One Kiss to Win

by Romi Hart

  I couldn’t believe this had happened. Only hours before, we had been hooking up in his car, all sweaty hands and hard kisses, and now I was lying in bed back at my place and wondering if I was ever going to see him again. It just didn’t make any kind of sense to me. Yes, the kid thing was a major bomb to drop on anybody, but surely he could at least understand why I’d held it back for such a long time? And it wasn’t as if I was asking him to step up and become Jacob’s dad or some shit like that. I was just telling him the truth, laying it out for him so he knew where he stood with me and why I might sometimes seem like I had something else on my mind when we were out together. And what had it got me – a taxi ride home alone, and waking up tomorrow morning knowing that I had basically severed any chance of a relationship for reasons that were beyond my understanding?

  Mom had warned me all about this back in the day. She had told me how hard it would be for me to find someone who was willing to stick around beyond the kid, to actually get to know me as more than some vague, distant single mother who they would keep at arm's length for fear of being dragged into a family situation that they had no real intention of sticking around in. I was only twenty-five, for God's sake, and most of the guys I knew around my age were looking for someone they could take out and be guaranteed to fuck at the end of the night. Now was the time when we were meant to be experiencing shit, to be getting out there and seeing the world and living our best lives. I knew that I was, but I also recognized that for so many people having a kid was the end of all that. They heard that I had a child, and they wrote me off as a homebody with no ambition and no intention of living any kind of life past him. They were wrong, of course, but that was hard to get across when everyone seemed to assume that my life had ground to a halt seven years ago. Add that to the fact that I was passionate about my career and achieving everything I wanted in a professional sense, and it seemed like most dudes my age would keep a full-on ten-foot boundary around me. I should have enjoyed Adam more while I had him, because I doubted I'd get my hands on anyone even half as accommodating as he had been.

  I thought back to the start of the date, when those paparazzi had appeared out of nowhere to snap pictures of the two of us together. I prayed that they hadn’t managed to capture anything too damning, because the thought of having to field a bunch of curious, nudge-nudge-wink-wink questions from my colleagues and family about the nature of our relationship now that it seemed pretty much done was…depressing. Not to mention the fact that I didn’t particularly want my face plastered all over the newspaper – well, I did, but only as long as I was the one writing the story behind it. The thought of cropping up on the gossip pages was almost unsettling. I was the person behind the story, not the bimbo on the arm of the soccer player the story was about.

  Maybe it was for the best. I mean, that life, the life that Adam lived, it would never have sat well with the one I did. Especially with Jacob to consider on top of everything else. Even now, I was figuring out how best to duck questions from the other parents at the school who might have seen the photos if they got published. That life, the one that had him plastered on the front pages of magazines and talked about all over the world, it was so much bigger than anything I subscribed to. I remembered the lance of panic that had shot through me as soon as I'd laid eyes on those photographers, that feeling of complete and utter discomfort at the knowledge that it was me they were trying to capture with their blinding flashes and calls of "over here, over here!". And Adam didn't seem put out by it in the least – if anything, he seemed amused by the attention. I couldn't imagine ever living like that, even after years of practice, and even if it became second nature for me I never wanted to expose my son to it too. Jacob needed to grow up like a normal kid. That had been my goal ever since his dad had left and it had just been the two of us against the world. I wanted him to have an easy life, a life he didn't have to think twice about, and dating Adam would have made them nearly impossible.

  My heart sank as I thought about all the reasons we couldn’t be together. Now that I laid them out like that, there were so many I wondered how I’d convinced myself to go for it in the first place. Was I lonely, or desperate? Did I just want someone after all this time without? No, I knew that wasn’t the answer. I had been without a man for years, and I didn’t see why I should suddenly get panicked about growing old alone when I was only twenty-five. It was something deeper than that, a connection between Adam and I that demanded to be taken notice of. We’d both known it was there, both known it was something sweet and sure and serious. But sometimes, that connection wasn’t enough, and you had to accept that things just weren’t destined to work out, no matter how hard you wanted them to, no matter how hard you were willing to try. I remembered what he’d said to me earlier in the night, that he wasn’t good at second dates, and yet there he was on one with me. I felt a lump in my throat. He felt the same way, the same realization that this was something special having hit him too. Why did he have to work out this way? Why couldn’t things just be….easy?

  I tortured myself for a good while longer, going over the maybes and the hows and the ifs in my head a dozen times until it felt as though I was running in circles. It took me hours to fall asleep, and when I did, it felt as though the alarm went off mere seconds later.

  “Shit,” I mumbled to myself as I dragged myself out of bed, heading towards Jacob’s room. The thoughts I’d been obsessing over the night before were still fresh in my brain but I was doing a pretty damn good job of pretending that they weren’t there for the time being as I went to get my son up for his baseball training. It was a Sunday morning and most of the world would still be crapped-out asleep, and yet here I was, heading towards the only thing in this life that had remained a constant for me. Yes, there was no doubt that his existence had thrown a spanner in the works of whatever relationship I might have had with Adam, but it was worth it. It was always worth it. I couldn’t imagine a time in my life when it wouldn’t be worth it to me. I looked at him for a moment as he slept, his little body spread out across the sheets and his mouth wide open as he snored softly, and grinned. Things might not have always worked out the way I wanted them to, but as long as he was still around, then I hadn’t done that bad a job.

