The Art of French Kissing

by Brianna Shrum

  We click play at the same time.

  It’s past ten when I follow Riya and Addie out back. We don’t have to be in our rooms until midnight, and even that is a completely lax rule that I don’t think anyone follows. We haven’t experienced a single bed check, and I hear doors opening and closing down the hall at all times. So no one is really counting.

  There’s this little area outside by a creek, because I think every single place is by some kind of creek in Georgia, and apparently we’re hanging out there. Will is the only guy from the other team here. It strikes me as odd, then, that we’ve cordoned ourselves off from each other because of these random group assignments. But we have. When I walk up, arms linked with Riya, Andrew glances at me and his face darkens.

  “So damn glad you could make it,” he says.

  I narrow my eyes. “You’ve made that clear, dude.”

  “Have I?”

  I stay standing, even though Andrew is on the ground, leaning back against a tree. Like I need this massive height difference to hold my own. Like we are gearing up for a fight. “It was one mistake.”

  “That’s going to screw us.”

  “You don’t know that,” I say.

  And once again, the whole freaking group is quiet, listening to Andrew rip me apart. Or try. I feel so tiny, and like I want to be tall. But I don’t know how to be. Andrew knows, down in the pit of his stomach, that I don’t deserve to be here.

  Maybe he’s right. I don’t know. I did screw up.

  I want to disappear down into the ground. My gut twists traitorously in sympathy for Reid. This is what he felt like the other night. Because of me.

  But his shittiness is what is causing me to feel this way, right now. So the sympathy dissipates pretty damn quickly, little mental effort required.

  Andrew’s mouth twists into something cruel and he takes a cigarette he smuggled in here from his pocket and lights it. “I’m just saying, next challenge, maybe try not being such a dumbass. We’re all paying for it, and I’m gonna be pissed if it’s not you paying.”

  Suddenly all the shame just snaps and gives way to rage. “I’m the dumbass?” I say, skin hot and eyes wide. “The first challenge, if Reid hadn’t tripped and spilled their dessert, you would have sent three of us home because you’re too stupid to know how to cook scallops.”

  “Who’s Reid?”

  I blink. And that’s when Will slides close to me and says, overenunciating and slow, “The guy who tripped. And spilled their dessert.”

  Andrew sucks in on his cigarette and stands, then blows it right in my face. I cough, and I’m mad about it. Like the satisfaction he gets out of my coughing is the most offensive thing happening right now. “I don’t need to stand here and take this,” says Andrew, and when he leaves, it’s nothing but crickets in the air for a while. Crickets and a creek and six kids just kind of breathing in the dark.

  Until Riya says, “Where’s everyone from?” and the tension mercifully cracks.

  I don’t even know Riya, really. And I know Will even less. But I am basically clinging to both of them like they’re handholds on a rock wall, because even with Andrew gone, no one will quite look at me. I think they wouldn’t have cared so much, except he set the bar. Made me a target. And that has basically made it so that anything less than tripping me in the cafeteria and berating me in front of everyone is considered mercy.

  So I just chill beside Riya, who keeps jerking into me and giggling because Will keeps poking her in the side and winking at her, and I ignore the chill in the air that I’m sure is actually warm. Because it’s Savannah in June.

  When it finally tips past midnight, we go inside and I fall asleep going over and over what I can do to get vengeance on Reid.

  CHAPTER NINE

  This week, the individual dish is a low-key thing. No sprinting around or grabbing for ingredients in a mad dash of flour and milk and paprika. It’s just “be a chef. Cook good food. Take less than two hours. The end.” Which is exactly what I needed. To relax into the exquisite deglazing of a sauté pan and be able to appreciate the heat that blows out of the oven when I open it, not view it as a health hazard when someone yanks it open as I sprint past it.

  We all needed this.

  I was so glad for the moment to breathe that I didn’t even give a second thought to sabotaging Reid. Not that it would have mattered; everyone knew our team would be the one losing members, not his.

  Three members of my team left after the individual challenge ended. Not Riya or Addie, thank goodness. Not Andrew, either, because someone up there hates me.

