21 Stolen Kisses Page 4

  I nod, then drain the rest of my espresso before I explain the amends project that arrived fully formed moments ago.

  “Yes and no. They won’t be love letters from me. They’ll be more like letters of apology. Anonymous letters. It’s like a karmic way of reversing the damage. I’m already sort of making amends for lying to my dad all those years just by going to the shrink, so now I can make them for what I did to all the other people. I can say I’m sorry without saying ‘Oh, hey there, I’m sorry my mom screwed your husband and I knew about it and did nothing to stop it.’”

  “But you couldn’t have stopped it,” Lane points out as he leans forward in his chair for emphasis. We’re at Dr. Insomnia’s Tea and Coffee Emporium in the West Village, the best coffee shop in all the world, or at least in New York, which is the world to me. It’s my world. “Kennedy, don’t you get it? Your mom had the affairs. She asked you to lie. You didn’t do anything wrong. She did, and there’s nothing you could have done.”

  “Maybe I could have said something before it went too far,” I say softly as I look down at the small brown cup in front of me. “Maybe if I said something way back when it was all starting, she might have stopped. Or he might have forgiven her before she went too far. So this is my chance. I can write letters to the women she wronged, sort of like a wish for happiness, a hope for more love in the world. Then maybe a line from a famous love letter.”

  “Sounds a bit stalkerish.”

  “It’s not stalking. It’s like I’m putting the love back into the world that was taken,” I say, the words sticking in my throat, but I push past the lump because it’s time to move beyond all those lies.

  “You are obsessed,” he says, tossing his hands up, knowing he can’t convince me otherwise. He arches an eyebrow, shifting to a playful mode. “But yet, I cannot resist an opportunity for potential troublemaking, so I must insist on joining.”

  “But you have nothing to make amends for,” I say, since Lane’s in therapy for other reasons. His dad died two years ago.

  “I know this is going to sound a bit crazy and radical, but I kind of think it would be fun. You won’t deprive a poor, fatherless boy of a little fun, would you?” he says, dropping his lips into a forced frown.

  “Stop it,” I say with a laugh, because only Lane could take the tragedy in his past and turn it into a joke.

  He punches the air with his fist, then holds out his hand to shake. “Consider me your comrade in amends.”

  We spend the next hour drinking coffee, making lists, and plotting a love letter delivery plan to make up for all my past lies. The addresses aren’t terribly hard to find. A few Google searches for property records and home ownerships reveal most of the homes. An unlisted number is meaningless in the Internet age. When we leave, I ride my bike home to my mom’s. Maybe, just maybe, as I send anonymous letters, I can start to restore some of the love that was stolen.

  Matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it can change forms; the bad becomes good, the wrongs start to right.

  The way it should be.

  I slam on my brakes, thrilling when I see a man in a purple shirt walking toward Central Park West.

  Chapter Six

  Kennedy

  My parents loved to cook together. That was their thing. Their bond. They loved to cook and they loved to entertain. When I was younger, we had one of those homes where their friends would drop in on Saturday afternoons, have wine and cheese, olives and pastries.

  One time my mom’s friend Patricia came by with her husband and their daughter, Catey, who was my age. I hit it off with Catey, and we became best friends at the tail end of third grade and then throughout most of middle school. We did everything together—discovered new music, got our periods at the same time, and shopped for clothes and makeup. We both became hooked on coffee drinks at the same time too. Back then, I was more into the froufrou drinks, while Catey was already on coffee.

  “I’m so tough,” she said, after ordering a latte to my mocha chip Frappuccino on our first trip to the coffee shop around the corner.

  “Let’s see who can finish her drink first,” I said as the nearby espresso machine whirred and hummed as a barista made drinks.

  “No fair. Yours is cold. Mine is hot. It’s harder to drink hot drinks fast,” she pointed out, swiping her light-blond hair away from her face.

  “Yeah, but you’re underestimating the potential for a brain freeze to knock me out of the battle.”

  “Oh, good point!” she said, then added cream to her latte. “This’ll help me keep up.”

