Kiss Crush Collide (4 page)

“I can see why.”

He revs the engine a couple of times.

“This car is hot.” He drags the word out with a slight southern twang so it sounds more like
hhhawt
and leans forward to rub the dash in a very possessive way.

I watch, mesmerized, expecting to see a streak of phosphorescence trailing behind his fingers.

“Want a ride?” he asks.

I laugh, because I am not that easy. But God, do I want to say yes.

I realize I am still watching his hands. I don’t know what I am waiting for, but I can’t stop staring. I snap my head up and drag my eyes away.

I shake my head and say, “I’ve been there before,” with a nod toward the backseat.

“True,” he agrees. He rests his chin on the tips of his fingers as if he is solving an equation and breathes in quickly, the solution found. “But not with me,” he says.

My first impulse is to move toward him like a sex-starved teenage zombie, arms out, neck exposed. But I can’t. I look away from him, my eyes drawn back toward the club and the lights flickering from inside. Want to. Can’t.

“Thanks,” I say, refusing him as politely as I can with another shake of my head.

Dropping my sandals over my right shoulder, I hold tight to the thin leather straps and start making my way back toward the clubhouse.

“Your choice,” he says with a shrug as he puts the car into gear and rolls away slowly. Superslowly.

So slowly he paces me, one hand comfortably slung over the steering wheel, his green eyes watching my every move as I walk along the side of the road.

I turn and watch him too, crossing one arm over my chest, bare feet soft and silent in the grass, trying to look unfazed by the challenge.

One side of his mouth lifts, and he gives me that crooked smile, making the wine flush on my cheeks even pinker. He stops the car. I walk toward the door, my steps light, our eyes locked. My fingertips brush against the cool silver of the door handle, and suddenly it’s ripped away from me. I gasp and yank my hand back as Porter speeds off.

He squawks to a stop about five feet away and tries to look nonchalant. He slides his arm along the curved back of the passenger seat, turns toward me, and waits patiently as I cover the ground between us on foot.

I reach for the door again, tensed, ready to pull back at the first sign of movement, mentally accepting the possibility that my fingers are about to be removed by force.

Porter revs the engine, watching me closely. I hear the sound of the cylinders making their upward climb again, and I go for it, grabbing the handle. I scrabble, pull the door open, toss my sandals onto the floor, and heave myself into the car, all arms and long blond hair and boobs escaping from my strapless dress as I crawl onto the seat, breathing like a maniac.

I look up from my undignified, hunkered spot and see Porter facing me, grinning appreciatively, my boobs practically in his face, his arm still resting lightly along the back of my seat.

The car never moved. Damn, he got me.

“Nice entrance.” He smiles, slipping his left hand onto the wheel, the other one leaving the back of my seat to reach down and put the car into gear.

“I’ve been working on it,” I say breathlessly, following his green eyes to my cleavage, which is spilling out everywhere, practically filling the car with soft white flesh.

With a faint smile, I pull up at the top of my dress while I pull down on the hem and simultaneously turn around in my seat to face forward. Porter steps on the gas, and we are gone, streaking down the road, away from the lingering lights of the club, and off, into the night.

Later, back inside the M3 with my head leaning against the leather headrest, I watch the dark golf course roll by. I am surrounded by my sisters, the air is warm, the location familiar, yet I feel off course, no longer on the map.

My eyes are trained on the horizon, on the slight rise just off the twelfth hole, to the left of the green. I wait impatiently, wishing Roger would drive faster, so I can see the exact spot.

I think I might be holding my breath, because I know that there, just off the green, invisible from the road but burned vividly into my memory, under a large oak with branches that covered us like a canopy, there are imprints, the grass flattened into crop circles by our bodies.

Squinting through the darkness, I smile as we cruise by. I close my eyes and sink down, remembering the cool grass, soft and springy beneath my head as I rolled onto my back. Porter was splayed out next to me. My face and lips were red, hot, swollen, and a bit bruised. He leaned up on one elbow and lowered his head down to mine, ready for more.

“You smell like mint,” he had whispered as his lips grazed past my ear, teasing me.

