As I pass the buffet near the front door, I swipe a handful of the pastel-colored dinner mints usually reserved for alcoholics and small children. I pull out the pink ones and drop the rest into a potted plant.
For years, at the end of every Friday night family dinner, I have secretly gobbled them down. The first time they appeared on the buffet near the host stand, mounded up in that silver tray with a tiny silver caviar spoon, they sparkled at me like little candy diamonds. Yorke, bold even at eight, stepped right up and scooped a small spoonful for all of us to share. They were three perfect shades of pastel, just like us.
Huddled in a tight circle in a pool of light in the parking lot, we stretched out our hands and discovered that they were not blue, yellow, and pink, like our matching dresses. They were, under closer inspection, green, yellow, and pink, practically perfect but not close enough for Yorke. She threw hers down onto the pavement with a loud “Those are for babies!” and stomped off to the car, the heels of her little blue dress shoes clacking loudly along the blacktop.
The green candies bounced away, out of the circle of light that had given them up as impostors, and rolled off into the dark, lost under the bellies of our friends’ and neighbors’ cars.
I knew those candies weren’t for babies. I also knew that Yorke wouldn’t eat them just because they weren’t blue, her signature color, and that there was no way Freddie would eat the yellow ones, not now.
I watched Freddie drop hers one by one on our way to the car, like a trail of bread crumbs on the blacktop. I held on to mine tight when my dad scooped me up and put me in the car, and I clung to them all the way home. Even though they leave your teeth kind of fuzzy and make your breath even worse, I have been eating them on the sly ever since.
In fair weather the dining room at our club opens up to a humongous wooden deck that overlooks the golf course and, beyond that, the lake. I veer to the left onto the deck when I should be veering to the right and into the ladies’ room.
I step out into the evening air, and the sun is right now making its last stab at daytime, painting the sky the same bright pinks, oranges, and reds that flood Freddie’s bedroom.
Leaning up against the railing, my hair still damp and my glass still almost full, I take a sip and wonder if Paris really does look like a sunset or if that is just Freddie’s interpretation. I guess I will find out eventually.
I’ll probably go abroad like Freddie. My French is not nearly as good as hers, but Freddie had to overdo it like she always does and master the language in one semester. I don’t have much interest in French, really. When I was picking classes for my freshman year, I had to pick a language, and both my sisters had studied French, so it seemed like the way to go.
I didn’t realize it might lead to something someday, like actual French conversations or a trip to France. I am not sure if I even like French people. I am fond of shaved armpits. I detest stinky cheese. And I am pretty sure my hair won’t work with a beret.
Yorke didn’t go abroad, but she did get engaged to Roger. Hmm . . . nine months of smelling armpits on crowded European streets or a lifetime with a man who just might trim his hair with a hedge clipper. There must be another option.
I turn around, resting an elbow on the railing, and look through the floor-to-ceiling glass windows that run the length of the dining room, searching the crowd for my sisters. The setting sun bounces off all the sterling, crystal, and glass. I narrow my eyes against the glare.
There they are, standing side by side, talking to the lady that lived next door to us at the lake house.
I move myself to the right until my reflection fits in and joins them. There is my hair, my smile, the way my hand covers my mouth when I laugh, my ability to make chocolate chip cookies, my best back tuck, the dress I am wearing right now, the pride I should feel when I am named valedictorian, and the sparkle I will have when wearing my engagement ring for the first time.
Gazing through that window, I see my sisters reflecting my past and presenting a prefolded map of my future. No need for me to open it up and navigate. I can simply follow the path they have laid out for me.
I drain the rest of my drink, the tannins biting at the back of my tongue. I shift, then turn and walk away, leaving my sisters and an empty glass behind me.
Somewhere down around the seventeenth hole, where the driveway curves in pretty close and almost hugs the fairway, I see the M3 speeding smoothly along in the distance, its bright redness moving through the cultivated green of the golf course.
Walking slowly through the soft, short grass, my sandals hanging loosely in my hand, I stop and watch it slow down before it whips a quick U-turn and heads back toward the club.
I hear it roaring toward me over the last hill. I align my toes along the edge of the asphalt drive and wait for Roger, trimmed and pressed, to squeal to a stop in front of me.
The car rolls up and comes to an easy, effortless stop at the tip of my toes. It’s Porter. His wild brown hair sticks up all over his head, thick and messy, and his green eyes look me up and down, burning through me, finally resting on my bare feet.
I tip my head to the side, fingers lost in my hair, already twisting as I ask, “What are you doing?”
Not the smoothest of lines, but I am surprised to see him there, his hands looking so familiar as they rest along the top of Roger’s steering wheel.
“Keeping it close,” he says as if it were obvious. He smiles that crooked smile again and stretches his long arms out far and wide around the interior of the car, almost grazing the passenger door with his fingertips.
I feel bolted to the ground.
“Umm . . . ” I flick my hair over my shoulder and eye the clubhouse, a couple of greens behind us. “I think he meant close to the building.”
It is just dark enough that the candles on the tables in the main dining room have been lit. They look like fireflies caught in a really big jar.
