Kiss Me Now: A Romantic Comedy

by Melanie Jacobson

  I’d reassure him when he came to visit Miss Lily again this weekend that he had more than atoned. I climbed out of the car and prepared for an even better second day of school.

  Day Two did not go better.

  It was hard to imagine it could go worse than spider-infested Day One, and in fact, the day had looked much more promising until lunch time when Noah Redmond popped his head in.

  “Offer still free to eat my lunch in here?”

  “Only if you promise to amuse me with witty banter.”

  He winced. “Ooh, sorry, I just came off a freshman PE class, and all I have is ‘your mom’ jokes.”

  “Then come in here and eat but don’t tell me any of those. Unless there were some good ones?”

  We had a good lunch while we traded war stories from our first two days on the job.

  “The kids are nice enough, but I don’t think they’re taking me too seriously,” I concluded.

  “Well, I actually taught before in Charlottesville, so maybe I have the added advantage of three whole years of experience to help put things in perspective?” He said it like he was asking permission to share his insights, and I liked that. Miss Lily was one of the few people who could barrel right into dispensing advice without asking because that’s what eighty years of good living earned you. I liked that Noah didn’t assume he should just start spouting his opinions.

  “I’d love to hear your thoughts,” I said.

  “I guess the main thing I figured out is to give up trying to get it perfect.” He smiled at whatever expression he saw on my face. “Not so easy for you?”

  “No. Not so easy.”

  “I get it. The good news is that eventually you start to do each thing better. In the meantime, the one thing that matters most is if the kids can tell you like them. I don’t mean that you want to be their friend—they’ll take advantage of that like you wouldn’t believe. But if they sense that you sincerely enjoy them, they’ll remember that far longer than—” he flicked a glance at my bulletin boards “—say, taxonomy.”

  I gasped. “How dare you? Dear King Phillip Came Over For Green Spaghetti. Domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species. They will never forget.”

  “You’re right. I’m vastly underestimating their monkey brains. But I’d invite you to come hang out during one period of freshman boys PE and tell me you’re still convinced that your memory trick is going to stick in there, much less words like phylum.”

  “Fair enough. Hey, I’m going to run to the ladies’ room, but feel free to hang out. I’ll be back in a few.”

  “Sure.”

  The high school was set up in two main buildings, each with four long corridors where classrooms were loosely situated by subject. I was the last classroom in the science wing, but luckily, the faculty restroom for our whole building was just at the other end of my hall. I passed kids sitting in small groups eating lunches, some from brown bags, some from cafeteria trays. They chattered with each other and paid no attention to me. I remembered that feeling: that teachers only existed during class and not between bells.

  I finished in the restroom and washed up, giving myself a thorough once over in the bathroom mirror. I got the sense that Noah wasn’t in a relationship, and while I felt more of a friend vibe with him than anything, I still wanted to look presentable in case I ever changed my mind. I verified that I didn’t have anything embarrassing stuck in my teeth, and no drips or spills on my shirt. It was fitted without being tight, and I re-tucked it into my knit skirt with its cheerful polka dot print and headed back to my classroom.

  By the time I reached my door, a few kids called after me, “Hi, Miss Spencer.”

  That was nice.

  Or at least it was until I heard a giggle after one of the hellos.

  I slipped into the classroom and leaned against the door.

  “Noah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think you and I are going to be friends?”

  “Sure, I think so,” he said in his easy way.

  “Um, I’m going to take advantage of that.”

  His eyebrow went up. “How so?”

  “I’m going to turn around, and I need you to tell me if there’s anything about my appearance from the back that would cause a hallway full of high schoolers to laugh.”

  “All right,” he said slowly.

  I turned. “Well?”

  “Uh.”

  It was all he needed to say. “What is it?” I plucked at the back of my shirt then ran my hand over the seat of my skirt, not feeling anything suspicious.

  “Your skirt. Um.”

  I leaned my head against the door, not wanting to face him now. “My skirt what?”

