21 Stolen Kisses Read online

  “They’re on the way to a hipster party. You have to wear pencil jeans to get past the door,” she said, pointing to a pack of skinny, goateed twenty-somethings.

  “Soul patch gets you a free beer,” I added. Then I tipped my forehead to a tired-looking couple in their early thirties. “They’re wondering if it would be bad form to crash on the couch when the babysitter leaves.”

  “Sleep is definitely going to win,” she said, as a fortyish woman in a purple satin dress and silver sparkles braided into her hair walked past us. The woman held a wand with a star at the point. Kennedy raised an eyebrow, and the corner of her lips curved up. “Either she entertains at children’s parties or she really is a fairy godmother.”

  I fixed a serious look on my face. “She’s totally a fairy godmother, Kennedy. She’s the real thing.”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” she said, then she spotted a girl who looked to be about twenty holding hands with a guy who seemed a few years older. They were our reflection, and we both turned to each other at the same time, recognition in her eyes. She laced a hand through my hair. I leaned into her hand. “They’re just happy,” she whispered.

  My heart tripped over itself in my chest. I was no longer man against the world. I wasn’t a guy holding tight to a job because it was all he had. I was a guy crazy for a girl, and the girl was crazy for me. There was no other way about it.

  “Very happy. Like us,” I added.

  “Like us,” she echoed.

  I traced her jaw with my thumb and I watched her reaction. Her eyes floated closed, and her breath hitched. I kept my hand on her face, touching her cheek as I brushed my lips softly against her, gently at first, a barely there kind of kiss. Her lips pressed harder, hungrier, and lustier, and soon, my arms were all around her, and her hands were all over me.

  I knew then in the feel of her hands, in the way they roamed my chest, gripped my arms, trailed along the front of my shirt. I knew in the sweet taste of her lips, in the sexy little murmurs she made, but most of all I knew deep inside of me.

  She was the one. She was the only one. She filled me in ways that no one and nothing ever had.

  It pained me to break the kiss, but then it was also necessary. I had to tell her, had to let her know. “Do you know why I’m so happy?” I said, my voice low but strong, matching the way I felt.

  Her eyes widened as she asked me softly why.

  “Because I’m completely in love with you,” I said, with all the certainty in the world.

  Her smile was as wide as the sky. I swore I could see her soaring, as she cupped my cheeks, brushed a kiss on my lips, then whispered. “I’m so in love with you.”

  I tugged her in close. “This will always be our place,” I said because I’d never forget how it felt here in Madison Square Park, on a warm September night, surrounded by the sounds of Manhattan, to be in love with her.

  Here, with her, I was … complete.

  Our Stolen Kisses

  I’d never forget how it felt to say those words. To be in our place. In love with you, in love with us, in love with our secret, with the island we were building, keeping out the whole wide world.

  There with you, I was … safe.

  Chapter Twenty

  Kennedy

  Now here I am again. Safe again.

  And I don’t want it to come crashing down this time. Not when I am so close to the finish line I can see it. Not when my get-out-of-jail-free card is within reach. I’ll be eighteen in mere days. I’ll be at NYU in three months. I just need to get through June, July, and August.

  Then I will be free of my parents. Once I’m in college, I can do what I want.

  When I get out of bed Sunday morning, I take off Noah’s orange shirt, fold it carefully, and stuff it at the bottom of my backpack to return it to him later today. I text him: Shirt’s off. Giving it back to you today.

  He replies seconds later. off? What’s on then?

  We banter like that for the next ten minutes, then he tells me he’ll be thinking of me when he heads to the library shortly for an event, and I’m sure you’d need an industrial-strength mop to wipe the ridiculous grin off my face, especially when I tell him I’ll see him later, since we’re going to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this afternoon. My mother never goes to Brooklyn. My father doesn’t either. No one who knows me will be there.

  I hear my dad walk down the hall, so I click over to the home screen on my phone, then double-check to make sure my backpack is zipped up. Not that he’d ever look through my bag, but once burned, twice shy. I so don’t need my dad seeing a sliver of orange fabric and then freaking out again. I shower and get dressed, counting down the hours until I see Noah this afternoon. As I turn off the hair dryer, my phone blasts out its ringtone for Amanda.

  I answer quickly. “Do you miss me?”

  “So much.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m bored out of my mind. My mom is working—what else is new? My dad is out having coffee with a friend who may have some job leads for him, he claims. As if.” I wince knowing where her dad really is. Coffee with a friend is coffee with my mom. It’s a gateway meeting, an entree into something more. “So I decided since you’re going to prom with Lane, I need to meet him,” Amanda announces.

  Crap. Prom. Lane.

  I’d totally forgotten about that. It had completely vacated my brain. How am I going to go to prom with Lane when I have a secret boyfriend again?

  “Sure,” I say, noncommittally.

  “Hello? Kennedy, you are going to prom. This is a big deal. This is on our list of top five things that suck about an all-girls’ school and you found a loophole to one of the five. You get to go to prom. I want to meet your boyfriend. So there. Make it so.”