“Nah,” he says, shaking his head, very sure of himself. “I think he meant me. Keep it close to me.”
“Highly unlikely,” I say, dropping my hand.
Shaking the loose broken hair from around my fingers, I look him straight in those sparkling green eyes and make the understatement of the century— “Roger is pretty attached to this car.”
“I can see why.”
He revs the engine a couple of times.
“This car is hot.” He drags the word out with a slight southern twang so it sounds more like hhhawt and leans forward to rub the dash in a very possessive way.
I watch, mesmerized, expecting to see a streak of phosphorescence trailing behind his fingers.
“Want a ride?” he asks.
I laugh, because I am not that easy. But God, do I want to say yes.
I realize I am still watching his hands. I don’t know what I am waiting for, but I can’t stop staring. I snap my head up and drag my eyes away.
I shake my head and say, “I’ve been there before,” with a nod toward the backseat.
“True,” he agrees. He rests his chin on the tips of his fingers as if he is solving an equation and breathes in quickly, the solution found. “But not with me,” he says.
My first impulse is to move toward him like a sex-starved teenage zombie, arms out, neck exposed. But I can’t. I look away from him, my eyes drawn back toward the club and the lights flickering from inside. Want to. Can’t.
“Thanks,” I say, refusing him as politely as I can with another shake of my head.
Dropping my sandals over my right shoulder, I hold tight to the thin leather straps and start making my way back toward the clubhouse.
“Your choice,” he says with a shrug as he puts the car into gear and rolls away slowly. Superslowly.
So slowly he paces me, one hand comfortably slung over the steering wheel, his green eyes watching my every move as I walk along the side of the road.
I turn and watch him too, crossing one arm over my chest, bare feet soft and silent in the grass, trying to look
unfazed by the challenge.
One side of his mouth lifts, and he gives me that crooked smile, making the wine flush on my cheeks even pinker. He stops the car. I walk toward the door, my steps light, our eyes locked. My fingertips brush against the cool silver of the door handle, and suddenly it’s ripped away from me. I gasp and yank my hand back as Porter speeds off.
He squawks to a stop about five feet away and tries to look nonchalant. He slides his arm along the curved back of the passenger seat, turns toward me, and waits patiently as I cover the ground between us on foot.
I reach for the door again, tensed, ready to pull back at the first sign of movement, mentally accepting the possibility that my fingers are about to be removed by force.
Porter revs the engine, watching me closely. I hear the sound of the cylinders making their upward climb again, and I go for it, grabbing the handle. I scrabble, pull the door open, toss my sandals onto the floor, and heave myself into the car, all arms and long blond hair and boobs escaping from my strapless dress as I crawl onto the seat, breathing like a maniac.
I look up from my undignified, hunkered spot and see Porter facing me, grinning appreciatively, my boobs practically in his face, his arm still resting lightly along the back of my seat.
The car never moved. Damn, he got me.
“Nice entrance.” He smiles, slipping his left hand onto the wheel, the other one leaving the back of my seat to reach down and put the car into gear.
“I’ve been working on it,” I say breathlessly, following his green eyes to my cleavage, which is spilling out everywhere, practically filling the car with soft white flesh.
With a faint smile, I pull up at the top of my dress while I pull down on the hem and simultaneously turn around in my seat to face forward. Porter steps on the gas, and we are gone, streaking down the road, away from the lingering lights of the club, and off, into the night.
Later, back inside the M3 with my head leaning against the leather headrest, I watch the dark golf course roll by. I am surrounded by my sisters, the air is warm, the location familiar, yet I feel off course, no longer on the map.
My eyes are trained on the horizon, on the slight rise just off the twelfth hole, to the left of the green. I wait impatiently, wishing Roger would drive faster, so I can see the exact spot.
I think I might be holding my breath, because I know that there, just off the green, invisible from the road but burned vividly into my memory, under a large oak with branches that covered us like a canopy, there are imprints, the grass flattened into crop circles by our bodies.
Squinting through the darkness, I smile as we cruise by. I close my eyes and sink down, remembering the cool grass, soft and springy beneath my head as I rolled onto my back. Porter was splayed out next to me. My face and lips were red, hot, swollen, and a bit bruised. He leaned up on one elbow and lowered his head down to mine, ready for more.
“You smell like mint,” he had whispered as his lips grazed past my ear, teasing me.
I arched up as I kissed him, his tongue slid smoothly into my mouth, and my brain raced to keep up, to stay in control. I was pulled under again, awash in the sensations, lost.
My fingers had curled into the grass beneath me, as his fingers trailed lightly down my arm, his touch leaving a throbbing current, flowing from soft inner elbow to wrist.
I was breathing fast, hot against his neck. Then I leaned my neck back as he kissed me from under the curve of my chin to the top of my dress, and his hand no longer rested solidly on my stomach but gently pressed up, pushing what was already almost falling out the top of my dress to the very edge.
I felt his tongue graze along my hot skin there, and I struggled against the rising tide and came up for air. I pushed up against him and pushed him away. Porter rolled off me, flat onto his back, arms flung out to the sides with his face to the sky. Panting.
