“
I feel completely embarrassed and remember the lock on the door and think: He knows, he knows, it shows, shows completely.
“He’s out back,” Mr. Garret tells me mildly, “unpacking shipments.” Then he returns to the papers.
I feel compelled to explain myself. “I just thought I’d come by. Before babysitting. You, know, at your house. Just to say hi. So . . . I’m going to do that now. Jase’s in back, then? I’ll just say hi.”
I’m so suave.
I can hear the ripping sound of the box cutter before I even open the rear door to find Jase with a huge stack of cardboard boxes. His back’s to me and suddenly I’m as shy with him as I was with his father.
This is silly.
Brushing through my embarrassment, I walk up, put my hand on his shoulder.
He straightens up with a wide grin. “Am I glad to see you!”
“Oh, really?”
“Really. I thought you were Dad telling me I was messing up again. I’ve been a disaster all day. Kept knocking things over. Paint cans, our garden display. He finally sent me out here when I knocked over a ladder. I think I’m a little preoccupied.”
“Maybe you should have gotten more sleep,” I offer.
“No way,” he says. Then we just gaze at each other for a long moment.
For some reason, I expect him to look different, the way I expected I would myself in the mirror this morning . . . I thought I would come across richer, fuller, as happy outside as I was inside, but the only thing that showed was my lips puffy from kisses. Jase is the same as ever also.
“That was the best study session I ever had,” I tell him.
“Locked in my memory too,” he says, then glances away as though embarrassed, bending to tear open another box. “Even though thinking about it made me hit my thumb with a hammer putting up a wall display.”
“This thumb?” I reach for one of his callused hands, kiss the thumb.
“It was the left one.” Jase’s face creases into a smile as I pick up his other hand.
“I broke my collarbone once,” he tells me, indicating which side. I kiss that. “Also some ribs during a scrimmage freshman year.”
I do not pull his shirt up to where his finger points now. I am not that bold. But I do lean in to kiss him through the soft material of his shirt.
“Feeling better?”
His eyes twinkle. “In eighth grade, I got into a fight with this kid who was picking on Duff and he gave me a black eye.”
My mouth moves to his right eye, then the left. He cups the back of my neck in his warm hands, settling me into the V of his legs, whispering into my ear, “I think there was a split lip involved too.”
Then we are just kissing and everything else drops away. Mr. Garret could come out at any moment, a truck full of supplies could drive right on up, a fleet of alien spaceships could darken the sky, I’m not sure I’d notice.
”
”