  We chugged our drinks, laughing and wiping foam and mocha from our lips, and by the time we were both halfway through, we declared it a tie and high-fived.

  “We should always make sure things end up in a tie. Then we both win.”

  “Always,” I seconded.

  We were friends for several years. Looking back, it’s amazing my mom took as long as she did to hit on Catey’s dad, Adam. But sure enough, she tapped him for a ride on the Jewel Express when Catey and I were twelve. He was a British historian, and she wanted to make sure the final treatment for Lords and Ladies hit the mark. All in the name of valiant research and historical accuracy, Catey’s dad started coming over in the afternoons, to help my mom. He’d pick up Catey from school, bring her along, and our friendship became their cover-up. They told us to stay upstairs, because we were loud by then, chatting and dancing to music, and that was better done behind the closed door of my bedroom, so they could focus on the fine-tuning of the scripts.

  But one time, we were hungry and we left my bedroom, flying down the stairs to the kitchen to grab some pretzels.

  When I hit the landing, I was greeted with one of the loudest moans I’d ever heard. A reckless “Oh God” blared from my mother’s room. My face burned as the awful soundtrack of her path to pleasure continued. A rhythmic groaning that matched the banging of the headboard, and made my gut twist in mangled knots from the shame.

  I turned to Catey, red flooding my cheeks. “Um, I think our parents are … ,” but I couldn’t finish the sentence, so I said, “I’m not hungry anymore.”

  “Me neither,” she said, and we went back upstairs, listless defeated soldiers, broken in battle from a surprise attack.

  We were silent and worked on homework quietly on opposite corners of my bedroom until her dad tucked in his shirt, zipped his pants, and gathered up his daughter to head home. After all, what do you say after you hear your mom screwing your friend’s dad, and vice versa?

  Nothing. You say nothing.

  Before the next party, my mom pulled me aside and reminded me that the reason Adam spent so much time at the house was for research.

  “Research, honey. If your dad asks, Adam is here for research.”

  “Research,” I repeated.

  “You’re a good girl,” she said with a smile and a kiss, and I smiled back. Because that’s what I had to do. Store up the names of men I was told to keep from my dad. Keep it quiet, don’t mention it, keep calm and carry on. I didn’t mention it. Not to anyone. I stuffed all the names inside of me. My plan was to do the same with Catey—pretend it never happened when I saw her. We could move on and stay friends. I was sure of it. All we had to do was make believe nothing had ever happened. That’s what my mom had taught me.

  But Catey didn’t come to the next party. When her parents showed up, they said she was spending the night at another friend’s house.

  I learned then that a friendship could die.

  *

  I see purple and my breath hitches. I slam my feet into the brakes and hop off my bike, walking it the final few feet to him, across the street from the park. I unsnap my helmet and sling it over the handlebars.

  “Did you just leave my house?”

  He nods. “Going to join some friends at Roseland to see a band.”

  “Not a hair band or a hip-hop band,” I say, returning to one of our inside jokes.

  He smiles. It’s a small sm
ile, the tiniest recognition of all our shared secrets. But I’ll take it.

  “Definitely not either of those. What about you? What are you up to?”

  “Just out causing trouble,” I say, then rest my bike against the fence surrounding the building he stands in front of.

  He laughs, and backs up a few inches to lean against the railing next to my bike. He runs his thumb along the rubber of the handlebar, still warm from my hands wrapped around it seconds ago. A spark shoots through me, a reminder of all the times we touched something the other had touched as part of our first tentative dance steps to each other. I don’t take my eyes off him. I study him, even though he’s so familiar to me. The moonlight plays across his face, illuminating half of him. Strong cheekbones, bristly stubble on his jawline, a nose that was cracked once from football. Then his eyes, those navy-blue eyes that are like ink, even darker here in the late evening that inches toward midnight. The air is humid, and the noises of Manhattan surround us—cars, cabs, wind, sirens, and the anonymity of all the crowds.

  “You. Causing trouble. I have a hard time picturing that,” he says in a wry voice, the corner of his lips quirking up.

