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Chapter 14
I couldn’t speak as we walked back to through the woods to the party. I didn’t think I’d done anything wrong, but I felt like I had. We’d both agreed this kiss wouldn’t change things, but that had been before it happened.
Now everything was different.
“I’m going to go help Mom and Gretchen,” she said. The party was starting to wind down and a lot of people had already left. Many of the balloons had been popped, and the shrimp was getting warm in the sun.
The signs of a party on the way out.
“I’ll get a ride,” I said, and she walked away without saying anything else. I went right for Esme, who was packing up the leftover bottles in boxes to take back to the bar.
“Do you need any help?” I asked.
“If you want to help me carry these to the truck, that would be so great.” Esme was in excellent shape from slinging bottles around, but it had been a long day and I needed something to take my mind off what had happened with Natalie.
“You okay? You look spooked,” she said.
“I’ll tell you if you give me a ride home,” I said.
“Deal.”
* * *
I left my car at the house since I could walk to get it later when I sobered up.
“So, what’s going on?” Esme asked.
“I kissed Natalie,” I said. No use in beating around the bush. The drive to my house was extremely short.
“So, she did want to kiss you for real the other night,” Esme said.
“Yeah. And now I think everything is ruined. She said we shouldn’t have done it after and then she left to go help her sister. I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s a conundrum,” Esme said. “I’d wait and see how she responds. You’re both adults who made the choice to kiss, so the blame isn’t on you. But you might want to sit down and figure out your own feelings about Natalie. Even if they’re complicated. Might give you some clarity.”
I absolutely did not want to do that, but it looked like I didn’t have a choice.
Things between us had changed and I was going to have to figure out where we went from here.
Esme dropped me off and handed me half a bottle of champagne.
“Don’t drink it all at once,” she said.
* * *
I didn’t touch the champagne. Instead, I guzzled water and waited to sober up. I was too tense to do anything, so I just paced around the cabin, tried to watch about four movies, forced myself to eat a dinner of microwaved mac and cheese, and then walked back to get my car and bring it to my place.
Once all that was done, I showered, and realized I was out of things to fill my time with, so I yanked all my blankets and sheets off the bed and started doing laundry on a Saturday night.
I hadn’t heard from Natalie, but that didn’t stop me from incessantly checking my phone for any kind of message from her. I did get quite a few messages from my online dating profile, but I turned off the notifications and ignored them.
Wondering what she was thinking was driving me to distraction and I almost bleached my non-white sheets.
“Get it together,” I told myself.
We could get past this. It was just one kiss. One mind-blowing, gravity-defying kiss. At least on my part. It probably hadn’t been that good for her. She’d told me it was, but she was probably just being nice.
The most reasonable explanation was that I was a bad kisser and she didn’t know how to tell me.
