20 - kissing and questions

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Silence cloaked the room, a dense tension freezing the air. It was like a heavy smog had settled over us with only Noah able to breathe through it, his eyes glistening and his smile wider than I'd ever seen it.

And, as though my body could sense that it was an inappropriate time to laugh, a schoolgirl giggle was itching at my throat.

"Alright, I think this has gone on long enough." James pushed himself off the back of the sofa, sauntering around it to join us on the other side. "Madison isn't kissing anyone."

My eyes flittered to him without waiting for permission from my brain to do so. His expression was sterner than I'd ever seen it before, his gaze avoiding mine and piercing into his friend's.

A strange feeling pooled in my chest, as if his words had spilled from his mouth, crept down my throat, and were snaking around my heart. Constricting it with yet another serving of rejection. Maybe it was just the fact that it was my third of the day, but it stung more than the others.

"Right." I swallowed the pain. Like I always did. Down into the depths of my core it went, joining whatever else I'd repressed. "I think we should get back to the problem at hand—"

"But this is the perfect solution!" Noah cried. "You said so yourself, Madison. Show Dex the perfect first kiss."

"I was talking about, I don't know, YouTube-ing it or something! Watching an episode of Love Island."

"Having live actors is so much better! This way, he can really engage. We can tailor it, you know, go through it step-by-step. I'll narrate, you two just do what I say."

"That ... could work." Dex ran a hand through his hair, tousling the dark auburn locks. "Can we focus on head placement? And how to stop your noses from colliding?"

Noah nodded. "All valid concerns."

The color was draining from my face more and more, I was absolutely sure of it. My palms were heavy, my throat rough and dry. What if my lips were chapped? What would James think? That I have chapped lips?

Why did I care what James thought?

When I pulled myself out of my head, I realized that James, too, had been stunned into silence. Noah, meanwhile, was peering back and forth between the two of us bewilderedly, finally giving in to an incredulous laugh.

"What's the big deal here?" he asked. "You're both adults, right? You're friends. It's just a kiss!" He said the word—kiss—as if it was a breath of air, a passing cloud. Like it was no big deal.

And maybe it wasn't. Maybe friends kissed all the time. I hadn't been single since I was thirteen, so maybe I'd just bypassed that part of friendship. A kiss can be everything or nothing. It can be everything to people like me, and nothing to people like Elijah. A kiss was just a kiss.

Right?

"I don't think this is appropriate, Noah," James muttered, his protest churning my stomach once more. "It's a big ask—"

"But why?" Noah shrugged again. 'Shrugger' had seemingly taken over 'smiler' as his defining personality trait. "It doesn't mean anything."

"It might to her," James retorted, talking about me as if I wasn't even there. He was cocking his head in my direction, but his eyes were locked on his friend's. "She just got out of something—"

"I don't ... care." My mouth was doing that thing again. Moving without permission from my brain.

I could feel James watching me from the corner of his eye, feel his attention pull from Noah and land on me. I stared straight ahead.

"If that's what you're implying," I continued, "Noah's right. It's just a kiss. No big deal."

I didn't know if I totally believed what I was saying. But I was also not about to stand for the insinuation that I couldn't handle educational, non-committal, strictly platonic displays of affection. No, not affection. Just ... displays of normal, non-romantic, non-affectionate gestures.

Gestures that just happened to involve lips on other lips.

Because if love was a construct, then maybe kissing was, too.

Noah's eyes lit like the night sky. He clasped his hands together, no less excited than a child on Christmas morning. "Great! James?"

He only said two words. Yet those two little words were enough to steal the breath from my lungs.

The gravity of what I'd done hit me in the face, pulling my head back from the clouds. The realization that I'd just thrown the ball to James, that it was now in his court ... My too-still heart jumped back to life. It raced manically, preparing me for my fourth rejection of the day. A rejection that I'd so stupidly set myself up for. Because I hadn't received enough.

"Well, if she's ..." James was stammering like Dex—something I'd never known the former to do. "I mean, I guess—"

"Great!" Noah repeated. "Alright then, so..."

His babbling faded into incomprehensible noise, my head spinning far too fast for me to hear anything beyond muffled sound. It was like the world was turning in slow motion, like everything around me was glazing over while my mind replayed the last five seconds again and again and—

I guess. Did that mean we were about to ... 

"Dex, pay attention." Noah had pulled a sheepish Dex back down on the sofa, the two of them peering up at us curiously. "Whenever you guys are ready."

Apparently, neither James or I were ready.

"Wait a second," I cried, hiding my nerves behind a laugh. A laugh that sounded far nervier than I wanted it to. Brilliant. "Are we just going to ... I mean, shouldn't we, like, set the scene?"

Noah bounced up, pointing to the cupboard down the hall. "You want some candles or something? Some incense?"

"No, that's not what ..." My voice trickled away, and I gave myself a second to take in a breath. To restore some semblance of composure.

It would have been a lot easier to do had James not emitted a low chuckle beside me that lit my nerve endings like a match.

