The Art of French Kissing

by Brianna Shrum

  Reid sits up. “Get out.”

  “I will not.”

  “Nemo, oh man, that’s too much. You were right; you should have lied, no one will ever be capable of loving you after that.”

  He’s laughing really hard and I’m laughing really hard because I know that is the most heartless thing I have ever actually vocalized.

  My stomach is starting to hurt from all the laughing, and if we haven’t woken someone up by now, it’s a freaking miracle. “Now you know my deepest secret, Reid Yamada,” I say.

  He’s wiping actual tears from his eyes. “Okay, ask me one of mine. Make it good; that one was worth a lot of information. Nemo.”

  “Oh man, my last question. So much pressure. I could ask your most embarrassing moment. What superpower you would have. How many people you’ve kissed . . . yes, okay that’s the one.” Tiredness is setting in. Making me bold. “How many girls have you kissed?”

  Reid’s eyes start to sparkle. He opens his mouth, then pauses. “Well. Wait. How many people or how many girls?”

  “Uh,” I say. “Either. Both. Can I . . . can I ask both?”

  He says, “For anything less than Nemo, I would have said no. But okay, yeah. I’ve kissed three girls.”

  It is completely ridiculous that the emotion flaring up in my chest is absolutely jealousy. Get it together, self, this is two in the morning talking. We are not jealous of girls who have had their tongues in Reid Yamada’s mouth.

  We definitely, DEFINITELY are not.

  I swallow hard.

  “Five people, total.”

  “Wow, okay,” I say.

  “One guy. Last person I dated was nonbinary.”

  “I didn’t realize you were bi, I don’t think. Is that the right word?”

  “I mean, yeah, it can be. There’s . . . a lot of words that can be the right one. I don’t know, I kind of just like queer, honestly? And how would you know, anyway. Not like I introduce myself with it. Hi, I’m Reid Yamada. Ask me how I do or do not experience sexual attraction and also the genders of people I would like to bang.”

  I’m laughing again, which I guess is the order of the night. “Fair. Your question.”

  He’s leaning close now, and I think maybe it’s a conscious choice.

  I think maybe I have been moving toward him, too, and maybe I wasn’t as unaware of it as I should have been.

  As though there’s any should involved in anything here.

  He says, “Tell me about the best kiss of your life.”

  “Form of a question.”

  “We playing Jeopardy now?”

  I lock eyes with him. We’re so close, and the fire is bright in the dark. And I guess I never had occasion to realize how many little shades of brown were peppered through his. Dark as polished wood in some places, light as amber in others. I can’t breathe for a second. And I think maybe he will just kiss me.

  It’s the craziest thing.

  But I think . . . I think maybe he will, and maybe, because I have slipped into some alternate timeline over the course of the night, I’ll kiss him back, and so I stop the whole thing from starting and say, “Jackson Rhodes.”

  Reid gives me that utterly destructive half-smile. “Do tell.”

  “Tenth grade. It wasn’t any place special or anything. Not like we made out in the rain and I could check an item off my bucket list. It was at my friend’s house. I’d kind of been flirting with him for a couple months and he’d been flirting back, probably harder than I’d been, honestly. So it was just a few of us watching some old movie in Em’s shitty basement. Something old and super, like, violent or depressing, too. Fight Club? Donnie Darko? It might have been Donnie Darko.”

  “Oh man, I hate that movie.”

  “Because it’s a terrible movie.”

  “Unlike Finding Nemo.”

  I flip him off and he rewards me with this single bark of a laugh. High-pitched in the way that anything borne of surprise comes out a little high-pitched.

  “Anyway,” I say, “Em had gone upstairs to make a frozen pizza, and a couple people were leaving. The other two had gone outside to smoke.”

  “You remember this really well.”

