by Jenn Bennett
Like he’s used to kissing his childhood best friend until her legs are wobbly.
And see, I know that Lucky and I must have done something shocking, because Evie says not one word to me after Lucky leaves—not one word. She just stares, mouth open and shaped like the full moon, as I hurriedly try to hide the evidence of our crime by stuffing the broken curtain inside my darkroom and shutting off my red safelight.
“Do not tell my mom” is the only thing I tell her.
And thankfully, she doesn’t give me away when Mom soon returns from the neighborhood meeting. And Mom, oblivious as ever, doesn’t notice anything amiss.
“Well, ladies, that was a waste of time,” she announces.
“Oh?” I say, pretending like I care as I fiddle with the CLOSED sign on the front door of the Nook, eyes darting across the street toward the boatyard, heart racing.
He kissed me.
Mom throws her keys on the counter and sits on the squeaky stool. “The business owners on our block have decided that there is no possible way Adrian Summers—handsome, talented, Olympic-hopeful, son of a prominent member of our community—could have possibly destroyed the boatyard window in retribution against Lucky. He’s too mature for that. He wouldn’t endanger his career at Harvard. He’s on crutches, poor thing.”
Evie groans and rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers, careful to avoid the whirls of heavy black makeup framing her eyes.
I’m just trying to focus on the words Mom’s saying, because all I heard was “Lucky.”
He kissed me, and I kissed him.
I feel like maybe I need to lie down. Or something.
“I’m sorry,” Evie says.
“Never apologize,” Mom tells her. “Women do that too much for things that aren’t our fault. And this is definitely not your fault.”
Mom tried to argue with the rest of the shop owners. Tried to tell them what Adrian said to me and Lucky. That he was in the blue car with the other boys, drinking and speeding down the street. The car that the old woman from Regal Cosmetics spied from her window.
“Even Kat Karras backed me up,” Mom says, “if you can believe that.”
We had our hands all over each other.
I laugh nervously.
“You okay, shutterbug?”
“I’m so good,” I tell her, and immediately regret saying it that way, ugh.
She makes a weird face at me and then shakes her head, as if to say, Whatever, kid.
“Anyway,” she says, “Kat and I were shot down. Mob rules, and the mob supports the Summers family. No one saw Adrian do it, and everyone loves Adrian. Therefore, it must have been some tourist hooligans that broke the boatyard window. Unrelated to the department store window. One person suggested Lucky might have done it himself—that maybe he’s got a thing about breaking windows now. Some kind of gang initiation.”
“What?” Evie and I both say in unison.
“That’s ridiculous,” I add.
Mom cleans her cat-eye glasses on the front of her shirt, then squints in the light to check the lens. “Yep. That’s when Kat and Nick stormed out of the meeting,” Mom says. “Hard to blame them. This town is what happens when puritans and greedy rich people breed.”
“What happened to all our revolutionary resistance fighters who fought for freedom and justice?” I ask. “Beauty wasn’t always bad … right?”
“Our revolutionary spirit got stamped out of the town when people like the Summers family figured out they could use it to make a profit out of tourism,” Mom says.
“Well, what do we do now?”
Mom shrugs. “I don’t know, babe. I’m hoping Adrian will stay away and let this thing die down now. But Evie, maybe you shouldn’t engage with him anymore if he texts?”
“Trying,” she says.
* * *
Seeing as how Lucky and I are pretty much the epicenter of the event that sparked the neighborhood meeting—broken windows, all that—you’d think he’d be interested in discussing what happened at that meeting, kiss or no kiss. I expect he’ll have a sarcastic opinion about it, and it will come via text any second now.
Any second.
I mean, maybe he’s busy.
He’s still trying to balance working at Summers & Co and the boatyard. And I don’t see his Superhawk parked outside, so he could be doing something with his family. I don’t know what he does every single minute of his day.
I’m sure he’ll text when he gets a chance.
But I don’t hear from Lucky that night … or the next day.