"I just mean that we should explain things." I nodded to myself, daring my eyes to confer everyone in the room. Everyone. Meaning the tall, muscular, grinning blond, standing so close that I could smell the concoction of ingredients that made up the earthy scent of his cologne. What was that? Cedar?

Shut up.

"Dex needs to know what to watch for," I explained as confidently as I could. "Because we're only doing this once."

Silence fell over the room once again, broken only when James cleared his throat.

"Right," he said slowly. "Madison's right."

I stopped myself from peering at him. Refrained even after he'd breathed my name, a breath that sent a wild shiver over my skin. God. What were we doing?

"This is a first date kiss," James explained. His gaze was on Dex as though his words were directed at him, but I couldn't shake the feeling that they were designed for me. "You don't want to go too hard, you know. Keep it light. Playful. And always leave them wanting more—"

"No tongue." Why did I say that? Why was I still talking?

James chuckled again.

My heart flopped.

"No tongue," he affirmed.

For the third time that afternoon, the room lulled into silence, yet again casting an air of tension over us with it. Only, that time, the tension rippled between just two of us.

My vision tunneled. My heart was thundering. I was sure I was about to have a heart attack. I told myself that it was just the strangeness of it all, just the strangeness of the situation itself and nothing more. Because there was hardly anything to be nervous about. I'd been kissed before. Plenty of times. I'd done a lot more than kissing.

Why was I thinking about more than kissing?

"It's about the moment before," Noah was whispering to Dex, "just as much as it's about the kiss itself ..."

The noise around me faded into static, the thousands of thoughts and questions consuming my mind fading, too. Everything melted away. Melted away as electricity sparked on my waist.

I turned, leaning into the current. Letting it ripple from my stomach, to my chest, then down through each one of my limbs. James was testing his hand's place on my waist, his touch soft. Gentle. Unsure.

I dared myself to look up, to trace my gaze around the chiseled contours of his face. A bead of water dripped down from a strand of his golden hair, drawing attention to the eyes that peered down at me cautiously. The ocean inside was gleaming more than it ever had. But that blue—usually light, usually serene—had transformed into the waves of night. Dark and enigmatic, drawing me in. I glimpsed it for only a moment.

Until his lips met mine.

It was a brush at first, so light that I wasn't all that certain whether it was there. I moved closer, examining the space between us, leaning into the taste of his smile. I could feel that amused tug of his lips, the image of it behind my eyelids daring me to claim it from him as though it was mine to claim. He responded instantly, his fingers trailing from my waist to the arch of my back. Extending an invitation without forcing me to accept.

Noah was whispering behind us, no doubt trying to direct the scene. But with another taste of the lips on mine, everything that wasn't James melted away.

I caught myself before I fell. I pressed my nails into my palm, reminding myself that this wasn't real. That my desire to deepen the kiss was nothing more than a chemical reaction to something I'd been deprived of for so long. But when I moved my hand to rest on his firm chest, when his breath hitched in response, I wondered.

I was so cold, and he was so warm. Maybe he could melt me.

His lips grazed mine. And then he pulled away.

I was underwater. Dazed. My pulse was racing. Or was that his heart beating under my fingertips? I was close enough to see that his ocean eyes had stilled; calm, quiet waters. Too quiet. Waiting. His lips were parted as if mine were still there, it would be so easy to just...

"Shit."

Groggily, I followed the source of the sound.

Noah. Making me realize, of course, that he was there. That Dex was there. That we weren't alone.

Because it wasn't real.

It was just a kiss.

Within a second, I had taken two, three, four steps back. I hit the armchair behind me, leaning back on it as though I was truly coming up from the depths of the sea.

"Was that, um." I put a hand to my throat to aid in clearing it. "Was that helpful?"

Dex's mouth had fallen open, a red tinge dancing on his cheeks. His eyes flickered between James, Noah, and me.

He looked apologetic. Slightly Fearful.

"No," he croaked. "I don't think that was helpful at all."

I should never have kissed James Bennet.

I knew it as soon as Holly returned to the guest house. As soon as the muddled veil lifted from my mind and my heartbeat steadied to its normal pace.

First of all, James had a girlfriend. Or a girl ... friend (with benefits)?

Whatever. At the very least, he had a girl waiting for him back home. Sure, I despised her. And sure, she despised me. But that didn't change the simple fact that he had essentially cheated. That I'd been the one who helped him do it. That I'd turned into the one thing that I hated more than anything.

And, second of all, no men.

I'd slipped. Fallen. Might have hit my head on the way down. It was the only way to explain how dizzy I felt whenever I thought about the kiss, or about the way James had looked at me when I opened my eyes, or the way his chest had lifted when I pressed my hand against him, like he needed to feel me, to touch me, to eliminate any space—

No. Nope. No men, no men, no men ...

My one saving grace was that the week following the Bennet wedding was our mid-semester break, and that James and Dex had decided to hang back to catch up with their families and school friends instead of driving to campus with the rest of us. I was spared, then, from having to run into them in the hall. From having to pretend that everything was normal, that I didn't know that James' lips tasted like honey or that his delicate touch had stirred dormant electricity in the depths of my body.   

Not forever, but for a little while.