  “Is sort of tucked? In?”

  “No.” It was more of a whisper, the last gasp of denial. I swept my hand over the back of my skirt again, this time sweeping lower. My butt was safely covered but when I got below that...

  I turned back around to face him. “My butt is not hanging out.”

  “No.”

  “But it’s barely covered.”

  “Yeah, that about covers it. Er, I mean sums it up.” He pretended to study his fingernails. “I’m going to stop talking now.”

  I reached up and worked at the back of my hemline as discreetly as I could. The end of my skirt was, in fact, tucked into my underwear. I unstuck it and my skirt drifted into place. “It was nice knowing you, but when I leave campus today, I’m never coming back.”

  “Don’t do that,” he said. “Who else will I have to share in my humiliation over teaching half of second period with my fly down?”

  I stared at him suspiciously. “Are you making that up to make me feel better?”

  He shrugged. “Oh, it happened. Just not second period today. My second year of teaching. There’s really not a good time for that experience. And yet I’m still here.”

  “What do I do?”

  “Maybe walk right back out there again with your skirt straightened out and get a drink from the water fountain like nothing is wrong? It’ll be less interesting for them if they think it was no big deal to you.”

  “Good plan but I’d rather die.”

  “You might. They may actually chew you up and spit you out in glee if they know this got to you.”

  “That’s fine. Can you call the office and tell them I no longer work here?”

  He smiled. “No. You got this. Get back in the game, Spencer.” He pointed to the hallway.

  I took a deep breath, snatched my water bottle from my desk, and walked back out. This time the kids all turned to regard me with greater interest.

  “How’s it going, Ms. Spencer?” one of the boys called as I passed.

  “Great. Couldn’t be better.” I made it to the drinking fountain halfway down the hall and stood there for the eternity that it took for my water bottle to fill, a half-smile fixed on my face while I tried to also simultaneously appear lost in thought. I made the return trip to my classroom, but this time no one paid attention to me.

  “How did it go?” Noah asked when I slipped back in.

  “I think okay? I’ll at least stay through the last two classes today. But I can’t promise I’m coming back tomorrow.”

  He laughed and returned his chair to the nearby lab desk as the bell rang. “Fair enough. But for what it’s worth, I don’t think anyone saw anything.”

  “No, but they almost saw everything.”

  “But it’s still only almost. Hang in there, Spencer.”

  “Thanks, coach.”

  He gave me a salute and headed back toward the gym.

  I survived fifth and sixth periods, drove home and ate a pint of ice cream, and decided when my alarm went off the next morning that I would go back to school after all. By the time I drove home Friday, I was even smiling as I thought about telling Ian the story.

  Except that by dinnertime on Friday, Ian hadn’t shown up at Miss Lily’s. I’d hung out for an extra-long time in the garden pulling wee
ds that could have waited a few days, waiting for a car—his car—to turn into Miss Lily’s driveway...but nothing.

  It was annoying. I was annoyed with myself for finding it annoying.

  I made myself a tomato sandwich—Miss Lily had naturally been exactly right about the glory of a tomato sandwich when the tomato comes straight from the vine—and burned off some restless energy by stripping wallpaper.

  I should’ve been exhausted after a disaster-laced first week. Instead, I was keyed up. I’d put some energy on reserve for seeing Ian without realizing it, and now that energy had nowhere to go.

  Well, no surprise. I’d said no dating. And Ian had proven he was far more likely to stay in DC than visit Miss Lily. But I’d been egotistical enough to think that he’d make an excuse to come see her so he could see me.

  Stupid.

  He was giving me what I wanted, and that was a good thing.

  “You have no time for Ian Greene,” I scolded my reflection as I washed my face before bed. “You will never have time for Ian Greene. Make your to do list and go to sleep.”

  I woke up early on Saturday, determined to get the last of the stubborn wallpaper stripped from the hallway. Except I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to do anything but burrow under the covers and put on Dream Home Makeover and not do a single useful thing.

