Long Gone Girl

by Amy Rose Bennett

  He smiled down at her and her heart tripped. “Just sizing up the potential competition.”

  Ginny shook her head and almost smiled. “Huh. You are nutty as a fruitcake, Jett. As if I would ever have the inclination, let alone the time for—”

  The music stopped and all the overhead lights came back on. Ginny noticed they had stopped by one of the side doors that lead into the corridor to the change rooms. No one seemed to be paying them any attention anymore as the vice-principal, Mr. Webster, had taken center-stage on the dais where the school jazz band was set up. He was obviously about to make a speech. The microphone squealed and hissed. “Students of Ridgewood High’s Senior Year, let me take this opportunity to—”

  Jett dropped his hand from her back but didn’t let her other hand go. “Come with me,” he whispered in her ear, then pulled her through the straggling students at the side of the room toward the door.

  Ginny followed, pulse skittering and stomach fluttering madly as they exited the gym and walked a little way along the dimly lit corridor. “Where are we going?” she asked, suspicious yet wildly excited. “We shouldn’t—”

  Jett stopped abruptly and she practically bumped into him. “Shouldn’t what?” he asked, his voice low and warm against her cheek.

  Ginny swallowed her mouth dry, her breath catching in her throat. “Leave…I mean…what about Loretta?”

  Jett blew out a sigh and glanced back toward the doorway to the gym. Mr. Webster’s strident voice and student laughter drifted down the corridor toward them. “She and I…we broke up. Just before…” He returned his gaze to hers and took a step closer, crowding her in so she was pushed up against the cold, hard steel of the locker doors.

  Should she believe him? About him and Loretta? It didn’t make sense. “Jett—”

  Jett touched a finger to her lips and she sucked in a breath, startled. She suddenly felt strangely hot all over. Feverish.

  “Please hear me out, Ginny,” he murmured, his eyes dark, their expression intense. Searching. “Lately I’ve wondered about you, what you really thought about me. Loretta caught me looking at you tonight one too many times…” He paused and trailed his finger along her lower lip, making her insides tremble like Jell-O. “Anyway this isn’t about Loretta. It’s about you…and me.” His gaze dropped to her mouth.

  This couldn’t be real—Jett Kelly, the object of her most secret daydreams—talking to her like this. Pressing against her, brushing her flushed cheek with the back of his fingers. Any moment she would wake up. “What do you mean?” she whispered.

  “For the longest time, I thought you despised me, Ginny,” he said, his gaze locking with hers again. “The way you always ignore me. Look away. But maybe you don’t… I’m thinking that maybe you have a crush on me, but don’t want to admit it… Am I wrong?”

  Oh Sweet Mary, Mother of God. He knew. He knew everything. And she’d tried so hard to hide it. She bit her lip, too terrified to tell the truth.

  “Hey,” he murmured, a frown, perhaps of concern, creasing his brow. He gently squeezed her still captured hand. “If I’ve got it wrong, we can go back inside—”

  Ginny shook her head. Pride and fear be damned. She wanted Jett to kiss her. More than anything. “No. You’re not wrong.”

  Jett smiled slowly and lifted her chin a little. “Good. Because I’m dying to kiss you, Virginia O’Hara. May I?”

  “Yes,” she whispered, her gaze dropping to Jett’s wide, perfectly sculpted mouth. Oh please, yes.

  Jett lowered his head and brushed his lips against hers. A gentle, sliding caress. Warm and satiny soft.

  Oh. So that’s what all the fuss is about. Her body melting from the inside out, Ginny grasped Jett’s lapels, and moved her lips beneath his, trying to mimic his movements. Jett made a strange noise deep in his throat—perhaps it was a groan—and she found herself pushed even harder against the lockers. A cold metal door handle bit into her shoulder, but she didn’t care. Jett slid one of his hands into her hair and changed the angle of the kiss. Covering her mouth with his again, he tasted the seam of her lips with the tip of his tongue. Ginny gasped at the strangely intimate sensation then moaned softly as Jett took the opportunity to slide his tongue all the way inside, stroking and teasing. She’d never imagined a kiss would be like this. So wicked and hot and wet…and good. Better than good. When she stroked him back, another deep, appreciative growl escaped from Jett, and Ginny’s heart soared. He really wants me.