  I got him up, and the two of us made our way through our morning routine with extra pep as I used the task to keep myself from thinking too hard about the night before. Jacob was always so excited to head out to his baseball team's training, and it was hard not to get swept up in the thrill of it all. I made him pancakes, and we sang along loudly to the theme songs of his favorite weekend-morning cartoons together, not caring much about waking the neighbors. We loaded everything up into the car and headed out to the park on the other side of town, and I dropped him off. I lingered for a second outside the fence and watched as he ran over to greet the friends he only saw once a week. After a second or two, I felt a pair of eyes on me, and I turned around to find myself face-to-face with another one of the parents who had just dropped their child off.

  “Hey,” I smiled at him briefly, and he continued to stare. I glanced away, frowning slightly, hoping he would catch on to the fact that I didn’t exactly appreciate being peered at like I was some kind of oddity here. What, had nobody met a single mother before? Was it really that big a deal? But then, he lifted the newspaper he had in his hand up to his face and peered closely at one of the pictures on the back page, and my heart sank to my shoes at once.

  “I don’t want to be an asshole,” he thrust the paper out under my nose, instantly moving into asshole territory no matter what he’d said. “But is this you?”

  I looked down at the paper in front of me, and found it open to the gossip pages. I glanced up at Jacob, and was glad to see that he hadn't clicked into what was happening over here just yet. Good. As long as I could keep it that way.

  I squinted at the picture. It was a slightly blurry black-and-white shot of me climbing into the front seat of Adam’s fancy car, while Adam raised
his hand towards the cameras in what looked like I wave but I knew to be an attempt to hold back the blisteringly bright wall of light coming at us. I sighed. I had sincerely hoped it wouldn’t come to this.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” I sighed, and pushed the paper back to him. I turned to head for my car, but he followed me, an excitement in his voice that made me want to scream.

  “Do you know Adam Channing?” He asked, leaning in interestedly. “Are you guys, you know, are you a couple?”

  “No, I don’t, and no, we’re not,” I responded firmly, grabbing the handle of my car door and hoping he would take the hint. “I have to go. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh but-” He tried to follow up with another question but I had already climbed into the car and slammed the door pointedly behind me, letting him know that I didn’t want to hear one more word of his bullshit prying into my life. I waited until he had backed off again, and planted my head on the steering wheel, hoping the cool leather would make me feel a little more human. It didn’t. Panic was soaring through my head, my brain trying to make sense of what had just happened. I had figured I might get a nod or a picture on a gossip site, but there I was, for everyone to see, on the back pages of a city-wide paper that almost everyone I knew flicked through a copy of at least a couple of times a week. I would have to pray that no-one would pick up a copy this Sunday, that everyone would be too busy or too hungover to bother with little old me.

  I headed to a coffee shop nearby to wait out till Jacob was done with his practice, and did my best to avoid the gazes of all of the employees and customers who seemed determined to make me uncomfortable. But that could have just been my imagination. Everywhere I went, I felt as though people were staring at me, that they were whispering amongst themselves and trying to figure out exactly what kind of relationship I had with Adam. But for the most part, I knew that no-one would give a shit about me, or what I had done last night, or whether my picture was in the gossip rags anyway. Well, at least, that’s what I could tell myself until my phone started to ring.

  I pulled it from my pocket and stared at the screen; it was my Mom. I groaned inwardly. Perfect. That was just what I needed right now, someone to pick at the wounds that were still fresh from the night before. I thought about ignoring it, but I knew I had to take it. She would keep calling until she got a response. I lifted the phone to my ear and closed my eyes as I pressed the button to take it.

  “Hey?” My voice lifted up at the end as though I was half-expecting someone else to be at the other end of the line.

  “Samantha?” She asked, and I could hear an urgency to her voice. “Have you seen the Tribune this morning?”

  “Yeah, I saw it,” I admitted. “I guess I’m…there.”

  “You’re all over the back page!” She exclaimed. “With that soccer player! What were you doing with him?”

  “I was out…we were just out together, Mom, you remember I had to write that article about him?” I reminded her, hoping that she’d believe me and that we could drop it.

  “It didn’t look very professional,” she grumbled. Mom was part of the reason I’d got into being a journalist, her ability to sniff out the best stories and the most compelling angles to stories. I ran my hand through my hair once more, wondering if I should stick to my story or just tell her the truth.

  “It wasn’t,” I blurted before I had a chance to stop myself. Suddenly, all at once, I just wanted to talk to my mother, wanted her advice, wanted her to convince me that I wasn’t completely unlovable and that I would find someone somewhen.

  “You were on a date with him?” She pressed. “As in, a proper date?”

  “Yeah, we went out last week and he invited me out again last night,” I explained, pinching the bridge of my nose between my fingers and wincing as I recounted it.