Or the next.
Two days …
Okay. Two days is definitely a long time, and that’s when I’m suddenly filled with a strange kind of panic that feels like thin ice forming over my skin, cracking, and re-forming … over and over again.
I go over everything in my head again—the entire conversation we had in the darkroom before everything happened. I worry I said something wrong, or I didn’t say enough. I worry about his state of mind regarding what he went through in the fire at the lake house, and that maybe we should have talked about that more.
God. I hope I didn’t pressure him into kissing me. I mean, I blocked the door. He asked me to move. Was all of it one-sided? Did I read the signals wrong? I don’t think so.… At least, I didn’t at the time.
Or maybe it was none of that. Maybe he just changed his mind and decided that kissing his best friend was too weird and squicky. Please, please, please don’t let that be it.
I could just ask him. That would clear things up.
Be upfront and honest: Are you awash in strange, new feelings for me? Because I can’t stop thinking about you, and you’re messing up all my plans, and now I need to know if I’m under a dark generational curse, or if you feel the same way, because I’ve never done this before, and I don’t know what I’m doing.
I think about texting him several times. I even compose a practice message, but before I hit Send, Evie walks behind the bookshop counter and catches me in the act.
“Want a little advice from Madame Evie the Great?” she says, dark circles under her eyes. “The spirits would tell you not to send that. Let him come to you. Or even better, just let him go. Chasing Adrian when he ghosted me after our first date got me where I am now, and I regret it completely.”
I’m a little insulted she’d even lump Lucky and Adrian into the same group; then again, she’s got more experience in these matters. Maybe she’s right and I should just wait. The more I hesitate, the more unsure I become … until all I end up doing is watching Lucky come and go, wondering what I did wrong, from the bookshop window.
I try not to think about it. When I’m not working, I load a fresh roll of film into my Nikon F3 and stroll through the historic district, snapping some interesting closeup shots of the horse-drawn carriages and one of the drivers, dressed in colonial costume. I’m concentrating so hard on my work, I’m able to ignore a kissy-face gesture thrown my way by a random Golden across the Harborwalk. Don’t know you, don’t care. But when I spy someone familiar eating at a café—my teacher, Mr. Phillips, his round Harry Potter glasses glinting in the afternoon sun—I get nervous that he’s heard about me trying to hustle my way back into the magazine offices, and that’s just too much; I cap the lens of my camera and head back home before he sees me.
At lunch on the third day of radio silence, I’m still wondering about Lucky while shelving books in the psychology section when I hear a couple of noises that catch my attention. The first is a dog barking outside the shop. Not out of the ordinary. Lots of dog owners on our street.
The second thing is Mom talking at the register. Again, nothing unusual. It’s the tone of her voice that’s alarming. She’s using her Not Friendly tone. And when I peer around the antique printing machine in the middle of the shop to see who she’s talking to—when I see the tiny black dog on the leash that’s tied up outside our steps—I understand why.
I stride around the Nook’s printing machin
e, heart racing.
“Of course you can. It’s a free country,” Mom is telling Lucky, who is standing in front of the counter with his back to me, black leather jacket stretched across his broad shoulders and jeans hanging low on his hips like he’s a walking, talking advertisement for sexy rebel-without-a-cause teenage dreams. “Not going to kick you out of the store. I’m just asking why it is you’re here, is all. If you’re not buying anything. And why is that dog yapping?”
“He’s Bean the Magic Pup, and he’s trying to tell you that he wants to come inside. He hates being outside when he can see people inside.”
“I hate dogs,” Mom says, making a face. “They pee on things.”
“He’s house-trained. Mostly.”
“Nope. He’s not coming inside. Why are you here?”
“Trying to tell you,” he says, sliding something across the counter.
She frowns. “What is this?”
“Looks like cash,” he says. “A hundred and fifty dollars, to be exact.”
Mother of God.