  But the thing about owning my own house was that it was mine and no one else’s, which meant the work was mine and no one else’s too. I stared up at the ceiling and weighed a day-long Netflix binge against having to live with the ugly old wallpaper again.

  “Do something nice for Brooke tomorrow and take care of the wallpaper today,” I told the ceiling.

  “Ugh, fine,” I answered myself. “But I’m going to need an incentive.”

  Music and muffins, my brain said.

  “I will strip wallpaper for one hour with my music blaring and then I can have a muffin. A chocolate chip muffin.”

  Blueberry is healthier.

  “Chocolate chip or nothing.”

  My head stayed quiet, so I dragged myself out of bed and slid on cutoffs and a holey Nationals shirt, set up my Bluetooth speakers, and cued the playlist I’d used when I trained for a half-marathon right after college, a collection of rap and rock anthems so cheesy they should be used for fondue. I showed the wallpaper no mercy while singing about the eye of the tiger at the top of my lungs.

  I’d moved on to a new section of the hallway and a song about big butts when a hand brushed my shoulder. I screamed at the top of my lungs and whirled with my scraper in front of me like a weapon.

  Ian jumped back and put his hands up. “I come in peace,” he yelled over Sir Mixalot.

  I blinked at him and pressed a hand against my racing heart. When he pointed to my phone and gave me a questioning glance, I nodded, and he moved to it and turned down the volume.

  “You can’t walk into the house of a single woman living on her own,” I told him. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “I knocked a bunch of times, but I had a feeling you wouldn’t hear me over the music.”

  “When did you get here?” I asked.

  “I only knocked for a minute.”

  “I meant to Creekville. I didn’t think you were coming this weekend.”

  “Miss me?” he asked with a crooked grin.

  “You wish.”

  “I do, actually.”

  My heart gave an extra beat, and I frowned.

  He held up his hands, misunderstanding the frown. “I know, I know, you have no time or interest for dating. Got it. Just here to help with some renovation. And...air guitar?” he asked as Bon Jovi began singing about living on a prayer.

  I glanced behind me at the mess and the sheer amount of wallpaper left to remove. Suddenly, it was the last thing I wanted to do. I wanted to say, “Forget it and let’s go wade in the creek,” but my busy bee setting wouldn’t quite let me get away with that. “Mushrooms,” I blurted.

  “Mushrooms?” he repeated. “Like at Caps? Or are you into some recreational activities I probably don’t want to know about?”

  “Both and neither,” I said. “I want to go mushroom hunting. It wasn’t a super great first week at school, so I think I’m going to redeem myself by bringing in samples of different local mushrooms for them to look at under microscopes and practice taxonomy.”

  “I’m sure it wasn’t as bad a first week as you think.”

  “I walked down the hall with my skirt tucked into my underwear.”

  A laugh tried to escape him, but he pressed his lips together for a moment then said, “Did you tell them it was an anatomy lesson?”

  It wasn’t funny to me yet. It would be. Scraping together a little more dignity each day as I stood up and faked calm, cool professionalism had helped reassure me that Pantygate wasn’t going to be a career-defining moment. But it was going to take more than a week to be able to laugh about it. At this moment, stomping through the woods felt like a good way to beat back the lingering humiliation.

  “Are you a fun guy ready to hunt some fungi?”

  “Is it a thing where you become a teacher and suddenly you have bad jokes?” he asked.

  “Yeah. We get a class roster and an app with joke of the day. Fungi or bye-bye.”

  “Fungi,” he said.

  I ran a glance over him. He was dressed to work in board shorts and a T-shirt with some sandwich shop logo I’d never heard of. “Let’s go then. Did you drive your convertible?”

  “Of course. That’s the only reason I’ve been driving out the last three weekends. Gives me an excuse to put the top down.” He grinned, and I knew it wasn’t true, but I still sort of wished that he’d add a flirty qualifier, like, And to see you, of course.

  And it annoyed me again to feel that way, of course.