  My heart flinches when she says boyfriend, because she can’t meet my real boyfriend. I can picture how it’d go—Amanda meeting Noah for the first time at Dr. Insomnia’s, holding back a surprise, then somehow reshaping her face into a happy look, when really she’d be thinking, Why didn’t you tell me your boyfriend is older?

  “First of all, Lane’s not my boyfriend, Amanda,” I say.

  “Semantics.”

  “But he’s not.”

  “But he will be.”

  “Doubtful.”

  “Why not?”

  I fall back into my pillow. “I don’t know, Amanda. It’s just … I don’t know.”

  “Well, whatever. You’re making me crazy. Let’s just all get coffee. I need you to entertain me. Call him and see if he’s free.”

  Amanda is nothing if not insistent. She will make a great reporter someday.

  “Fine.” I hang up, then quickly dial Lane’s number.

  “Thank God you called. Otherwise, I was going to have to put an ad on Craigslist for a girl with a red polka-dot umbrella,” he says before I can even say hi. Was it really just two days ago when Lane bought me the umbrella? My project with Lane feels like a lifetime ago. Because the life I want has returned to me in the meantime with the man I love.

  “I bet you’d get a lot of takers,” I say, when I recover to the present.

  “Umbrellas have that effect on girls.” His voice is hopeful, and something in it feels too close, too intimate for me. Or maybe it’s the words. Words like girls and effect. I’m not sure I want to roll around in those words when it comes to Lane.

  I shift gears. “Do you want to meet at Dr. Insomnia’s in, say, an hour? My friend Amanda wants to meet you.”

  Lane pauses. In the span of his silence, I am guessing he’s considering, he’s wondering, he’s weighing the fact that neither one of us has met the other’s friends. Our friendship has always just been us, him and me.

  I fill the white space. “I mean, I know we’ve never met each other’s friends, but why shouldn’t we, right? No one needs to know we met at the shrink’s. We’re just friends, that’s all. And I told her we’re going to prom. She’s dying to help me pick out a dress. I can’t not let her meet you.�
��

  “Sure. Let’s do it. See you in an hour.”

  I call Amanda back and tell her to get ready. As I leave, I let my dad know I’m meeting Amanda and Lane. I’ve told him the truth, but the truth will also pad the lie I’m about to tell him to explain my whereabouts for the rest of the day.

  “And then we’ll probably see a movie or something,” I say, and the words come out so easily, so smoothly, because this is how it goes when you are a seasoned pro, when you’ve been coached by the best, by the person who perfected lying to this man for most of her marriage.

  I maintain my false front as my dad smiles.

  “Have fun at the movies. Say hi to Lane and Amanda,” he says.

  “I will.”

  Inside, I want to jab myself with sharp pencils, a punishment for the little lies I tell him, for the ways I’m not the opposite of my mom right now, for the ways I am her imprint.

  I open the door to leave.

  “No bike today?” my father asks.

  I don’t look at him for this one. I don’t look at him because I don’t need my bike, because I’m meeting my secret boyfriend in a cab in a couple hours.

  “Nah, I feel like walking,” I say.

  Before I even reach the cobblestoned street, I crank up South Pacific, but I jump because the last song I want to hear right now is “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair.” Instead, I switch to “Some Enchanted Evening,” and the words and the music do what they’re supposed to. Make me forget what I want to forget and remember what I want to remember.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kennedy

  Back then, I didn’t think much about the lies I had to tell, because the bubble of bliss was just that. Bliss. Perfection. Happiness.

  The fall of my senior year was the best. Every day, every second with Noah, was like a scene in some romance set in Manhattan, with secret dates all around the city that only we knew about. Stolen moments on the Staten Island Ferry late one afternoon, watching the big boat whip across the water as the sun beat down. Visits to Chinatown on Sundays, where we’d wander in and out of cramped little shops selling teapots with cats on them and red embroidered jackets. Popping into the theater to see a Saturday matinee of Jersey Boys, enjoying the half-price tickets he’d snagged that morning.

  Of course, the theater date itself was idyllic, the reason not so much. I’d needed to escape from my mom, especially since I’d heard her talking to Jay Fierstein, and he was on his way over.

  “Can’t wait to see you, handsome,” she’d cooed into the phone as I walked through the kitchen to make a piece of toast, and my chest burned when I heard her voice. I stopped in place, my hand clutched around the fridge handle as she planned her next tryst. I wanted to claw her eyes out, claw his eyes out, claw out my own.

  Instead, I turned to Noah and to Broadway and to show tunes, and we spent the afternoon holding hands in the darkened Winter Garden Theatre as songs from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons took me away. That evening, we stopped in Sardi’s for appetizers, and I told him about the phone call.

  “I wish I could just make up a new story for my life before this year.”

  “What would yours be, K? What would you change?”

  I reached for his hand under the table. “Everything. First, my mom would never have cheated on my dad. Second, she would never have asked me to lie about it. Third, they never would have gotten divorced.”

  He nodded and stroked my hand gently, knowing this small action of his thumb against my palm soothed me. But more than that, telling him soothed me. Telling someone soothed me. He was maybe the only one besides my dad and me who knew my mom had cheated.

  “You know that about her, right? This isn’t news, is it?”