“Hi, uh. Hi. H-hi,” I say in the most awkward way possible, sliding around the side of the counter. A tiny earthquake shakes me from the inside out at the sight of his long black lashes and the playful swoop of his hair. I’m not prepared for this. I can’t see him here—not in front of my mom. She’s going to know something happened between us. Isn’t it obvious? Every molecule in my body remembers. They’re practically shouting.
LUCKY. LUCKY. LUCKY.
I’ve got a tangle of weird emotions about why he hasn’t texted me, and I’m very panicked right now, but …
But I still want him.
The worst part is that he knows. He sees it all over my face, the wanting, and he lights up like a city skyscraper at midnight.
His scarred eyebrow lifts. And oh, the evil look behind his eyes. In the history of the world, no one has smirked like he’s smirking. This smirk of his is sly. It’s full of knowing. It says, Why yes, I kissed your face off, and we both know it was damn good, but here I am, turning the tables on you. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
Dead. Me. Go ahead and call an ambulance, because I’m going to have a heart attack right now, right here. Goodbye.
“Good afternoon,” he says, like he’s a Jehovah’s Witness, come to save my soul with a pamphlet and a smile. “I was just asking your mother here about hiring out your services.”
“Were you, really?”
“I was, yes. Need a photographer.”
“Is that right?”
“Yep.”
“Quick job. Need some photos of the boatyard.”
“The boatyard.”
“The front window, back bays. The crane. The docks.”
Bean the Magic Pup sees me and scratches at the glass on our door to come inside, pink tongue hanging out of his mouth.
“Why?” Mom asks.
Lucky lifts his face to hers. “We just got the new window put in, and the trim and paint is different. You may have noticed.”
We both stare at him.
“Anyway,” he continues, “My parents want to update our website photo of the front of the business. So might as well update the others while we’re at it. We’ve just got standard phone photos up there now. Would be nice to have more professional shots. If that was something Josie could do?”
“Of course she could,” Mom says, like he just insulted both of us. Like it was a challenge, and she just fell for it.
Wait a minute. She’s actually buying into his scheme? Correction: my scheme. Because I thought of it first. I think I’m actually a little miffed at him now. I don’t care how pretty he is, or how much I want to stick my hands deep inside his leather jacket. Why is he even wearing that thing? It’s hot outside, for the love of Pete.
“She’s really good,” she tells him. “Don’t know if you’ve seen her work online, but she has a website you can browse. One of those subscriber things?”
“Mom,” I say weakly. Ambulance. 911. Emergency. Dying.
“Yes, I have seen it,” he says, suppressing a smile as I discreetly try to step on the toe of his boot. It’s got some kind of reinforced steel thing inside it. Won’t budge. He shifts his boot to the side and says, “All the sign photos. Really cool.”
Mom crosses her arms and nods. “It is really cool. She’s got a good eye. But as for this job … It’s for your parents?”
“It is,” he says.
“They know about it?”
“They do. You want to call my mom?”
She doesn’t answer. Just considers it for a moment while she shifts on the squeaky chair and says, “Suppose it’s up to Josie, not me.”
I blink at her. I blink at him.
“I’ve got work here in the Nook right now,” I tell him.
“That’s okay,” he says. “I’m on a break. Just finished up at the department store, and I’m about to start a shift with my dad. It would probably be better to do the photography after the boatyard’s closed, so you wouldn’t have everyone in the way. And isn’t there something about the light being better right before twilight … ?”
“Golden hour,” I say, smiling tightly. You bastard.
He snaps his fingers. “That’s it.”
“It’s a real thing,” Mom says, completely clueless. “Right, shutterbug?”
Oh my God. Lucky is eating this up. I want to kick him in the shin.
He clears his throat and says in a cheery voice, “So, golden hour? I can meet you in front of the boatyard office. I’ll show you which things to shoot. Shouldn’t take all that long, I wouldn’t think? But if that’s not enough money—?”
Kick him in the shin, strangle him … Maybe he’s the one who needs the ambulance, not me. “Oh, it’ll be enough.”
