He leans his forehead against mine, still holding me around my waist. “ ‘Wow’ is not an adjective.”
In four years, I have never heard his voice like this. This ragged, this spent.
I’m not sure how long we stand there, breathing each other in, breaking the relative silence every so often to laugh like the love-drunk loons we are. His cheeks are flushed. I’m sure mine are too.
“I was so sure I’d ruined everything,” he says after a while. He reaches for my hand, and it’s so easy to thread my fingers with his. “I wanted to kiss you on that bench so badly. But then we were interrupted, and I got… scared, I guess. Scared you didn’t feel the same way.”
It’s a relief to hear him say it. “So that’s why you said it would have been a mistake.” I trace his knuckles with my thumb.
He nods. “I thought, I don’t know, that you regretted it, and the best way for me to get over it was to pretend it was a mistake. I didn’t want it to make you uncomfortable.”
“A defense mechanism.”
“Yeah,” he says, bringing up his other hand to cup my face.
“I guess I have a few of those too.”
When we kiss again, it’s softer. Sweeter.
Out of the corner of my eye, I can see D. B. Cooper watching us, reminding me why we came here in the first place.
“The game.” I use all my willpower to stop kissing him. We’re so close to that five grand, to Neil potentially being able to change his name. To some freedom from his old life—whether I’m part of that new life or not. “We should go.”
“I, um. Need a moment,” he says, glancing down sheepishly. Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I can’t help grinning again.
With some effort, we untangle ourselves and reach for our phones. No Howl updates, meaning no one’s won yet. Slowly, I feel myself slide back into competitive mode. Westview is less than fifteen minutes away. Howl is nearly ours.
We weave our way out of the museum, hiding our flushed faces from the woman at the front desk. When I glance back, I swear I see her smile.
* * *
I’m not sure if I reach for his hand first or if he reaches for mine, but it immediately feels natural. He brushes his thumb across my knuckles on the way to my car, and when we get there, he pushes me up against the driver’s side door like a bad boy in a teen movie.
“We have a whole summer to do this,” I say, even as I’m grabbing his T-shirt and tugging his mouth to mine. “I mean—if you want to.”
And although his yearbook confession is stamped behind my lids whenever I blink, his response sends sparks down to my toes.
“Do I want to kiss you all summer?” He raises his eyebrows, mouth quirking to one side. “Is Nora Roberts prolific?”
“More than two hundred books,” I say. Then, with some reluctance: “But we’re so close. We’ll come back to this.”
One long kiss, and then he groans. “Fine, fine. You win.”
“Can you say that again? I like the way it sounds.”
“Shameless,” he says, but there’s that lazy-sweet-sly smile again, the one I’d never seen before tonight. The one I know now is solely mine.
But something tightens in my throat. A whole summer. Suddenly, it doesn’t sound very long at all.
“Hey, lovebirds. You guys finally figured it out, huh?”
Across the street, Brady Becker is unlocking a little white Toyota, pausing to wave at us. The paper with his name on it burns hot in my pocket.
Stronger than the shock of star quarterback Brady Becker realizing we’re together is the sense of dread creeping up my spine.
Neil blinks a few times, as though trying to process what Brady’s doing here. “Hey,” he says quietly, voice laced with uncertainty. We haven’t talked about how to announce ourselves to the rest of our graduating class, if that’s something we even want to do. I twine my fingers through Neil’s, showing him exactly how I feel about that. His features relax, and he wraps his fingers around mine again. “Yeah, we, um… yeah. We did.”
His nerves are too adorable.
“Cool museum,” Brady says, and I force my oxytocin-addled brain to remember where Brady was in the most recent blast of Howl standings.
Fourteen.
He had fourteen, just like we did. And if he’s leaving the museum, that must mean—
“See you back at school,” he says. “I’ll be the one with the five-thousand-dollar check.”
DRAFT: (no subject)
Rowan Roth <[email protected]>
to: [email protected],
Saved Saturday, June 13, at 12:32 a.m.
Dearest Mom and Dad,
This is scary, but here are the first few chapters. Be gentle with me.
Love,
Your favorite daughter, cream cheese enthusiast, and potential one-day romance author
Attachment: chapters 1–3 for mom and dad.docx
2:04 a.m.
I DIDN’T THINK Howl would end with a car chase, but I’ve been wrong about a lot of things today. To be fair, it’s a chase between two used cars with decent fuel economies and five-star safety ratings. The Fast and the Furious: Sensible Sedans.
The streets are deserted, nighttime lights smudging the skyline with gold, and my heart bangs against the seat belt as we trail Brady to the freeway.
“I didn’t realize he was so close to us,” I say, changing lanes and hitting the gas. We remain parallel with the Toyota, even as I accelerate up to 70 mph.
Neil stares down at his phone. “D. B. Cooper must have been his last one too. I guess we were… distracted.”
“Right,” I say, my stomach dropping. If he regrets what happened at the museum…
“Even if he wins,” he says, as though he can detect the insecurity in my voice, “I wouldn’t have done anything differently. I want you to know that.” He sounds more solid than he has all night, and it fills me with a fierce determination.
“Don’t worry. We’re not going to let him.”
We’re neck and neck until we approach the exit, where I have to switch back into his lane. Behind him.
“A for effort!” Brady yells out his window as he sneaks through a yellow light the moment before it turns red.
I hit the brakes. “Shit. What now?”
“Turn right,” Neil says. “He’s probably taking Forty-Fifth all the way. If we take the backstreets, we won’t hit any more lights.”
“You sure?”
“No,” he admits. “But it’s our only chance.”
I flip on my blinker and swerve right, taking us into a residential neighborhood. I circle a few roundabouts, white-knuckling the steering wheel the whole time.
The school parking lot is just up ahead, and Brady’s white Toyota is approaching it from the other side of the street. There’s Logan Perez, standing at the entrance to the gym with Nisha and Olivia, holding two black-and-white checkered flags. There’s a grassy field between the parking lot and the gym. We can get close, but we’ll still have to make a run for it.