next.
Sawyer: Me.
I texted back so angrily that my thumbs pressed rogue characters and my message was full of )$&@. I had to take a deep breath. I wasn’t going to send him an answer that was less than perfect. Finally I got it cleaned up and texted this:
Me: I’m not stupid about u. YOU lead me on and then shut me down. U have done that for the last time. 3 strikes and ur out.
I turned my phone off, threw it in my bag, and rolled over with my back to the van.
As soon as I’d done this, I regretted it. “3 strikes and ur out”? That was the kind of draconian statement my mother would make, setting limits and sticking to them no matter what, even if they had no meaning later and caused everyone misery.
But I wasn’t wrong, was I? Showing Sawyer how much I liked him was hard for me. There were only so many times I could go out on a limb like that, only to have him cut off the limb at the trunk and watch me fall. I’d been worried at lunch that his problems were too serious for us to get over. Well, I was done. Now he could start worrying about my problems.
I pictured my life as I would start living it tomorrow: single. I wouldn’t go after Sawyer. I wouldn’t worry what Aidan was up to. I wouldn’t try desperately to find a date for my nonexistent homecoming dance. I had great friends and lots to do my senior year—too much, according to my mother—and I could enjoy it all by myself.
I sat up and peered around the seat in front of me only once to see what Sawyer was doing. His worried face was lit clearly by the glow of his phone. He was still typing.
* * *
An hour later, the instant I arrived home and escaped to my room, I turned my phone back on and opened his texts.
Sawyer: 3 strikes makes it sound like ur playing a game w ME.
Sawyer: Kaye
Sawyer: We need to talk abt this. You can’t just pretend I’m not here. I’m RIGHT HERE & if u don’t answer I will do something inconceivably cruel to ur pompons.
Sawyer: Kaye
Sawyer: Kaye.
11
THE NEXT NIGHT HARPER CALLED me after dinner. “What’cha doing?” she asked.
“My next paper for Mr. Frank.”
“Oh, shit. On Saturday night? Have I missed something? I thought it wasn’t due for another two weeks.”