  “Bear trap,” I say, tapping my head. “And yeah, it was definitely Donnie Darko because that terrifying rabbit thing showed up onscreen and I remember saying, This guy is freaking horrifying, I hate this movie, and he just kind of slid over so my head was on his shoulder, and I thought his deodorant smelled really, really good. And he looked down at me and said, Have you considered not looking at the screen? And I said, That thought had crossed my mind, yeah. And he was so nervous, like I could actually hear his heart going crazy, when he kissed me.” I lean my head back against the couch. “It was his hands that did it. A kiss can’t be great if you don’t know what to do with your hands.”

  “Oh, I know,” says Reid.

  “God, I’d forgotten how amazing he was with his tongue, too.”

  “Okay,” says Reid.

  I glance over at him. “You alright?”

  “Just tired,” he says.

  “I thought you were usually out here for like two hou—”

  “Yeah, just. Challenge tomorrow and everything. Tiredness kind of just hit me all at once.” His voice is a little shaky.

  “You sure you’re—”

  He stands and I blink. “I’m glad we did this.”

  I smooth my hands over the couch and stand with him. “Me, uh, me too.”

  He runs his tongue over his bottom lip and rakes his hand back through his hair. “I’ll see you tomorrow? Or. Today, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, okay.” And it feels bizarrely abrupt and I am unsettled when I head up the stairs to go to bed.

  The way this got cut short is only one of the reasons.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  In the cold light of day, under the buzzing kitchen fluorescents, I am . . . kind of uncomfortable. Just standing there next to Reid, neither of us quite looking at each other. In the dark, it didn’t seem like we were revealing a whole lot, just seemed like we were talking. Having a totally average interaction.

  In the morning, it feels like he told me his deepest fear was losing people and I told him about the specific skill level of a boy’s tongue, and he told me he was queer, and maybe we almost kissed.

  But, eight hours later, that feels kind of foggy, too. Like I could have just completely made it up. I don’t know. All I know is, he looks as uncomfortable as I feel, and I’m really hoping he’s not regretting anything.

  Thank the lord the only thing either of us has to regret is the exchange of information.

  Dr. Freeman, thankfully, releases us from this contest of muteness by saying, “This week, we will only have one challenge. Conducted in two parts.”

  I don’t know if that’s higher pressure or lower. I’m tensing up either way.

  She continues, “This challenge is long-form and will be started today, concluded tomorrow evening. Teams, send one member to the judges’ table.”

  Reid tips his chin at me and goes. The length of his legs compared to mine, a quick calculation says, means it is less work for him to do it. He walks back to me with an envelope in his hand, and I want to open it, and I don’t want to open it.

  “Open your envelopes,” Dr. Freeman instructs.

  Well, that settles that.

  “Oh, damn,” says Andrew at something in the contents, and I purse my lips, eyelids dropping in annoyance.

  Dr. Freeman ignores him. “In them, you will find a detailed menu. Following that will be a client profile. Each of you has received, at random, a client with some sort of dietary restriction or preference. They have all been determined to be of equal difficulty level or negligible difference, so I expect no complaints. Behind those things, you have each been provided money, with which you will shop today for your ingredients. You will stock them in the fridge in the packaging that will be provided to you, and let me make this clear: there will be no tampe
ring with anyone’s ingredients. One of your judges will be available from one-thirty p.m. on to personally check ingredients to ensure that no tampering occurs. Is that clear?”

  I am standing at attention, nervous as hell that maybe somehow they know. Which is kind of nonsense; maybe they’re just paranoid. Or have had people pull crap in previous years. Doesn’t really matter, I’m totally concerned anyway and I’m sure it shows on my face. When I glance up, Reid’s mouth is twitching. Suddenly, I’m relaxed.

  “Yes, ma’am,” we all say, and I wonder just how this would have gone were Reid and I not allied.

  Maybe we both would have been honest about it.

  I almost laugh out loud at that.

  “There is an open-air market just up the road. A map has been provided for you on the back of your client sheet. Let me also make clear that that is a thing you will want to utilize. If you’re the only team using grocery store ingredients and everyone else has purchased them fresh, we will notice.”

  Another chorus of “Yes, ma’am”s.