  Moist heat suddenly welled between her thighs and she pushed her hips against Jett’s hard body, grasped his neck and pulled him closer, not wanting these glorious, heady moments to end.

  A sudden burst of loud clapping and cheering shattered the air around her and Jett. “Way to go, Jett! Woohoo!”

  Ginny pulled away from Jett’s mouth. Oh God, no. A group of at least half a dozen boys—most of them Jett’s friends—stood by the door to the gym, laughing and wolf-whistling.

  Jett swore under his breath.

  “Looks like I owe you ten bucks after all, Jett,” jeered Frank Baxter, one of Jett’s football buddies. “Who’d have thought Miss Goody-Two-Shoes had it in her?”

  Ginny’s stomach roiled with sudden nausea and she wrenched herself away from Jett’s hold. Her instincts had told her this was too good to be true. Why hadn’t she listened? She was such an idiot.

  “Ginny.” Jett’s face was ashen as he reached for her hand again. “Ginny, that’s not why—”

  “Jefferson Kelly!” Loretta suddenly appeared in the corridor as well, hands on hips, blue eyes spitting fire. “You two-timing, lowlife louse. And to make matters worse, I can’t believe you actually kissed someone like her. A stuck-up—”

  “That’s enough, Loretta.” Jett snapped.

  “Hey. What’s going on out here?” Mr. Davis, the school’s gym teacher pushed into the gathering group of onlookers.

  Could this get any worse? The whole school would find out what had happened. Ginny clutched at the locker door behind her and took a step back. And then another. Hot tears stung her eyes and the crowd blurred.

  She’d been set up—the butt of a cheap and nasty joke between boys. She really did mean nothing to Jett—nothing more than ten dollars anyway. Humiliation and anger clogged her throat.

  She felt like she wanted to die.

  As she fled down the corridor toward the door to the high school oval, she thought she heard Jett calling her name.

  Well he could call all he liked. She never wanted to see him again.

  Ever.

  ***

  Point Pleasant, New Jersey, September 1953

  “What you did…It was cruel and humiliating…I just don’t know if I can get past that.”

  Jett flinched, his gut twisting with guilt. He deserved Ginny’s condemnation. Her pain was clear to see in the shadows clouding her hazel-brown eyes as she stared out to sea. The catch in her voice. Why, she couldn’t even bear to look at him. After all these years, she was still hurting—badly. And he was solely responsible. Somehow, he had to make things right.

  He raked a hand through his hair to stop himself reaching for her hand again because he knew she would rebuff him this time. “Ginny, I never meant to hurt you. You must believe me. I was stupid and cocky…and selfish. That night, when I asked you to dance, when I kissed you—”

  “Well I hope you got your money’s worth.” Her tone was bitter. Cold. Yet infinitely sad.

  Jett’s heart clenched tightly. “The bet…” Shit. An explanation was long overdue but now the moment was upon him, he struggled to find the right words. “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.” Even to his own ears, he sounded lame. Unconvincing.

  At last Ginny turned to look at him, her eyes glittering with anger and tears. “What, you were supposed to humiliate me in front of a bigger audience? Is that it?” she accused.

  “No, Ginny. You weren’t supposed to get hurt at all.” Jett swallowed, trying to keep his tone measured and even, but it was useless. Gu
ilt lodged in his throat like a hard stone. He dragged in a breath and focused on holding her gaze. If she could just see the sincerity in his eyes, maybe, just maybe she’d believe him. “I…I was falling for you. I honestly was,” he continued. He sat forward a little on his seat, bunching his hands into tight fists on the wooden table to stop himself from touching her again. “I’d already suspected you might have a secret crush on me, long before Prom night, but as you know, I was with Loretta so I didn’t do anything about it. But a week before Prom, that jackass Frank Baxter noticed you blushing at something I said when we were partnered up during a chemistry class.”

  Ginny sighed and reached for her root beer bottle. Her slender fingers toyed with the wet label. “The titration experiment.”

