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“Mine.”
Okay, then. The kid clearly didn’t want to share. And who could blame him? He hadn’t learned the ways of the world yet. Hadn’t worked out that by not licking regularly, more of the ice cream was going to end up on him than in him.
Everybody in this world had to make their own mistakes – it was pretty hard to learn from somebody else’s.
“You ready?” he asked Ally.
She nodded. He stood and grabbed her crutches, rubbing off the ice cream with his thumb. Passing them to her, he helped her up.
“Come on. Let’s go home.”
16
“Oh. My. God,” Ember said, leaning into the camera. “I can’t believe he kissed you. So what happened after that?”
“Nothing,” Ally told her. “We got in the car and came home. Then Nate said he had to cook dinner, and Riley was in the kitchen with him so I told them I needed a quick nap and called you two.”
The three of them were on a video call. Crazy, since they lived in the same town, but there was no way to get together tonight – and this was a crisis. Ally needed her friends like she needed air. If she didn’t talk about what happened she thought she might explode.
“How long was the drive home?” Brooke asked. She was cooking dinner, her laptop angled so she could see them both from the stove. She stirred the sauce and turned the heat down, then added some pepper.
“Two hours maybe?” And they’d been the longest two hours of her life. So many thoughts had been rushing through her mind as she stared out of the window at the Pacific coast. Was he going to say something? Would he try to kiss her again?
The answer to all those was a firm no. Instead, he turned on the music as loud as it would go and tapped his fingers on the wheel to the rhythm. And here she was, wondering if she was supposed to forget it ever happened.
How the heck could she do that when she couldn’t stop thinking about that kiss?
“Maybe he’ll talk to you tonight,” Ember said, her face full of sympathy. “When Riley’s in bed. He can’t just pretend it didn’t happen, can he? Not when it was as hot as you described.”
“What did you do when Lucas first kissed you?” Ally asked her friend. “Did you talk about it?”
Ember shifted her eyes away, looking suddenly embarrassed. “I… um… went back to his cottage and then…” she trailed off. “Okay, I’m officially not answering that question.”
“It was different for you guys,” Brooke interjected. She was chopping vegetables, her knife slicing through stiff carrots. “First of all, you weren’t working for him. Plus he doesn’t have a daughter. There weren’t as many complications as there are for Ally.”
“My whole life is one big complication,” Ally said, sighing. “I’ve no idea how I can go out and face him again without blushing like crazy. If I act like a loon then Riley will wonder what’s going on, and that will only make things worse.” She shook her head. “Ugh. Why can’t this ground just swallow me up right now?”
“You’ll be fine,” Brooke told her, giving her a warm smile. “You’re catastrophizing. If he kissed you then that means he likes you. There’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”
“But what if he doesn’t like me the way I like him?” Ally asked. “Maybe he got carried away by the moment. We were having fun, sitting out looking at the ocean. Everything was beautiful. What if he regrets it?”
“Did he look like he regretted it?” Ember asked.
Ally thought back to that long car ride home. “I’ve no idea. He has this ability to make his expression totally blank. He’d make a killing at poker.”
“It’s probably the businessman in him.”
“Well it’s not very helpful.” Ally sighed. “I wish I knew how he felt.”
“How do you feel?” Ember asked, taking a sip of coffee. “Isn’t that the important thing?”
How did she feel? It was almost impossible to tell. She felt high from the kiss and low from the aftermath and in between she felt completely confused.
“Would you
kiss him again if he asked you to?” Brooke laid the knife down and stared at Ally through the square in her screen.
“Yes.”