“Hey,” Mom says. “If you do this, I want to make it clear that I’d be right across the street, and I will not be picking up anyone at the police station again. You have to earn my trust back, Lucky.”
“Understood,” he says. “Zero police stations.”
“You’re not in contact with Adrian Summers, are you?” she asks. “Because I know our neighborhood is filled with buffoons, and I’m not saying I don’t believe that Adrian wasn’t the one who smashed the boatyard window. But whatever’s going on, I have to ask—this hasn’t turned into a turf war or anything, has it?”
“Turf war? Jesus, Mom. There’s no turf in Beauty. This isn’t a football rivalry.”
“I have heard there’s bad blood between the clam shacks,” Lucky says.
Mom has a low tolerance for smartass-ery, so I expect her to give him the ol’ Saint-Martin glare, but she just patiently tells him, “You know what I mean. I don’t want my daughter caught up in the crossfire of anything.”
What about your daughter causing the crossfire? How would you feel about that, huh? My stomach twists around the old lie of the department store window, and I try not to look at Lucky’s face, because it only makes me feel worse.
“No ma’am, there’s no contact between me and Adrian Summers,” he tells her. “However, I did hear through the grapevine today that his father sent him to Providence to stay with his aunt for a while. Mom says his father’s trying to keep him out of town until the dust settles.”
Okay, that’s actual real news. Out of the corner of my eye, I spy Evie’s worried face peering out from behind a rack of local postcards. She’s been listening, and apparently she didn’t know this either, because she speaks up and says, “Adrian went to his aunt Cynthia’s house?”
“Yeah,” he tells her. “My mother found out through someone in our family.”
“Probably for the best,” Mom says. “Well, I guess this photography project at the boatyard is all right, then. If Josie has time …”
I straighten a stack of bookmarks on the counter, keeping my eyes down. “I have time.”
There’s nothing more we can say in front of my mom, so he just thanks us and leaves the store, fetching Bean the Magic Pup on his way.
Mom watches him go, a look of confusion on her face. “I’ll never understand why people choose to own pets. They just die and break your heart.”
“Jesus, Mom. Way to look at the world. Bean is actually kind of cute.”
“You’re scared of dogs.”
“I know,” I grumble.
She sighs. “Wonder if I should walk across the street and talk to Kat about this.”
Um, no. Disaster! Absolutely not. Then she might find out I went to their house for Sunday dinner, or that I hired Lucky to give me seasickness, piloting me around the harbor.
“I don’t think that’s necessary,” I tell her.
Her eyes dart toward mine. “Still not sure about you hanging around that boy.”
Yeah, well.
She’d be even less sure if she knew what we did in the darkroom.
* * *
I braid my hair. Unbraid it. Brush it a thousand times. Dark makeup. Light makeup. Wash it all off. Try again. Okay, this is stupid, because the only thing I need is my best jeans—the one pair of jeans that fits so absolutely perfectly, I can completely relax when I’m wearing them. Those jeans. I’m wearing them and my perfect black flats, and the rest doesn’t matter.
It’s just Lucky.
It was just a kiss.
After the Nook closes, I use my digital camera to get some experimental shots of the Karrases’ new window from the across the street between breaks in the traffic. They’re a bit more Art than the Karrases would probably prefer. They just want pictures for a website; any monkey with a DSLR could take them. But I’m a little wired and anxious right now, and everything in my lens is hyper saturated and full of odd angles.
It’s just Lucky.
It was just a kiss.
Lucky and his leather jacket are waiting for me—no Bean this time—when I cross the street and make it over to him, super cool, my camera hanging around my neck, best jeans and perfect flats.… You can do this, everything is fine …
“Hey.”
One word. That’s all he says. And all at once, my body suddenly turns into a dark cave filled with a thousand bats that are all trying to escape in a panic, flapping their batty wings and gnawing at my insides with their tiny vampire teeth.