  That puts us at eighteen chefs. Teams are even. And I am well-rested enough from the simple challenge this week that now I can focus my energy back where it naturally wants to go: getting vengeance on Reid.

  I am walking the campus in the early morning fog, pondering. Tar and feather, quartering, burning all of his pants if I can find a way into his room—a number of creative solutions—when there’s a shadow beside me and a thumping on the pavement. Rhythmic puffs of breath that sound vaguely masculine. I turn.

  Reid is bouncing on his feet, a thick ring of sweat darkening the neckline of his shirt. He has headphones in but he pops one out to say, “Hey there, buttercup.” He smiles. A genuine smile. I can feel my fist curling at my side.

  “Reid.”

  “Early morning communion with nature?”

  He’s still bouncing, warding off that lactic acid with movement, so all his words come out short and off-pitch and wrong. “Not exactly,” I say.

  I have stopped walking, apparently. I cross my arms over my chest. “What are you doing?”

  He raises a single eyebrow and gestures to his entire self, hand quickly drawing my eyes to his damp face, his torso, his hips, down to his legs, which are frustratingly beautiful things. Like God assigned the sculpting of Reid Yamada’s calves to Michelangelo, and Michelangelo approached them with the goal of rendering David a piece of shit. I blink hard to clear that thought. “What’s it look like I’m doing?”

  “Sullying a perfectly beautiful morning with chatter? And—oh my gosh, will you please stop the bouncing? I can barely hear what you’re saying.”

  He rolls his eyes but stands still. After he’s been immobile for more than half a second, he bends over and rests his hands on his knees, breathing hard. His shirt is super loose, with those excessively deep athletic dude armholes, so when he does, they gap hard and I can see everything—his collarbone and stomach and . . . good lord, what a perfect chest.

  I bite my tongue and look away. Then say, primly, while looking across the courtyard, “Who runs this early in the morning?”

  “You think I should run at three in the afternoon? When it’s eight hundred degrees out and the air itself is a swamp?”

  “Well,” I say.

  “Well.” He cocks his head. “And who communes with nature at such an ungodly hour?”

  “I told you. I wasn’t communing.”

  He’s standing tall again, one hand in his hair, the other relaxed at his side. “Then what were you doing?”

  “I don’t have to tell you.”

  He laughs, this big, loud, shockingly genuine thing, and I’m kind of startled by it. I know I sound like a little kid. Petulant. I don’t have to tell you. But I don’t want to talk to him, not after the hell of last week, not after he started all of this in the first place. I want to not-commune with nature far away from here. Where his cocky smirk is not invading my peripheral and the smell of deodorant and sweat isn’t completely consuming my ability to form coherent words.

  “You ready for the personal challenge tomorrow?” he says.

  I blow out a breath of laughter. “Yeah. You’re not screwing me this time, Yamada. I’m done.”

  “Oh?” Reid’s frustratingly perfect flop of hair finds its way down over his eyes. “You want to call a truce?”

  I narrow my eyes. “Not on your life.”

  He sticks a single earbud back in his ear and bites his
lip when he smiles. “I’m breathless with anticipation, princess.” And he runs off, tennis shoes thump-thump-thumping on the pavement.

  My shoulders drop when he’s almost out of sight, and I didn’t realize until now that my muscles were tense, on edge, through our entire conversation. I purse my lips. I have honestly no idea what I’m going to do to him tomorrow except whatever it is, he’s going to expect it. I won’t be able to hand him the wrong ingredient or knock into him so he falls or sabotage something he’s mixing; he’s going to be ready and alert. Which means I have to think.

  I feel kind of bad even pondering it. But he was the one who couldn’t let it lie, couldn’t just call it even. He asked for me to retaliate then, and he’s basically literally begging me for it now. I am not interested in guilt.

  I’m not.

  I’m interested in revenge.

  I look up at the sky, hoping for a magical answer to appear in the clouds. And when none does, I resign myself to walking back to the old culinary building. It’s long and slow; I must have walked farther than I planned. Mist is curling around my ankles; it looks apocalyptic almost. The whole way back, I contemplate vengeance and cooking and evil smirks and floppy hair.