  “You have until three-thirty p.m. to be back here with your collections. One minute later and there will be no one in the kitchens and your team will have been eliminated.”

  I stand tall and take a deep breath. That’s only intimidating because of the finality of it. The challenge itself is simple: buy groceries. And don’t take like a BILLION hours to do it.

  “Begin,” says Dr. Freeman and I turn to Reid.

  “Hand me the menu.”

  He raises his eyebrows. “Yes ma’am.”

  “What’s our restriction?”

  “Walk and talk,” he says, and we leave the kitchen. “Looks like it’s a gluten thing.”

  “Okay, that seems doable.”

  “Yeah. How long’s that menu? Do we have to do the whole thing?”

  I laugh. “No way. We’re gonna have to pick something to cater to the client. Wow, there are even ingredients listed for the meals. Dude, they gave us recipes. This doesn’t seem bad. Like . . . this is practically a free day.”

  “Seems like it,” says Reid, but his voice is coated in suspicion.

  We study the menu as we walk—me with eyes on the paper, him on a phone, cross-checking ingredients for gluten.

  We hop a bus to the open-air market several miles outside Savannah, and everything seems pretty easy.

  Until it isn’t.

  And the moment we realize that this day is going to be a challenge is this: we lay eyes on the price of the first shank of lamb.

  “Reid,” I say.

  “Oh, I noticed.”

  “Should we—count what we have again.”

  Reid purses his lips, and there’s this furrow in his brow again, the adorable one, not that the adorableness of that brow crease matters overmuch right now. “I’ve counted it four times, mon petit chou.”

  “If we buy that lamb, there’s no way we can possibly afford all the spices for it. Or the side dish! We can barely afford the potatoes, let alone fresh cream for them. Oh no. We’re going to lose, we’re going to lose. Switch. Switch the dish.”

  “Every other main dish has gluten in it.”

  My eyes go wide. “That can’t be right.” I go over the list.

  It turns out that, in fact, it can.

  “Shit,” he says, laughing. “What do you want to bet everyone is freaking out about exactly this, exactly now? I bet all this minimal cash in our envelope with this fancy-ass menu is designed to be impossible.”

  My eyes widen. “Everyone had only one option. And not enough money to make it.”

  Reid grits his teeth and kind of shakes his head, smiling. “This is practically a free day.”

  “Shut up,” I say and I shove him in the shoulder.

  Reid grabs his shoulder and fake-winces. “No violence against your competitors,” he says.

  “You’re not my competitor, slick, you’re my teammate.”

  “Touché.”

  “Well,” I say, squaring my shoulders, “let’s conquer this Everest.”

  We wind through the market, trying to figure out what we can substitute, what can stay the same, if we can maybe cut down on the lamb shank a little if we make up for it in the potato side dish. What spices we might only need half of, or that have a cheaper substitute somewhere. We hit the jackpot at one vendor who has a ton of herbs at like 60 percent off because they’re all gonna go bad in like a day.

  It’s not too terrible.

  What makes it not-terrible, I absolutely hate to admit, is that I am spending this stressful day with Reid. Reid glances down at the herb choices and asks my opinion before picking one up. He says, “You go find the best cream here and I’ll find something minty to make this work, meet in the middle?” And he doesn’t check what I bought before he accepts it as a good choice.

  I am completely blindsided by it all.

  When the sun blazes over us and it’s midday, time starting to wind down, we head to Tybee Beach, like a half mile away, to pick up lunch. We’ll head back after and have like a couple hours to spare.

  We stop by this little seafood hole-in-the-wall, and he gets something crawfish and I get shrimp and grits. When in Rome.

  We don’t eat inside; instead we take all our stuff to the beach, and we eat with our toes in the water. It’s kind of loud, but not deafening. Calm waves lapping at our ankles.

  “I don’t get it,” I say. Then, “Oh my god, these grits are incredible.”

  “What don’t you get? The grits?” He smirks and I roll my eyes.

  “You,” I say.

  Reid raises an eyebrow. “The question stands.”