  I step closer. The current draws me to him; the air between us is charged with ions and electrons. He is the eye of my hurricane; the calm I am drawn to amid the chaos of my home. Here, a mere block away, we are so close to being caught.

  But we are far enough away that I feel both safe and reckless. That’s how I always felt with Noah.

  “You can’t picture me causing trouble?”

  He shrugs. “Depends on the trouble.”

  “You know I’m trouble.”

  He nods, the smile erasing itself. “I know, K. I know. Trust me.”

  “I do trust you,” I whisper. “With everything.”

  He inhales sharply. The look in his eyes says we’re crossing into the danger zone again. It’s the only place I want to be with him. Because when we’re there, nothing between us feels dangerous. Everything feels right.

  “I turn eighteen in a few more weeks,” I say, like my birthday is an open invitation for us to slam back into each other.

  He nods. “I know.”

  A breeze blows by and rustles his hair. A lock falls out of place. Instinct takes over. I raise my hand to reach for his hair.

  But he’s faster. He grasps my wrist, and the second he does, the moment expands. It stretches and unfolds into the thing I will replay tonight and tomorrow and the next day. I stare at his hand clasped around my wrist, flashing back to all the times he held my hand, touched my wrist, and ran his fingers along my arm. I shiver as the memories collide, the past slamming into the present.

  I look up from our hands to his eyes. Blazing, full of heat. Full of all that restraint from him that I know so well.

  “I’m almost out of high school,” I whisper. “Three more weeks till I graduate.”

  He closes his eyes. The expression on his face is so pained. I’m supposed to stay away. But all I want to do is be close again.

  “I am acutely aware of the dates. Of everything,” he says through gritted teeth. He opens his eyes. “I know everything about you. I know when you graduate. I know when you turn eighteen. I know what we planned. I know you.” Everything comes out like they’re stones in his mouth, hard and hurting. Except the last word, all breath and warmth and whispers. An echo. “You.”

  I want it all back, I want to say. But I don’t. I let him drop my hand. It aches from where he touched it.

  Our Stolen Kisses

  They say you never forget your first kiss, and I never will, but our fifth kiss was pretty spectacular too, wasn’t it? Do you remember where we were? We were on Jane Street. You grasped my hand, and led me into a small courtyard outside an apartment building. You placed your hands on my cheeks, and I practically melted just from the feel of you holding my face. But it was the way you looked at me that truly sent me soaring. I felt like the only one ever. That’s who I want to be with you.

  Then you whispered in the barest voice, “You.”

  It was all you said, but I knew everything you meant. I felt it too.

  You.

  Chapter Seven

  Kennedy

  Noah started as a crush.

  He was the first one to visit me in the hospital when I broke my foot from a skateboarding accident in ninth grade.

  I was still reeling from the epic phone fight I’d heard my parents having earlier in the day. They were fighting over custody of me. Enough, I thought. Just enough. I grabbed my skateboard, slammed the door, barreled down the steps, and slapped the longboard down on the sidewalk.

  I raced east a block or two on the smooth concrete, then jumped off the curb and into the crosswalk without looking. I weaved south on Broadway, sandwiching my body and the board between the parked cars and the cabs, the trucks and buses screeching downtown. I was fast and I was furious. I wanted speed and I wanted distance. There was no more home, and there was no more Mom and Dad, and there was no more normal life, but there’d never been a normal life anyway, and this was the only normal there ever was—me and the New York City streets as I dodged the bullets the traffic threw at me. It was me against the cars, me against rush hour, and I wanted to win. Then someone in a cab opened the door and I didn’t see it coming. The door smacked my elbow, and the next thing I knew the board slid out from under me and my foot slammed into the tire.

  I tried my parents when the medics showed up, but neither one answered their phone—my dad was at a museum event, and my mom was having an afternoon delight. The only other number I could come up with on the spot was Noah’s.