  Jett nodded, heartened a little by her response. Her anger had dissipated a fraction at least. “You remember it?”

  Her gaze returned to his and she arched an eyebrow, a wry smiling playing about her lips. “I remember everything about those last few weeks of school.”

  Jett ventured a small smile of his own. “Me too.” Ginny’s body language and expression might be slightly less hostile at the moment, but he still had a lot of lost ground to make up. The look of sad skepticism in her eyes pierced his heart to the very core. Marshaling his courage, he drew in a steadying breath and continued. “Anyway, later that day, at football practice, Frank joked that there was no way on God’s green earth that even the ‘Great Jett Kelly’—his words, not mine I might add—could get you, the straightest girl in school, to agree to a kiss, even if you were sweet on me. He suggested a bet of ten dollars. With God as my witness, I told him to go jump.”

  Ginny’s brow lowered into a deep frown. “You’re saying you never made the bet? But he said, he owed you.”

  Jett at last gave into the need to have physical contact with her and grasped her hand, praying she wouldn’t pull away. She had to believe him. “I never agreed to it, Ginny. I wouldn’t do something so cruel. As I said, it was his idea of a joke. It wasn’t mine.”

  Ginny’s gaze dropped to their hands on the table but she made no move to withdraw. Jett released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.

  “I want to believe you, Jett, I really do but…then there was Loretta. She accused you of cheating on her. But you’d told me you’d broken up.” Ginny sighed heavily then met his gaze again. “I don’t know what’s true and what isn’t.”

  “I don’t blame you, Ginny. The truth is, I had started to grow tired of Loretta’s demanding behavior and waspish attitude some weeks beforehand. In fact, I had already contemplated breaking off with her a few times leading up to Prom. But then at the Prom, when she made a totally uncalled for snipe about you, I told her I’d had enough of her judgmental ways. It was the prod I needed to break up with her, so I could pursue you.” He squeezed Ginny’s hand. “It was only then that I asked you to dance.”

  “So her accusation of two-timing was false.”

  Jett shrugged and gave a rueful smile. “I guess she just didn’t want to believe it was over. But believe me, it was definitely over.” He decided to push his luck a little further and ran his thumb up and down Ginny’s wrist. He smiled when he saw he’d raised goose-bumps along her fine, smoother than cream skin. “As I said before, I honestly had a crush on you too, Ginny. For months. But I was too spineless to do anything about it.” He caught her gaze and risked throwing her a deliberately flirtatious smile. “Do you know how Goddamned gorgeous you were in school?”

  Ginny rolled her eyes, but a deep blush to the very roots of her hair betrayed that she was affected on some level by his compliment. “I didn’t think they let visually impaired or delusional people into the military, let alone become a pilot.”

  Jett’s smile widened. He loved her razor-sharp quips. And the fact that she didn’t seem to have a vain bone in her entire beautiful body. “I swear most of the guys in our school year thought you were the prettiest girl there. But you were so smart and seemed so...contained and aloof. Unattainable even. Everyone was intimidated by you. Including me.”

  Ginny let out a huff of incredulous laughter. “You must be kidding.”

  “No. I’m not. I was so nervous when I asked you to dance…you have no idea,” he continued in a low voice, holding her gaze. “And when you said yes, I was over the moon with happiness. When I took you out into the corridor, and kissed you, it was all real, Ginny. It wasn’t a joke. And it certainly wasn’t because of a bet.”

  The breeze had blown a wisp of Ginny’s red-gold hair across her cheek. His heart pounding with nerves and desire, Jett leaned forward and gently tucked it behind her shell-like ear. “One of my biggest regrets about that night is that I was so caught up in needing to hear you say you had feelings for me, I never told you how I felt in return.”

  Ginny’s gaze instantly narrowed with suspicion, and she withdrew her hand from his grasp. Damn. She doesn’t believe me. I’ve pushed her too far.

  “If all this is true,” she challenged, her eyes suddenly hard with long-held resentment, “if you cared, why didn’t you follow me? Tell me how you really felt afterwards.”

