The Kiss

His hand was still cupped under my jaw when he asked if he could tell me something, and I already knew from the way his voice shook that whatever came next was going to change everything between us.

We were sitting on the old dock at the lake, my nosebleed just stopped, his shirt balled up and forgotten beside us, the sky gone that deep orange it only turns in the last twenty minutes before dark. A bullfrog had started up its evening racket somewhere behind us. None of it mattered, because Gray was looking at me the way he'd never quite looked at me before.

I'd known Grayson Locke since I was six years old. He lived next door, and back then he was just the loud kid who fell out of trees and once tried to trade me his goldfish for my bike. By eight he'd broken his arm in two places falling out of the treehouse he'd built to impress me, and I'd been the only person who signed his cast with anything other than a name. I drew a lopsided crayon picture he still swore looked more like a dog with a tumor than a stegosaurus. Every June since we were nine, we'd climbed the same rope swing and jumped into the same freezing water on the same first Friday of summer. He was the star quarterback now, the kind of boy who got his name called over the loudspeaker on Fridays. I was the girl who painted in her garage and flipped him off when he deserved it, which was often.

I had loved him for two of those years without saying a word about it to anyone, not even Dana.

"I like you," he said now, fast, like tearing off a bandage. "Not friend-like-you. The other kind. I've liked you since sophomore year and I've been too much of a coward to say anything, because if you didn't feel the same way I'd lose you completely, and I'd rather have half of you as a friend than none of you at all, so if you want to pretend I never said—"

"Gray."

"—said that, we can just go back to the truck and I'll never—"

"Gray. Shut up."

He shut up.

I kissed him.

It wasn't really a decision. It was two years of almost, finally collapsing into one point. He made a small startled sound against my mouth before he kissed me back like he'd been waiting his whole life for permission. His hand slid from my jaw into my wet hair. Mine found the front of his shirt and held on like the dock might tip.

When we finally pulled apart, he was smiling in a way I'd never once seen on him. Unguarded. A little stunned. None of his usual cool left on his face.

"So," he said. "Not weird?"

"Extremely weird. Do it again."

He did.

That kiss turned into a whole secret summer. He'd text me some ridiculous excuse around eleven at night, and I'd climb out my window and drop onto the trellis my dad built years ago. We'd end up somewhere. The lake. The truck bed, parked out past the water tower where you could see every star Cedar Bluff had to offer. He kept bringing up going public, telling people at practice he was "seeing someone," and I kept redirecting him with a kiss whenever the conversation got too close to something real.

"You're doing the thing again," he said one night in July, both of us flat on our backs in the truck bed under a sky gone thick with stars. "Where I bring something up and you kiss me instead of answering."

"It's a very effective strategy."

"I want people to know, Josie. I'm not embarrassed of you."

"I just like having something that's only ours," I told him, and that part, at least, was true. "The second everyone else knows, it stops being just us."

He studied me for a long moment, then let it go. He pulled me closer instead and tucked my head under his chin, the same gesture he'd used when we were kids and I'd had a bad dream.

"Okay," he said. "A little while longer."

We spent the rest of July and half of August like that. A day at the boardwalk that ended with him winning me a lopsided pink elephant after eleven tries at the ring toss. A night parked at the top of the Ferris wheel when he told me, quiet and serious for once, that he loved me. Actually loved me. I said it back before I'd even decided to.

I didn't tell him about the bruise that showed up on my arm in early August with no fall or bump behind it, purple-yellow and tender when I pressed on it in the bathroom mirror. I didn't tell him about the morning I stood up too fast off the couch and the whole room tilted sideways before it settled back into place. I told myself both were nothing.

The night before senior year started, we sat on my roof eating gas station candy and making fun of our own senior photos. I remember thinking that summer had been the best one of my entire life. I remember thinking that whatever was coming next couldn't touch this.

I woke up the next morning with blood on my pillowcase and my nose still bleeding.