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“Please, don’t say that.”
“Why not? I do. I think about you all the time.”
“You think I’m messy and complex and that I don’t know right from wrong.”
“That’s not true. You do know right from wrong; you just choose to push the limits of both because you don’t know how to deal with your situation.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “You know nothing about my situation.”
“I know enough,” he whispered.
Then he did something he had never done before. He covered her hand with his and then awkwardly entwined his fingers with hers. She stared at their entangled fingers with her mouth wide open, afraid to look him in the eye.
He was touching her. On purpose.
Lucas cleared his throat. “You don’t talk a lot about what goes on at home and I respect that. I just want you to know that I’m here if and when you want to, talk I mean. Because I care about you. Like, more than a friend.”
Her eyes whipped to his and widened. He had never said anything like that before. He had always treated their relationship as one between friends.
Best friends.
Jagged edged rocks deposited in her throat as she convulsively swallowed while watching their fingers touching one another. Intimately.
Just when she thought he couldn’t have surprised her more, he lifted her hand to his beautiful full mouth. And. He. Kissed. It.
What boy did that? In ninth grade?
The majority of boys in her class were clueless and uncoordinated, trying to figure out the exact coordinates for kissing the girl without smashing their noses together, or their braces getting stuck. No boy in the ninth grade kissed the back of a girl’s hand. That was what men did. Romantic men. In. The. Movies.
From what she overheard in the cafeteria from some of the more experienced ninth grade girls, the more, so-called, advanced boys just fumbled and groped their way to home base, confused as to which hole was which, finding their way to their target purely by accident as opposed to any knowledge of female anatomy.
Treating them like a carnival prize to be won for the moment and then discarded.
Lucas didn’t look at her like a ten-cent prize at the local carnival. He looked at her like… a treasure.
Her mouth remained wide open as she stared at him, for the first time in her life, speechless. She felt a tingle run down her spine and settle in places farther below she wasn’t prepared to feel and closed her eyes as she pressed her legs together.
If all of that wasn’t enough, he kept staring at her mouth, his tongue barely jetting out to wet his lower lip, as his head began to lean toward its obvious destination.
The kitchen door flew open. “Hey, Lucas, we caught a bunch of stone crabs down by the seagrass beds, come check it out.”
Grant held the hand of six-year-old Rachel, who was beaming at their crabbing success, while Grant’s older, slightly more intuitive eyes, narrowed at what had to have appeared to a questionable scene.
Lucas moved with lightning speed, propping his head on his palm, scribbling incoherently on his paper, while Birdie stared straight at Grant as if caught kicking a litter of kittens.
“What are you guys doing?” Grant asked.
“Geometry.”
“English.”
They replied at once.
“Okay, then,” he said, pulling Rachel behind him while closing the door. “Carry on.”
Lucas offered to walk her home, but she wanted some time to think about what had happened and make sense out of it.
For the first time ever, she walked home that evening with a feeling that wasn’t at all typical for Birdie. She usually dreaded every step toward that ominous hellhole. Not today. Today she felt lighter than usual and with a sense of optimism. Hopeful that soon she would be released from her cage and free to wander the world, in control of her future.
