Page 43 of Always Been You

Not like her first time having sex. As soon as Louis left, Jess had picked up her phone, called Ali, and the first words out of her mouth had been, "Well, that sucked."

But not her kiss. No one knew.

“You guessed, right? There’s no way that you could’ve known that.”

The grin that spread on Ethan's face made her even more curious.

"What?" Patience had never been a virtue she'd possessed, and she wasn't about to get it now. "Just tell me," she demanded.

"I was there."

"What do you mean, you were there?" Jess shook her head back and forth. "You were on the beach or something?"

"No. I was on the pier."

That didn’t make any sense.

"You were on the pier?" As she repeated what he'd said, goosebumps rose on her skin as the realization of what he was saying didn't sink in slowly, it hit her like a Mack truck. "You were on the pier?" Her words came out in a breathless string.

He nodded.

Even though she knew that it was true, she still found herself shaking her head as she tried to remember every detail of that day. "No. There's no way."

She searched his eyes for the boy that had sat beside her. The boy that she'd shocked by leaning over and kissing. The boy that was, well, a boy. Ethan was a man.

Then a memory surfaced. The boy had said that his dad had just died. A lot of her childhood timelines were fuzzy, but she remembered that Daisy's son had died that summer. She remembered hearing about it right before she left for California. A few days after her first kiss, her parents had gotten her on an experimental drug protocol that required her to stay at Children's Hospital Los Angeles for close to a year. Now that she thought about it, she did remember Ali mentioning Daisy’s grandson moving to town and that he was "so cute" during one of their weekly phone calls.

"You were the boy on the pier." Tears began to fill her eyes and Jess made no move to wipe them away.

"Yep."

“And you remembered…how did I not know…?”

“It was a couple years before I saw you around town. I only noticed you because of the oxygen tank. And then it was years before we actually talked to each other. I probably looked a lot different at twelve than I did at seventeen.”

That made sense but, she still had another question. "Why didn't you ever say anything?"

"You didn't seem that impressed by my skills." He grinned. "Seriously, though. I thought about it, but what was I going to say? 'Hey, remember that time you thought you were going to die and you kissed a boy, you know that was me, right?'"

She couldn't help but laugh when he put it that way.

His smile faded. "Honestly, Jess, most of the time you seem like you can barely stand me. I didn't want to give you any more reasons to dislike me."

"I don't dislike you, I just..." How could she possibly tell him that she'd held a grudge against him and had secretly been in love with him for years but hated herself and him for how impossible her feelings were? "It's complicated."

"I'm just glad I got to redeem myself."

"Redeem yourself?" Her left brow rose.

"By the pool, at your parents’ house. You can't tell me you felt the same way about our second kiss that you did our first."

All of these years, Jess had never even considered what her response might’ve done to the boy that she'd ambushed for her first kiss. To her, playing it cool had always been a defense mechanism. She'd felt vulnerable after telling him that she was going to die, that she was scared for her parents, and then she planted a big one on him. She'd needed to gain some control back. That kiss had rocked her nine-year-old world. Just like the one at her parents’ house had rocked her twenty-eight-year-old world.

She was considering letting him know that when she noticed that his eyes had fallen to her mouth and he was staring with an intensity that she felt like a physical touch. Her tongue ran along the seam of her mouth as tingles danced over her lips.

"Or maybe I need another shot at redeeming myself," his low voice growled as he leaned toward her.

She closed her eyes in anticipation for the heavenly sensation of his firm, yet soft lips touching hers, but before that happened, her body jerked forward. She opened her eyes and saw that the carriage had come to a stop.

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