During a round of truth or dare at a party their friend threw while his parents were away, Juniper had been dared to kiss their classmate Jason. At the time of the event, Rowan hadn’t understood the real reason why she was so upset seeing Juniper kiss him. She chalked it up to her best friend ditching her — even though she was sitting right next to her and the kiss lasted all of five seconds — or the fact she had been dragged to the party when she would have rather been doing almost anything else. Another one of Juniper’s attempts to get her tolive a little,as she said.
When Rowan played back Juniper and Jason’s lips touching in her mind that night, and finally put a name to the turmoil in her mind and in her stomach, she knew. As she lay next to Juniper in the cramped twin size bed in her room, she listened to Juniper’s light snoring mix with the cicadas chirping through the open window and had an overwhelming urge to redo that kiss. To wipe that kiss from Juniper’s mouth and replace it with hers.
She slid her face across the pillow to get even closer thanthey already were. She stared at the glow of moonlight across her lips and swiped a gentle finger down the bridge of her nose. Then traced the curve of her rounded cheekbone up to her hairline. Juniper swatted Rowan’s hand in her sleep as if it were a bug, and Rowan’s face shot straight back forward to stare, eyes wide, at the ceiling instead. She folded her arms over her pounding chest and forced her eyes to close. That was enough of that.
“You would tell me if you’ve kissed someone you wanted to right?” Rowan asked.
“I mean, yeah. I literally tell you everything. Why?”
Rowan raked the gravel under her athletic slide forward and backward.
“I don’t know.”
She felt Juniper’s bare foot nudge her ribs.
“Why, you wanna kiss someone Ro?” She teased.
Rowan’s heart rate skyrocketed. She jerked her leg to stop messing with the gravel like she’d been physically caught in a trap. She exhaled and settled her foot flat back against the earth.
“What if I did?”
Juniper hopped down from the tailgate and leaned her face over Rowan’s extended arm to give her a silly look. The proximity to her face, the fact that Juniper’s cheek was resting on her arm and her plump lips were parted so perfectly in that goofy grin, was enough for Rowan to finally be baited into giving a real answer.
“What if it was you?”
She watched as Juniper’s eyes flitted to her lips then back up to meet her gaze.
“What?” She asked on a whisper, a slight crease forming between her eyebrows as her grin softened.
Rowan shook her head and redirected her gaze back to the ground.
“Nothing.” She whispered back.
Juniper plucked Rowan’s hand from the tailgate, pulling herto stand up and face her. But in a move that made Rowan’s breath catch in her throat, Juniper didn’t drop it. She held it. Sure they’d shared all kinds of physical touches before, including holding hands, but this was different. This wasactuallyholding hands. She washolding her hand.
“Don’t do that,” Juniper protested softly.
“Do what?”
“Take it back.”
“You… don’t want me to take it back?”
“No, I mean, I don’t know.” Juniper looked down at their joined hands and swung their arms back and forth a couple times. “No.”
“That means…” Rowan ventured into unknown territory. “You want to kiss me too?”
“I think I’ve wanted to kiss you for a while now.” The crease was still apparent in her eyebrows, but the grin was taking a new shape on her face. “I think I wanted to kissyouthat night instead.”
Rowan grinned a little. “Yeah?” She let out a slight laugh. “I wanted to wake you up that night and kiss you.”
“You should have.”
Juniper traced a stray wisp of hair across Rowan’s temple, along the brim of her tattered backwards baseball cap, to tuck behind her ear. Rowan resisted the urge to shift under her touch, or increasingly warm gaze.
“Do you want to kiss me now?” Juniper asked as she inched even closer.
Rowan swallowed. She really wished her mouth weren’t so dry at the moment.