I am not the type of girl to do something like that. It is not in my nature. I was prom queen last year. I will be homecoming queen in the fall. Both my sisters were. I date the captain of the football team, just like Yorke and my mother, too, when she was in school. I’d like to say I have a lock on the whole valedictorian thing next year, but with Valerie around, I am keeping my fingers crossed.
I don’t need to drive off in a suspiciously borrowed car and end up making out with some random guy. It was a whole year before I even let Shane put his hand up my shirt. He tried many, many times, and I fought him off, protecting my turf against what I knew would be an inevitable march forward. It’s boobs first, then down the pants, undies off, and then, after that, everything is fair game.
We spend late Friday nights and most Saturday afternoons scrimmaging in my bed, above the sheets, with Shane slowly gaining ground. But what my boyfriend spent more than twelve months achieving inch by inch in my bedroom, Porter had plundered in a few sweaty minutes on the fairway near the twelfth hole.
I had lain there, looking up at a sky so blue it was almost black, listening to Porter’s breathing as it returned to normal, feeling mine finally slowing, too. All those weekends and tangled after-school specials with Shane, combined, added up, and totaled, did not feel as good as this one brief grassy smash with Porter. I felt like I just got a big drink of water when I didn’t even know I was thirsty. It was so good it scared the shit out of me.
“Leah . . .” Freddie says softly from the snug seat next to me, her voice bringing me back to the car, to the warm night rolling past me, but I am unable to turn my head and drag my eyes away from the fairway until I feel her hand on my shoulder.
“Leah,” she says again, a little louder this time, with a small, surprised laugh, “you’ve got grass in your hair.”
She runs her fingers lightly through my hair and holds out a few blades. She drops them, long and green, into my palm, and I close my hand around them, running my knuckles softly against my bruised lips, searching for the scent of mint between my curved fingers.
Freddie is watching me closely. Yorke looks over her shoulder, glancing back from the front seat with her eyes wide.
I open my hand. The grass is a striking green against my pale palm as we pass under an amber streetlamp, as green as Porter’s eyes. Roger shifts into gear, and a breeze drops down, swirling through the convertible. It lifts the grass up and blows it away. I watch it disappear. My sisters look away as I lower my hand and slowly settle back into place.
Chapter Three
My family, all experts in reading my mother’s moods, disappears as soon as we get home from the gymnasium. My sisters split off in different directions, shadowed by their boyfriends. Freddie, the first one across the foyer, slips up the steps, still in her cap and gown, defecting to her Parisian bedroom with Evan.
Seconds later I hear “Pour aimer . . . pour avoir aimé . . . être aimé . . .” as the sound of Gérard, the well-modulated voice on Freddie’s language tapes, floats down the stairs.
Freddie has been Frenching it up all day. All morning long we heard the tensing of French verbs, while Yorke covered the dining room table with bridal magazines and crowded me (and the last few Os in my cereal bowl) right out of the room, and while I stepped out of the shower and Freddie yanked our bathroom door open to find her favorite lip gloss—excuse me, son brillant à lèvres—then left me steaming on the bath mat.
My mother had tensed right along with Gérard, her mood notching up slowly from breakfast through to lunch, reaching a fevered pitch as we rushed back home after Freddie’s graduation ceremony with, according to her, “a thousand things to do before all the guests arrive” and the party officially got under way.
Yorke circles the staircase the long way and sneaks out back to join Roger and my dad in the rented white tent, leaving Shane and me alone with my mother, and she is closing in behind us.
I grab Shane’s hand and bound up the stairs two at a time, climbing away from the sound of her heels clicking furiously across the Italian tile and her voice calling, “Be back down here in fifteen minutes!”
> Fourteen minutes and thirty seconds later I am flat on my back, soft flowered sheets rumpling up against my skin, bra off, and legs twisting around the duvet.
“Shane,” I whisper as his head lowers and his lips nudge away at the neck of my T-shirt. “Shane . . .” I say again, feeling his hand, too warm on my stomach, slowly making its way upward. He breathes back, his only response a slight arching of his neck to come at me at a better angle.
I reach around his back, squeezing hard as I try to see the clock on my dresser behind his head. His hands feel heavy, my hair is caught somewhere, and I am so warm and suffocated and tired.
I don’t know what I was thinking, dragging him up here, hoping to feel some spark, to thrash about hot and heavy as if we were on green, soft grass, with the night open and smooth around us. I thought maybe something had changed for me last night. That I had woken up somehow.
I push at his hands, wanting them to stop moving in careless, wandering circles, wanting nothing but air and coolness between us.
“Shane! Leah! Get down here!” my mother screams, and I can almost hear her bracelets against the banister.
“Shit,” Shane says into my neck before his head snaps up and his eyes crack open, lids heavy against the early-afternoon sun streaming through my windows. “So much for the French lessons.”
He rolls off me and stands quickly, smoothing out the front of his long khaki shorts and flicking his bangs to the side.
“Let’s go,” he says impatiently with his eyes on the unlocked door.
“I can’t go like this,” I say, still lying on the bed, pointing at my blue T-shirt, all stretched out and twisted, my boobs free and naked underneath. “Julia would not be pleased.”
Kiss Crush Collide Page 3