  "How did it go? Are you guys dating now?" She was trying not to sound excited, but for her, this was probably the double whammy she'd been waiting for for years, ever since Jacob was born. Not only was I back at the dating game, but I was dating someone who was rich, famous, and talented. It was everything she could have wanted for me, except that it wasn't.

  “No,” I shook my head even though she couldn’t see me. “He…”

  “Was it about Jacob?” She cut across me bluntly, and I practically winced at her words. She had never been much one for that motherly tact, and honestly, it had probably done me good growing up to hear the truth of the matter and not have to deal with a Mom who constantly danced around the point and never came out and said what she actually meant.

  “Yeah, I think it was,” I admitted. She must have felt a little vindicated, but she would never have shown it in a million years. Her voice dropped into a different register, one that told me she had no intent of gloating the accuracy of her predictions over me.

  “Well, a man like that…” she trailed off and left the words hanging in the air between us. “You can’t really be that surprised, honey. I doubt someone like Adam Channer has much interest in stepping in and raising a kid out of nowhere-”

  “Channing,” I corrected her without thinking. “And I wasn’t asking him to do that. I never would. I was just being honest with him, that’s all. But he…he shut down completely. It was like someone had flicked a switch or something. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Are you alright?” Mom asked, cutting across my rambling and asking the important questions. “You don’t sound alright.”

  “You never think I do,” I pointed out. “I just…this is a real kick in the teeth, you know? I’ve waited so long for someone to come along, someone that I actually like and who likes me and who I want to date and then…”

  “You’ll find someone, honey,” Mom replied, her voice gentle and motherly. “I know it’s hard, but if this guy didn’t want all of you, including Jacob, then things just weren’t meant to be.”

  “I know, I know,” I let my head tilt to the side, exhausted. “It’s just been so long. This one…I guess it hurts more than it would if I’d been dating all along.”

  “Well, this can be your way back in,” she suggested. “You can use this to get your mojo back, yeah?”

  “Mojo?” I couldn’t help but splutter at what she was saying. The word just sounded so silly coming out of her mouth.

  “Yeah, mojo!” She shot back playfully. “You know now that you’re open to dating someone, but that maybe men like him aren’t quite what you should be going for.”

  “Fair point,” I smiled despite myself. “I should probably go. I think I just need some time for myself to figure out…ugh, to figure out what I can take from all of this.”

  “Take all the time you need,” Mom replied warmly. “And see if you can get this picture out of the newspaper! You must have contacts who could get rid of it for you…”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I cut her off, knowing that she would go full-on into it if she thought she was on to a good idea. Now that the paper was printed and my picture was out there, there’d be no way in hell that I could get it taken down again. I just had to pray that no-one else caught a glimpse of it, or if they did they dismissed it considering that the likelihood of someone like me dating someone like Adam was pretty much rock-bottom.

  I sipped on my coffee and peered out the window, absent-mindedly picking at a slice of cake that I had chosen as a treat to help me get over the last couple of days. But I didn’t have much on an appetite. Everything just felt too…current. It would take a while before I could put all this behind me, that much I knew for sure.

  Not to mention the fact that I had to write that article about him. There’d be no getting away from that. I’d have to think about him, to really consider his existence in a deep and profound way, and even the thought of it made me want to collapse into this seat and refuse to get out till it all blew over. At least the first draft was done; provided it wasn’t a pile of crap, I shouldn’t have to give too much effort to it outside of edits. Irina usually liked my stories well enough, so at l
east I could rely on her not to drag me through writing a whole new piece from scratch.

  I finished up my coffee and was heading to the car when I felt my phone bumping up against my hip. And it gave me an idea. I knew I was being ridiculous, but I had to try. Even if it was stupid, even if there wasn't a hope in hell for the two of us anymore. I remembered that photo, in black and white, and how I'd felt when it had been taken. Sure, I had been unsettled by the photographers, but I had been so happy to see him that it felt as though my heart might swell and burst just being close to him again. Even thinking about it now I had to suppress a little smile. Before I had a chance to think things through, I grabbed my cell from my pocket, dialed his number, and held it to my ear.

  “Hello,” Adam picked up the phone after a couple of rings, and he didn’t sound pleased to hear from me. I paced up and down next to the car as I tried to figure out what to say next. Shit, I shouldn’t have just jumped into this. But then, I would never have found the nerve to do it if I hadn’t just gone for it. But what did I want to say?

  “Adam,” I spoke his name and it felt like a spell on my tongue, as though I could conjure him up and have him appear right next to me in an instant. “Adam, I need to talk to you.”

  “Fine,” he sounded quietly mad, and the tone of his voice made me shiver. “What about?”

  “Last night,” I hesitated. Was I really going to call him up on this? I rolled my shoulders back and steeled my resolve. Call it research for next time. If I could get the truth of why he’d just left me there out of him, then maybe I could avoid a similar scenario with the next dude. If there ever was one.

  “Yeah, did you get home okay?” He replied, his voice wooden and devoid of any actual concern.

  “Yeah, yeah, I was fine,” I nodded, wrinkling my nose up as I tried to find the nerve to say it. “Look, Adam, you left so quickly after I told you about my son, and I was just-”