  “Just . . .” I look out over the water. “You. Today it’s like nothing but respect when it’s been all assholery and you checking to make sure I’m slicing my carrots thin enough before you’ll allow them to go into our dish. And arrogance which—I hate this but I guess you’ve earned the right to it; you’re better than all of us. It’s throwing me off.”

  Reid peers at me then, and I set my spoon back in its bowl. I look right back.

  “Do you think you’re not as good as me?”

  I blush. I don’t know why I’m blushing. But my face is red-hot and my stomach twists like a dishrag—hard and uncomfortable and I don’t . . . I don’t want to answer.

  He keeps looking, and I think maybe he’ll wait forever for me to answer. I think maybe I’ll wait longer.

  He doesn’t. He says, “Do you think I think you’re not as good as me?”

  I actually laugh. “Of course you think that.”

  Reid scoffs.

  I say, “Please. You think you’re God.”

  “I do not think I’m God.”

  I say, “Okay,” with as much sarcasm as I can muster and look back over the ocean. It looks . . . endless.

  “And I never thought I was better than you.”

  I snort.

  “I’m serious; hey, look at me.”

  I do.

  He’s looking at me like he knows me. His face is this weird blend of fallen and intense. Like he’s sad, in one turn. But in the next, it’s like he sees a thousand things about me that no one else on this beach does, and I can’t breathe.

  “If you . . . Jesus, if I made you feel like that, I’m sorry.”

  My throat constricts harder.

  “You think I’d pick my enemy number one if I didn’t think she was really fucking good? You’re good, Lane. You’re . . . great. If you weren’t, I would have dropped this whole thing we had between us.”

  “Thing . . . thing we had between us?” My mind snags on the past tense, and I don’t want it to.

  “The whole rivalry stuff, yeah. I would have quit after you had your revenge. I’m glad we’re paired, Lane. Because you’re good.”

  My mouth drops and I glance down at the sand, at the half-inch of space between my thumb and his fingers, and everything feels dangerous, suddenly.

  Feels like that ocean is closing us in, and my focus is just zeroing in on him b
reathing. I can feel him looking at me. Smell the light, clean deodorant he uses, and the spicy crawfish beside him, hear him breathing.

  I glance up at him and he brushes this stray strand of lavender hair—it’s faded to that by now—away from my forehead.

  I jump up. Like, leap from my butt to my feet. “We should probably go.”

  “Uh,” he says. “Yeah.” He chokes a little and says, “Yeah. We should. Gotta get all this back before we get DQ’d. Yeah.” He stands. “Let’s go.”

  We do.

  I’m still savoring the grits.

  “Have you never had those before?” he says.

  “Nope.”

  “What a tragedy.”

  I shrug. “I bet there’s things you’ve never tried.”

  “Ghost peppers. Mustard-based barbecue. Weed brownies.”

  I laugh loud. “Living in Colorado, even. Let’s see. For me. Well, grits. Caviar. Macarons.”

  “You’ve never had macarons? Is the entirety of Montana FARGO?”

  I sniff. Prim. “That’s set in Minnesota.”

  “Well if they don’t have macarons, they’re the same. Dead to me.”

  I smirk and shove him.

  He grabs my hand, presses it there for a split-second before he drops it.

  Normal.

  Regular.

  Neutral.

  Everything is perfectly, regularly middle-of-the-road. And that is why my heart rate doesn’t slow the whole trip back.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I leave for breakfast a little earlier than Riya; she’s spending eight hundred years on her makeup this morning.

  And when I open the door to my dorm room, I almost step in something.

  Something that very much should not be stepped in—not because it’s disgusting and you wouldn’t want it on your foot, but because it would be an utter sin to ruin it with a misplaced body part.

  It’s this plate, stacked with macarons. Every color that exists. Bright yellow and pink and teal and brown, oh my gosh.

  I bend down and pick it up, reverently.

  There’s a little note on top, hastily written and stained with almond flour and dye. It says fix your life, princess.