  Jett sighed and sat back, resting his hands upon his thighs to keep them away from her. For the moment. “After you ran off, Mr. Davis hauled both me and Frank off to see the vice-principal, Mr. Webster, for creating a ruckus. He then called our parents and sent us home. My mom and dad were not happy, to say the least. I was grounded for the next week. Actually I was damn lucky I wasn’t suspended.”

  Ginny’s expression softened a little. “I didn’t hear about that.”

  Jett shrugged and stared out at the waves rolling in. The swell was getting heavier and the bank of low grey clouds was moving closer to shore. The weather was going to take a turn for the worse. He hoped to hell this conversation didn’t though. He prayed that when Ginny heard about everything else that had happened, she would understand, even if she couldn’t forgive him. “Being grounded didn’t matter. It was the week leading up to exams anyway,” he said matter-of factly. He glanced back at Ginny again and tried to catch her eye. “What did matter was that I didn’t get to see you at all. You never came to school…I heard you were sick.”

  She nodded. “I had tonsillitis. I guess I was run-down.”

  And heart-sore too no doubt. Because of me. Jett winced a little as he felt a sharp twist of guilt deep inside him again. “I remember, during our last week of school—exam week—you wouldn’t even look at me the few times I did see you,” he said softly. “I thought you hated my guts, Ginny. I just didn’t think you’d listen to me if I tried to talk to you then.” Jett ran a hand down his face, inwardly cringing at the memory of how idiotic he’d been. “I was a cowardly ass.”

  Ginny remained silent and crossed her arms firmly over her chest. By the set expression on her face, the tight line of her mouth, she obviously didn’t disagree.

  Regardless, he needed to push on. “Anyway, the day after school finished, my family left Ridgewood. I don’t know if you recall, but we always went away for a few weeks every summer—to stay with my grandparents in The Hamptons. I was due to start law school in the fall, but as soon as I turned eighteen, I enlisted for flight training with the air force, much to my dad’s annoyance. He’d always wanted me to follow in his footsteps, but I guess World War II put a crimp in his plans. Not that I ended up serving then—the war ended before I finished my training—but that’s another story.”

  Still no response other than stony silence. Disappointment settled in Jett’s gut like a cold, lead weight. He only had one thing left to divulge. And if Ginny didn’t accept what he told her next, he was screwed. He swallowed, attempting to moisten his suddenly tight, dry throat. “I thought you should also know that the morning I left for The Hamptons, I dropped a letter off at your house, explaining everything… But based on your opinion of me, I’m thinking, you never got it.” He willed Ginny to look at him so he could see the expression in her eyes. To see if he stood a chance. �
��Am I right?”

  She frowned in apparent confusion and at last met his gaze. “No, I never got it. Who did you give it to?”

  “Your sister, Kathleen.” He held his breath.

  Ginny’s mouth tilted into a rueful smile. “Huh. Well that explains it. I’m sure she would have given it straight to my mother, who would have thrown it away. Mom was always warning me about how you were the wrong kind of boy, and that no girl—even a decent one—would be safe in your company.”

  Jett grimaced. “She was right to some extent.”

  Ginny’s gaze narrowed, but Jett thought he detected a glint of humor in their rich, golden-brown depths. “And I’m thinking it’s probably still the case.”

  Jett put a hand on his chest, over his heart. “Hey. I promised to be good, remember? I’m on my best behavior here, believe me. Your opinion means a lot to me.”

  “Hmm.” Ginny’s gaze was speculative as it wandered over him, but again, he thought there was a hint of amusement in her expression. “I’m still making up my mind about you. You’re still very much a fast fly-boy if I’m not mistaken. But that being said, I believe your explanation, Jett.”

  Relief surged through Jett like a wave on the incoming tide. She hadn’t exactly forgiven him, but it was a start. And more than he probably deserved. He captured her gaze, eager to say the one last thing that needed to be said. An apology from the heart. “I’m so sorry, for everything that I did…or didn’t do, Ginny. And for hurting you so much,” he said, his voice suddenly rough with emotion. He swallowed and chanced catching her hand. “But I’m not sorry for the dance, or the kiss we shared. As for anything else…” On an impulse, he linked his fingers with hers. “It’s up to you, what happens from here on in. But don’t forget, you did promise to spend the day with me.”