I arched up as I kissed him, his tongue slid smoothly into my mouth, and my brain raced to keep up, to stay in control. I was pulled under again, awash in the sensations, lost.

My fingers had curled into the grass beneath me, as his fingers trailed lightly down my arm, his touch leaving a throbbing current, flowing from soft inner elbow to wrist.

I was breathing fast, hot against his neck. Then I leaned my neck back as he kissed me from under the curve of my chin to the top of my dress, and his hand no longer rested solidly on my stomach but gently pressed up, pushing what was already almost falling out the top of my dress to the very edge.

I felt his tongue graze along my hot skin there, and I struggled against the rising tide and came up for air. I pushed up against him and pushed him away. Porter rolled off me, flat onto his back, arms flung out to the sides with his face to the sky. Panting.

I am not the type of girl to do something like that. It is not in my nature. I was prom queen last year. I will be homecoming queen in the fall. Both my sisters were. I date the captain of the football team, just like Yorke and my mother, too, when she was in school. I’d like to say I have a lock on the whole valedictorian thing next year, but with Valerie around, I am keeping my fingers crossed.

I don’t need to drive off in a suspiciously borrowed car and end up making out with some random guy. It was a whole year before I even let Shane put his hand up my shirt. He tried many, many times, and I fought him off, protecting my turf against what I knew would be an inevitable march forward. It’s boobs first, then down the pants, undies off, and then, after that, everything is fair game.

We spend late Friday nights and most Saturday afternoons scrimmaging in my bed, above the sheets, with Shane slowly gaining ground. But what my boyfriend spent more than twelve months achieving inch by inch in my bedroom, Porter had plundered in a few sweaty minutes on the fairway near the twelfth hole.

I had lain there, looking up at a sky so blue it was almost black, listening to Porter’s breathing as it returned to normal, feeling mine finally slowing, too. All those weekends and tangled after-school specials with Shane, combined, added up, and totaled, did not feel as good as this one brief grassy smash with Porter. I felt like I just got a big drink of water when I didn’t even know I was thirsty. It was so good it scared the shit out of me.

“Leah . . .” Freddie says softly from the snug seat next to me, her voice bringing me back to the car, to the warm night rolling past me, but I am unable to turn my head and drag my eyes away from the fairway until I feel her hand on my shoulder.

“Leah,” she says again, a little louder this time, with a small, surprised laugh, “you’ve got grass in your hair.”

She runs her fingers lightly through my hair and holds out a few blades. She drops them, long and green, into my palm, and I close my hand around them, running my knuckles softly against my bruised lips, searching for the scent of mint between my curved fingers.

Freddie is watching me closely. Yorke looks over her shoulder, glancing back from the front seat with her eyes wide.

I open my hand. The grass is a striking green against my pale palm as we pass under an amber streetlamp, as green as Porter’s eyes. Roger shifts into gear, and a breeze drops down, swirling through the convertible. It lifts the grass up and blows it away. I watch it disappear. My sisters look away as I lower my hand and slowly settle back into place.

My family, all experts in reading my mother’s moods, disappears as soon as we get home from the gymnasium. My sisters split off in different directions, shadowed by their boyfriends. Freddie, the first one across the foyer, slips up the steps, still in her cap and gown, defecting to her Parisian bedroom with Evan.

Seconds later I hear “
Pour aimer . . . pour avoir aimé . . . être aimé . . .
” as the sound of Gérard, the well-modulated voice on Freddie’s language tapes, floats down the stairs.

Freddie has been Frenching it up all day. All morning long we heard the tensing of French verbs, while Yorke covered the dining room table with bridal magazines and crowded me (and the last few Os in my cereal bowl) right out of the room, and while I stepped out of the shower and Freddie yanked our bathroom door open to find her favorite lip gloss—excuse me,
son brillant à lèvres—
then left me steaming on the bath mat.

My mother had tensed right along with Gérard, her mood notching up slowly from breakfast through to lunch, reaching a fevered pitch as we rushed back home after Freddie’s graduation ceremony with, according to her, “a thousand things to do before all the guests arrive” and the party officially got under way.