I shook my head as I stepped out of my car, forcing all traces of James and that stupid smile out of my head. Of the heat of his skin mixing with mine. Of that look in his eyes when I'd pulled away. I'd never seen him so still. So quiet. So ...

Not. Helping.

I had bigger problems than the irritating blond and our confusing kiss to deal with, anyway. My wave of anxiety was descending into an all-out typhoon as I approached the two-story home in front of me, its dainty cream details and high pointed roofs concealing the memory of a simple beach house underneath. It wasn't until I closed my eyes, hearing the waves of the ocean and smelling the salt of the sea, that my heart twisted with the realization that I was home. That it was just three summers ago that my father and I had been collecting seashells over the cliff for our latest DIY project. Two summers ago when Eli tried to teach me how to surf. One summer ago when Lola and I were tanning on the sand, gossiping about a mysterious boy she'd met in town. A boy she was certain she was in love with. A boy she told me was the cause of her flushed face and rosy cheeks.

Indeed, I was in dire need of a distraction to have ended up where I did.

I pushed the memories aside, taking a deep breath before shoving my keys into the lock and stepping into the entryway.

I could see the changes that had been made during my absence almost instantly. Freshly painted white walls, newly laid floorboards, a sparkling chandelier planted between the grand double staircase. In a matter of two years, my parents' quaint, modest beach house had been transformed into one of the finest homes on the coast.

I reined in a groan. "Here we go." I went to throw my keys on the side table—which was now a door that led to another sweeping lounge.

My mother's greatest hobby had always been playing house, but it took a second marriage to a Wall Street icon for her to fully realize her potential as a would-be Real Housewife of Cape Capri. She was forever competing to keep up with the latest trends; as soon as one renovation finished, another began. In fact, up until a week ago, my childhood home had turned into one of the most impressive pieces of real estate I'd ever seen up-close. But it took a lot to compete with a three-story mansion, complete with a guesthouse, a tennis court, and its own butler.

A featherlight pattering of footsteps was rocketing my way, a high-pitched yap stealing my attention for good.

"Baby!" I fell to the ground, catching my black Maltese as he cannonballed into my chest. I rolled my eyes at the pink bow my mother had tied around Bandit's neck, ruffling his furry coat while he wriggled excitedly in my arms. "I've missed you! Yes I have! Do you miss me?"

The bundle of fur jumped back to the floor, ran around in a circle, then quickly raced back the way that he'd come.

While Bandit and I had always been two peas in a pod, something told me that it wasn't just me being home that had him all riled up. In fact, I had a pretty good idea of what was waiting for me around the corner of my mother's attempt at a grand entryway. I should have known as soon as I saw that stupid pink bow.

"Surprise!"

An ensemble of my relatives and my parents' friends sprung out from their hiding spots in the lounge, the lights flicking on to reveal pink, gold, and white balloons crafting a veritable canopy over the high ceiling. The guests had also adopted the pink and gold color scheme, their glittering, formal attire a stark contrast to my black jeans, charcoal tank top, and black leather jacket.

I widened my eyes, attempting to hide my scuffed sneaker behind the other, less beaten one. When my mother invited me to the house for an early birthday dinner, a surprise party with half of the neighborhood had been the last thing I'd expected. That was totally on me.

"Madison, dear."

The stench of her perfume hit my nose before I even caught sight of her, an expensive cloud of rose and orange blossom imprisoning me in her presence.

In true Dianna Watson style, my mother had out-dressed every single person in that room; a slinky golden gown hugged her slender frame. Matching drop earrings glimmered next to her chestnut brown locks, not a hair out of place. Her toffee eyes narrowed beneath her feathery lashes, scanning me from head to toe while she critiqued my outfit in her own passive-aggressive way.

If I'd looked out of place amongst her guests, then I looked as if I'd landed from a different planet when I stood next to her.

But my mother was quick to paint a smile onto her plump red mouth. One designed to convince her guests that everything between us was just fine.

"Happy birthday, sweetheart." She pulled me into a hug, her soft tone and pleasant demeanor a far cry from those she'd employed during our brief phone calls. Naturally. Everything about Dianna Watson came down to appearances, to convincing the rest of Capri that our screwed-up family was okay.

"I thought we said intimate?" I muttered through gritted teeth, veiling my face in an expression as fake as hers. Just like my mother, I didn't need to give anyone in that room a reason to think that something was wrong. Lord knew that her so-called friends watching us intently from the fireplace would have a field day with that information. 

"This is intimate. I only invited your aunts, uncles, the reverend, and some of the families from church. And I ran into your seventh-grade science teacher at the store. Mr. Schuester—"

"Mr. Schuyler," I corrected, throwing the balding man a wave. I'd forgotten that my mother's definition of 'intimate' differed significantly from mine.

Again, that was on me.

In all fairness, I hadn't even wanted a party in the first place. I wasn't sure whether it was losing my dad or just getting older in general, but I found my birthday more and more depressing with each passing year. I would have preferred to have swept it under the rug alongside everything else that had once meant something, but sweeping events under the rug was not in Dianna Watson's nature. Events were as important to her as playing house—or maybe both went hand-in-hand.

I made my way around the room, shaking

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