“What was with we ‘mostly’ kissed?” I asked.
“I didn’t want them to ask questions.”
“Well, now they think ...”
“We’re adults. We can do whatever we want,” Luke says with a shrug, and I turn to look out the window, my neck hot.
When he adds, “You’re not in high school anymore,” I face him with a quizzical expression. I hadn’t been aware that any of what we’d done and hadn’t done when we were together was contingent on my being in high school.
“I don’t know what that means,” I tell him as we pull up in front of my house, but he shakes his head.
“Never mind,” he says.
As I climb out of the car, my mind is a year in the past, flipping through memories I haven’t let myself think about in a while. Luke’s hands. His hot breath on my skin, his lips slightly parted, and the way his eyes went almost black after every kiss. The helpless way he sometimes looked at me, as if I were in total control, when the truth was, I had been just as breathless and desperate as he was.
“Good night, Luke,” I say, unable to meet his eye as I shut the door.
“Night, Jessi.”
9
THEN
The hardest thing,with Luke being miles away, was not letting him, not lettingus,become the single most important thing in my life. When we weren’t video chatting or talking on the phone, we were texting. It had become my mission to make him an emoji fiend by the time I was done with him. Which, if I had my way, was going to be never.
School became a simple hurdle to get over before we could get to the weekend, when we would see each other again.
We told Mel and Rowan the last weekend in September. The first weekend of October, Luke drove all the way back to Winchester. It was late on Friday night when I got his text:I’m outside.
I jumped out of bed, finger-brushed my hair, and raced down the stairs and out the front door. I waited outside his car door, leaping on him when he opened it. We kissed for what felt like eternity, and then we both slid back into the car, him behind the wheel and me in the passenger seat.
“Your parents are going to hate me,” Luke said, running a hand through his hair. It was already messy from me pushing my hands through it while we kissed. I loved seeing Luke, perfect put-together Luke, all disheveled and rumpled, and knowing it was because of me.
“My mom won’t notice, and my dad goes to sleep at like nine.” It was after ten now. “What will most likely happen is that Mel will start to hate me.” Even as I said it, a hint of fear sparked in me. I guess it was natural now to second-guess how each and every one of the Cohens felt about me. After all these years, it turned out that Luke saw me completely differently from the way I’d always thought he had. That was a good thing, but it also meant that the others might have seen me differently, too. Rowan was certainly never in a good mood with me lately. And there was the whole thing the night his mom was diagnosed and the way he’d been after the fact. Maybe even Mel’s feelings about me were more complicated than I understood.
Luke grinned now, as if what I’d said was absurd. “Never.”
“You skipped your last class to drive all the way out here,” I pointed out.
“She doesn’t need to know that.”
“And you’ll get home smelling like ChapStick and me.”
“I hope so,” he said, and leaned across the console to kiss me again. “Stop worrying what Mom thinks. She loves you.”
Something lit up inside me at his words. Most days, I was ninety-nine percent sure of this, but occasionally, insecurity reared its ugly head.
“All this time we wasted,” I said, shaking my head and wanting to get away from the subject. “Being friends. Not kissing. So stupid.”
“Sostupid,” Luke agreed, and I kissed the grin off his face.
When we broke apart again, he had a serious look on his face. “How’s Ro doing?” he asked.
“Good. I think,” I said. Ever since I’d told him about me and Luke, Ro had been even more distant. We had a couple of classes together, but other than that, I hadn’t seen very much of him. He had a different lunch period than I did and normally sat with his tennis friends anyway.
When I went over to the Cohen house, he usually wasn’t there.
“I’m worried about him,” Luke said, swiping a hand over his face.