Yorke circles the staircase the long way and sneaks out back to join Roger and my dad in the rented white tent, leaving Shane and me alone with my mother, and she is closing in behind us.

I grab Shane’s hand and bound up the stairs two at a time, climbing away from the sound of her heels clicking furiously across the Italian tile and her voice calling, “Be back down here in fifteen minutes!”

Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds later I am flat on my back, soft flowered sheets rumpling up against my skin, bra off, and legs twisting around the duvet.

“Shane,” I whisper as his head lowers and his lips nudge away at the neck of my T-shirt. “Shane . . .” I say again, feeling his hand, too warm on my stomach, slowly making its way upward. He breathes back, his only response a slight arching of his neck to come at me at a better angle.

I reach around his back, squeezing hard as I try to see the clock on my dresser behind his head. His hands feel heavy, my hair is caught somewhere, and I am so warm and suffocated and tired.

I don’t know what I was thinking, dragging him up here, hoping to feel some spark, to thrash about hot and heavy as if we were on green, soft grass, with the night open and smooth around us. I thought maybe something had changed for me last night. That I had woken up somehow.

I push at his hands, wanting them to stop moving in careless, wandering circles, wanting nothing but air and coolness between us.

“Shane! Leah! Get down here!” my mother screams, and I can almost hear her bracelets against the banister.

“Shit,” Shane says into my neck before his head snaps up and his eyes crack open, lids heavy against the early-afternoon sun streaming through my windows. “So much for the French lessons.”

He rolls off me and stands quickly, smoothing out the front of his long khaki shorts and flicking his bangs to the side.

“Let’s go,” he says impatiently with his eyes on the unlocked door.

“I can’t go like this,” I say, still lying on the bed, pointing at my blue T-shirt, all stretched out and twisted, my boobs free and naked underneath. “Julia would not be pleased.”

I sit up and search around in the tangled duvet. I find my bra and start to put it on, sliding it under my shirt.

“Hook this thing, Shane,” I say with my chin down and my fingers foreign and clumsy behind my back.

Shane of course bypasses the bra completely and reaches for my goods.

“Jesus, Shane.” I swear through clenching teeth as I fight him off.

Kneeling, I swing my hair over my shoulder and feel a section that clings, still damp and sweaty, to the back of my neck.

I reach back and try again. “She is going to walk in the door any second.”

“I am much better at the unhooking part,” Shane says in frustration, but he twists my lacy pink bra around in his football fingers until he gets it hooked.

Shane and I have barely touched down on the last step when there my mother is, pushing a large silver vase overflowing with yellow tea roses into my arms.

“Find somewhere to put these where Freddie can enjoy them,” she says as she walks off toward the kitchen.

Caterers are carrying more of everything in through the garage door. A constant stream of aproned workers, steaming silver pans, and large, Saran-covered platters passes through the arched doorway.

Right, I think, holding the flowers out and away from me at arm’s length as I search the room for a place to stash them. I was there when Freddie had a couple of accidents and Yorke invented pee-your-bed yellow. Freddie has shunned yellow ever since, but my mother keeps trying.

I set the flowers down on a small trestle table in our family room and feel a slip and a slosh. Water drips onto my fingers and the polished wood tabletop.

“Oh, and Fred . . . Lee . . . Yorke,” my mother calls impatiently.

Finally she is out of choices and lands on “Leah.”

Her head pops around the corner, and she finds me wiping my wet hands on my already used-looking T-shirt.

“Go change,” she says, eyeing me up and down with a disquieting glance. “It’s almost time and you look . . . disheveled.”

God, she doesn’t even know which one I am. She just knows I don’t look good enough.

I retreat across the foyer with Shane in tow. He’s so close he’s practically in my back pocket as I grab the railing at the base of the stairs.

My mother’s slender fingers slide onto his forearm, stopping us both.

“Shane,” she says with a smooth smile, the coral tips of her fingers denting into his skin, “won’t you come give me a hand at the bar?”

She peels him away from me, and I head back to my room alone, feeling mostly pissed at her, but also a little thankful, because for once I can climb the stairs without Shane hotboxing me step by step.