  He nodded. “Yes. I mean, it’s not like Jewel and I ever discuss it, but it’s not that hard to figure out. It never was. Besides, I think I have good radar in that department.”

  “What department? Detecting cheating?”

  “No. Detecting addictive behavior.”

  It was the first time anyone had ever used the word addict in relation to my mom. It was strangely freeing to hear it, to know that someone else got what was going on. I didn’t feel so alone with her secrets.

  “Did you want to rewrite your backstory with your mom?” I asked.

  “Absolutely. I would have done anything to get her to stop drinking,” he said, and he sounded sad and wistful at the same time. “I wish I had known what she was like without all the drinking. I would have loved to have known her sober.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  “When I was younger, I used to try to get her to stop. I would hide her beers, or empty them out. But she always found a way to get more. And so all I could do was just not drink myself.”

  I nodded, because that’s what I was trying to do too. I was trying to not be her, to not make the same choices my mom made. She didn’t know how to love. She only knew the merry-go-round. I vowed to never go on the merry-go-round.

  And so eventually we made plans.

  As the fall cruised along, we laid out on a blanket one Sunday afternoon in Central Park on a rare warm day in October. We were off in a secluded spot, one of those cloistered corners where tall trees and stout bushes formed little inlets for lovers. We ate strawberries and cherries and mini hummus sandwiches. As the sun dipped farther in the sky, Noah read a new script from one of his other clients, and I read a book about the Impressionists and Manet’s friendship with Charles Baudelaire, since my dad was helping a collector to acquire an Impressionist painting in an upcoming auction at Sotheby’s. I wanted to be able to talk to my dad about his work, to converse with him about his job.

  I finished the final few pages and then put the book down.

  “Good book?”

  “My head is stuffed full of facts about the Impressionists now,” I said.

  He placed the script pages next to him. “Tell me something about the Impressionists.”

  “Well, they were pretty much hopped up on absinthe all the time.”

  “So they were getting by with a little help from their friends,” he quipped.

  “Indeed.” I stretched out closer to Noah, resting my head on his chest. “It makes you think too about all the things that were going on in France at the time of the Impressionists. The Franco-Prussian War and the French Third Republic, and then in the midst of it all, this beautiful form of painting real life emerged. There has to be a connection.”

  “Look at you, already the art history major.”

  “And I haven’t even applied to college yet.”

  “Ah, college. That thing that happens in a year.”

  I shifted again, so I could look at his face, rather than the sky. “Yes, this time next year I’ll be in college.”

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked, and it wouldn’t take a rocket scientist to detect the nerves in his voice.

  “NYU,” I said. There was no point pretending I wanted to go anyplace else. NYU was my first choice and always had been. I’d already finished most of the application. “I’ve always wanted to go to NYU. I don’t want to leave New York. This is my home. I love it here.”

  “Can’t argue with that.”

  “Plus, it’s close,” I said, and now the butterflies in me took off racing. I’d thrown it out there. I’d said it. The future of us, the possibility of an us next year and beyond.

  He traced the edge of my hair with his index finger. “It is close,” he said, but he sounded noncommittal.

  “Do you want me to be close?”

  “I want you to be where you want to be. I want you to go to school where you want to go.”

  “Right,” I said, knowing he was being magnanimous, knowing he had to say that, because he’d never be the guy who held his girlfriend back, especially not over such a massive life choice. “But now that you know my first choice happens to be a few blocks away, what do you think?”

  “K, I want to be with you always. But it’s co
llege; it’s a big deal. You should make the choice free of me.”

  I hit him lightly a few times with my fists. “Stop being the good guy.”

  He grabbed my wrists and held my arms in place, shifting me with his legs, so I was straddling him. “You want me to be the bad boy?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “No, I don’t. Tell me what you mean.” His face was just inches from mine, and he was daring me to say more.

  “You make me crazy,” I said, and squeezed his hips with my thighs.

  “Strong thighs.”

  “Just tell me, Noah. Tell me what you want.”

  “How about you tell me what you want?” he countered.

  “You’re such a negotiator. You always make me go first.”

  His blue eyes sparkled. “A good negotiator.”

  “Fine,” I said, caving. “I want you. I want to be with you.”

  “You’re with me right now,” he teased.

  “That’s not what I mean, you goofball!”

  “Ooh, name calling. This is going to be a fun negotiation,” he said, tightening his grip around my wrists and easing my body closer to his.

  “I want to be with you always. I love you. I’m in love with you. And you’re the one,” I said quickly, testily. “There, I said it.”

  “It was heartfelt.”

  “Well, that’s what you get for making me go first. Your turn.”

  He loosened his hands and lowered me gently onto him, my chest against him, his arms encircling my back.

  “I want to be with you for real. For always, K,” he said, holding my eyes with his, no joking, no negotiating now. “But I hate the thought of holding you back from college or in college, and I want you to be happy and to experience life and to enjoy everything and if that means you need to leave me, then I understand. But if you don’t need to leave me, then I will be the happiest man on earth. Because all I want is to be with you. I want you to sleep over, and I want to wake up next to you, and take you to breakfast, and come home to have dinner with you.”

  My heart blasted off into another stratosphere. “I want that too.”