  “Let me grab some supplies and we’ll go,” I muttered. I could be honest enough to admit to myself that I had invented a reason for us to spend time together, but I didn’t have to be happy with myself about it.

  Twenty minutes later, I directed him to a parking lot at the head of a walking trail that wound along the creek, and we climbed out, my tote full of supplies. Instead of setting us on the trail, I led him across the bridge and into the woods on the other side.

  “Hey, that bag doesn’t have murder tools in it, does it?” he asked.

  “It definitely does. I’m luring you out here to kill you and steal your car. Miss Lily may have some questions when she sees me driving it every day and you’ve been missing for weeks, but I’m smart. I’ll figure something out.”

  “Okay, as long as I know what the plan is.” He slipped the bag from my arm and slung it over his shoulder. “Teach me how to find mushrooms, Ms. Spencer.”

  We spent the next two hours picking our way around tree roots and discovering mushrooms on trunks, fallen logs, and hiding in the dirt. Maybe I should have felt weird about being alone in the woods with a guy I didn’t know so well, but Miss Lily was good people, and despite his arrogance when we first met, I was beginning to think Ian was good people too.

  He was easy company. Or, not easy, exactly. Easy company was like Noah or Miss Lily, where I felt comfortable with them right away. And it wasn’t that I was uncomfortable with Ian, but there was a subtle tension there that made it something other than easy. It was a tension that wove a kind of spell that shrunk the world down to the two of us and our patch of woods. I felt it every time he took my elbow to help me scramble over a fallen log, or when I caught him watching me as I pried mushrooms loose from tree bark.

  I was too smart to fall under the spells of charismatic men anymore, so I went out of my way to break it.

  “Tell me about your work,” I said. It was designed to remind me that he spent most of his waking hours in an environment that had been a nightmare for me. To remind me that he lived a life I’d left behind for good reason.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked. “My job sounds interesting on the
surface, but it’s mostly Google searches and stakeouts where nothing happens.”

  “Then tell me about the non-boring parts of it. What’s the weirdest case you ever had?”

  “Probably the fish smuggler.”

  I stopped and stared at him. “It sounded like you said fish smuggler.”

  “Yep. I was trying to find some intel on a Malaysian diplomat one of our clients wanted to lobby for a construction contract—”

  “By ‘intel’ you mean ‘dirt,’ right?”

  He shrugged. “Potato, po-tah-to.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Continue.”

  “Anyway, I was tailing him, and I thought I was on the trail of something big. I knew he was doing something shady. Illicit meetings, exchanges of money, stuff like that. But then I finally caught him in the act of a trade with an aide from South Korea at an embassy party. And it turns out my shady Malaysian was a dealer, all right, but in fish, not drugs. He was sneaking in a fish called an arowana and making major bank.”

  “So arowana, not marijuana?”

  “Yeah. I turned the case over to the US Department of Wildlife and Fisheries instead of the DEA. They’re pet fish and in huge demand all over Asia, but they’ve been banned here forever. So Mr. Malaysia was supplementing his humble government salary in the pet fish black market.”

  I stared at him. “You’re making that up.”

  He pulled out his phone, tapped it a few times, and handed it over.

  “Hang on, I want to sit to read this. Give me a boost.” We were standing beside a fallen trunk so thick it came up to my hip, even on its side. Ian put his phone back in his pocket and wrapped his hands around my waist.

  “Hold my shoulders,” he said, so I did. His shoulders were as firm as they looked, and taking them put our faces at eye level, but I pretended to be interested in the tree behind him instead of meeting his gaze. There was a tiny pause before he lifted me up so I could sit on the trunk. Then he handed me his phone and the article.

  It took a second to focus on it. A couple of my synapses had fried when he’d picked me up. Dang, he was strong. I swallowed and blinked to clear my head before I could read the article.

  Sure enough, there was a headline about a diplomat being sent back to Malaysia in disgrace after he was busted for fish trafficking.