  He met me at the hospital and didn’t even flinch when he saw my mangled foot. Soon I went into surgery, and by the time I woke up my parents were there and Noah was gone. But he came back to visit me; he was like a family member, or at least a very good family friend. He’d been my mom’s agent for two years by then, so he’d been around the house, had come over for my parent’s parties. We’d see him out of the house too—at Lords and Ladies events, LGO fetes and celebratory dinners whenever he inked some new terms or new distribution deal for my mom’s show. I had talked with him plenty over the years, but rarely had it ever been just the two of us. Now it was.

  He was a jock too, a former one at least. He sat a few feet from my hospital bed, camped out in a standard upholstered hospital chair, and regaled me with stories of all the bones he had broken when he was younger. He wiggled three fingers on his right hand. “These three snapped when the center stepped on them during practice in junior high.”

  “You were the quarterback?”

  “No. Wide receiver.”

  “How did the center break your hand then?”

  “It was just one of those big old football pile-ons during practice,” he said.

  “Were you good at football?”

  He smirked. “What do you think?”

  I nodded my answer.

  He nodded back.

  “How many passes did you catch?”

  “So many they had to make an extra record book for Pop Warner in Hoboken, New Jersey.”

  “Ha. Yeah, right.”

  He winked, then whispered. “Don’t tell anyone I can’t remember the records from my glory days.”

  “Right. They were so long ago,” I joked.

  “Then I broke my kneecap a couple years later,” he said, recounting high school injuries.

  “How’d you manage that?”

  “Playing soccer. I planted my foot wrong while I was twisting around to try to score, and then it snapped. Man, it felt like it fell down to my shin.”

  “Seriously?”

  He tapped the side of his calf under his black pants to show me where his kneecap had landed. He wore his agent outfit: black slacks, shiny leather shoes, and a crisp navy-blue shirt that day. “Yep. My kneecap was knocked about two inches out of the socket.”

  My eyes widened as I covered my mouth with my hand. “It’s like when a cartoon charac
ter’s chin falls to the ground or something.”

  “It was exactly like that. Only it actually hurt, oh, say, twenty thousand times worse than if I’d have been animated.”

  “What else?” I asked, eager for more stories of his broken bones that took my mind off not just mine, but my broken family.

  Noah

  I crossed my legs and leaned back in the hospital chair, happy to entertain her with tales from not that long ago. It was a rare day when I could talk about something other than business. The chance to distract a friend from an injury—because she was a friend, as weird as that may seem to an outsider, she was always a friend first—was something I’d gladly do.

  “Let’s see. There was that time when I was seventeen and I dislocated my shoulder on a triple play.”

  “How? Did you throw too hard?”

  “That’s me. All brute strength,” I said drily.

  “Seriously,” she said, narrowing her eyes at me.

  “I was the third baseman. I forced out the runner at third and threw too hard to second.”

  “But you got him out, right?”

  “Hell, yeah. Glory first,” I said, like it was my team’s tagline. But there was a pride underneath my self-mockery, and she nodded in understanding. She was good at sports too, worked hard at them, and they meant something to her. The same was true for me.

  “Were you all stoic during the play, then did you limp off the field cradling your shoulder, as your teammates cheered?”

  “Something like that. But we lost the game, so it was a moot point in the end.”

  “Is that all you did growing up? Play sports?” she asked.

  I laughed, and shook my head. “It wasn’t all I did, but I was good at sports. Plus, I think my mom just wanted to balance out all the show tunes and cabaret and drag queens I’d grown up with. You know, just to give me a full sense of the world.”

  Raised by a single mom in the acting biz, I grew up on Broadway and off-Broadway, in nightclubs and cabarets. I knew stage right and stage left before I knew real right and real left. My mom was a chorus girl. She never made the big bucks. She always made just enough from her tiny backup roles for us to get by. In between her Broadway gigs, she sang in nightclubs for a hundred bucks a pop, her big, brassy, showy voice reverberating throughout the cabaret halls and red-velvet lounges of Manhattan. She took me everywhere, toted me to all her auditions when I was a little kid, tugged me by the hand to her rehearsals when I was in grade school, brought me to Sardi’s in between her matinees and evening performances on Wednesdays and Saturdays.