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“Come on, Owen, we all saw that kiss.”
“It was just a New Year’s kiss. I didn’t want her to be the only one without one.”
“How thoughtful of you,” Luke said, his voice dripping in sarcasm.
“Yeah, the last time I kissed someone out of pity, it definitely didn’t look like that,” Taylor said.
“It wasn’t out of pity. We’re friends. I just didn’t want her to miss out.”
“Well, it was quite the show!”
“We all know you’re not ‘just friends,’ Owen. We can see right through you.”
“And what is it that you think you see?”
“You’re mad for her!” Taylor exclaimed, knocking snow off the tree branches as he flung his arms into the air.
“That’s not true. We haven’t seen each other in like twenty years. We’ve just been catching up, that’s all.”
“Oh that’s all,” Taylor said with a nod.
“Right, sure it is,” Luke agreed.
They stared at me for a moment, then looked at each other, and then back at me. They were obviously having some kind of silent conversation that I was not a part of. And honestly, I didn’t think I wanted to be part of it.
“It’s all we could talk about last night,” Taylor finally said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, you guys kissed. Then we went inside, and you guys stayed out there for a long time. Then when you came inside, Skye was basically covered in beard burn around her mouth.”
“Her face was red from the cold,” I argued, though I knew that was a complete lie.
“So, we spent a lot of the night talking about how far you guys could have gone out there in the cold. There’s actually a lot of things that could have gone down.”
“Are you guys middle schoolers or something?”
“No, we’re just nosy gays,” Luke said completely seriously.
Taylor nodded his agreement without hesitation.
“Sorry to disappoint you, but there’s nothing going on between Skye and me. And nothing happened between us last night except for one meaningless kiss.”
I stumbled over my words as I said it was ‘meaningless’ and Luke and Taylor both took notice. I knew it wasn’t meaningless. And neither were any of the kisses that followed. I hoped they weren’t meaningless for Skye, but I had no choice but to keep up the charade until I knew how Skye felt about everything.
“Whatever you say, Owen,” Luke said with a sideways glance to Taylor.
I wasn’t sure what else there was to say, or how much longer I wanted to spend arguing with them, even though I knew they were absolutely right about everything they had said. So, I wandered over to where the kids were working and busied myself with building a snowman army for the rest of the afternoon.
19
SKYE
Iwoke that morning to a message from Owen that had come quite early, long before I was awake. The poor guy never seemed to get a full night of sleep.
“The girls would love it if you came over for game night tonight.”
“Game night? And what does that entail?” I responded.