  “Save me from this nightmare, Em,” I say into the phone. There is a dramatic sigh on the other end.

  “Tell me your struggles, babe.”

  I flop back onto my bed, muscles unwinding. I can actually feel it—this is the first second I haven’t been stressed since I got here. “Tell me yours first.”

  “If you insist.” I can hear Em smiling through the phone; she has a particularly smiley smile-voice. “So I told you Sophie was coming over again? After several very platonic coming-overs. Well she did and we turned on Top Gun, which is the gayest straight movie of all time.”

  I bark out a laugh. “No one watches Top Gun anymore.”

  “Well,” she says, “neither did we.”

  It takes me a second, then I pump my fist in the air. “FINALLY.”

  “Fiiiiiinallyyyy.”

  I laugh and say, “Have you guys hung out since?”

  “A lady doesn’t kiss and tell, Carter.”

  “You already told.”

  “Then yes. We have. We have not watched Top Gun like eight times; it’s turning into a hell of a summer.”

  “I have not not watched Top Gun with anyone at this college, which is a real tragedy.”

  “Get your shit together then.”

  I groan. “I can’t. I don’t have time.”

  “For getting your shit together or for making out?”

  “Either one.”

  There is a short pause, and then, “Well then what are you using that time on?”

  I sigh. “Studying. Watching cooking shows. Plotting the downfall of one Reid Yamada. Stop raising your eyebrow.”

  “I wasn’t raising my eyebrow.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  She laughs.

  “There’s nothing eyebrow-raisey about it,” I say. “He’s just this guy here who went out of his way to completely screw me on day one. And now things have, like, escalated. I’m out of ways to life-ruin and I need to ruin his life.”

  “How did he screw you?”

  “In the kitchen,” I say. Then immediately. “DON’T. DO NOT.”

  Em snorts and says, “You are asking way too much of me here.” There is a pause, charged with Em’s valiant attempt to say nothing, but then she says, in obvious sharp relief, “A bedroom would be a more obvious place, though.”

  And then my brain lights up. Bedroom.

  “Em,” I say. I glance at my clock. It’s getting dark and mostly everyone is out and about, taking advantage of nighttime. Half of them are down by the creek, playing in the water like kids. Riya asked me to come and I declined, on account of desperately needing some no-physical-contact-with-humans time. “I have to go.”

  “Whattttt? No! I haven’t talked to you since you left.”

  “Just . . .” I say. “Listen. Let me call you back in a few minutes. I have to do a thing.”

  “Ugh, fine,” she says, and I end the call, then slide my phone back into my sweatpants.

  I crack open my door and glance down the hall, like leaving my room is the nerve-wracking thing. Then I open it when it becomes clear that it’s empty. And then it’s clear to me that everyone could be outside my room right now and no one would care that I am leaving it.

  I walk down the hall until I have officially crossed from the girls’ side to the boys’ side and everything feels too quiet, too easy, too . . . lord, what am I doing?

  I reach Reid’s room, or what I assume is his room, since I’ve seen him heading into it a few times at night, and take a breath. Knock. Softly, so no one hears it and thinks it’s for them. My stomach twists—I know it’s just him in there; his roomie got knocked out the first night, but I am realizing now that if he is in there, I have no story at all about what has brought me here to knock on his door at night.

  My face is bright red, I bet. I can feel it. It’s so hot I think if I touched it I would burn my fingers. But mercifully, after a few seconds, no one answers.

  So I square my shoulders, and push the door open, then close it behind me.

  It smells like Reid in here. I hadn’t noticed he had a particular smell, but people’s living spaces always wind up smelling like them, I think. It’s not amazing or terrible; it mostly smells like butter and the spicy body wash he must have pretty recently used and like . . . like someone who spends a lot of time in a kitchen. I’m rising up on my tiptoes apparently, tightness all the way down to the soles in my feet. I force myself back down to the flats and all the tension that left my body talking to Em has just magically reappeared. As I suspected, Reid is extremely the source of it.

  It’s kind of messy in here, Reid’s bed only halfway made, a bunch of crap all strewn over his former roommate’s bed. His T-shirt from this morning is crumpled on the floor. When I see it, my throat practically closes up and suddenly I feel very guilty being here.

  I am wracked with it, out of nowhere, crawling up my throat and pinching at my stomach. Like this is a violation. It kind of is, honestly.

  I look at the door—I could leave. I should. I should go. This is really not cool—but then I see it. There like a shining beacon of temptation.

  Destroy me, Carter. Destroy meeee.

  His phone.

  He’s got to be down with everyone at the creek and didn’t want to get it wet. And this was the plan, but I was half-assing it honestly. Was planning on screwing up the alarm on the clock by his bedside table and just crossing my fingers he had relied only on that for a wakeup. But this? This is a sign.

  I have no choice.

  I switch the alarm on his nightstand first, from a.m. to p.m. Tomorrow is an early-morning challenge and I’m willing to bet he won’t wake up on his own without an alarm.

  My hands are shaking when I go for his phone.

  It’s a violation, it’s such a damn violation.

  But he doesn’t even have a freaking passcode on here. Who doesn’t have a passcode on their phone?

  I navigate to Clock, and yup. He has an alarm set for 5:30 a.m.

  My thumb hovers over it.

  Knots and flip-flops in my stomach.

  I am breathless with anticipation, princess.

  I click p.m.

  Then I sprint the hell out of his room and practically rocket down the hall into my own bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  I am sweating throughout the entire individual challenge. It’s early enough in the morning that everyone is about half asleep, or we were when we got here. My hair is a wreck, and several kids still smell like the creek, and it’s all just a mess in here.

  A mess that is short one person.

  We had an hour today, another time-lenient challenge, to create something small and beautiful and extravagant, which makes anything anyone will make just impossibly annoying on principle. Basically the Tiny Houses of food.
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br />   There is a half-hour left, and my merlot is reducing on the stove, sweetness and pungency bubbling up in the air. I pull out a knife to start slicing my duck, stomach twisting. Reid isn’t here yet. Thirty minutes late and I wonder if the judges have noticed or if there are so many of us, they won’t realize until judging comes up and his name isn’t there.

  I feel annoyingly guilty. Man, I hate having a conscience; life would be so much simpler if we could just be done with them altogether when we needed to be. But that is not real, and so I am assailed with it.

  I am halfway through slicing this duck breast when the door to the kitchen slams opens and in runs Reid. He’s red-faced, hair completely wild, the part that isn’t shaved smushed up on one side. He’s wearing Deadpool pajamas and these beat-up tennis shoes and he looks absolutely panicked.

  “What’s the challenge, what are we doing?” I hear him whisper frantically to Will, who looks like he hasn’t got a lot to do; whatever he’s making won’t take him the full hour.

  Will leans over to tell him in this low voice and Reid just hisses, “Shit. Shit shit.” He jerks an apron over himself and runs his hand violently over the tuft on top of his head. He knots the rope aggressively, like it has done him a personal offense. I whirl away from him and focus on my own stuff. I can’t afford to be derailed by him, not again. And he’s not giving a second thought to me. I slice.

  Prepare my pan with butter and saffron, a pinch of garlic. There’s only twenty minutes left and Reid is swearing up a storm somewhere, clanging around. I glance up when I reach for a few herbs and start chopping, and see the judges glancing at each other, looking down their noses. They keep looking over at Reid, and oh man, he is in such deep shit.

  He doesn’t seem to notice, he’s so focused on making up forty minutes of lost time.

  I get my duck in the pan, stir my merlot, prepare the little veggie and crostini base of the appetizer, and when it’s perfectly pink inside, I take it off the burner. It smells totally divine. It tastes totally divine. The wine sauce is utterly absurd, it’s so incredible. I never get to cook duck at home, so I’m dying to just eat the whole thing myself and straight up drink the spiced butter out of the sauté pan.