Page 58 of Again with Feeling

“What’s happening right now?” Bobby asked, appraising me.

The giggle tried to slip out. I didn’t trust myself to speak, so I shook my head.

“Are you upset?” Bobby asked. “Do you want me to leave?”

“No. No, don’t leave. I just didn’t—am I supposed to kiss you?”

A distant part of me recognized that Bobby had not, perhaps, realized what he was getting himself into, and he was clearly, at this point, in way over his head.

“Do you want to kiss me?” he finally asked.

“Pretty much always. But, um, not if you don’t want me to. I know yesterday was—”

“Yes.”

I adjusted the blanket. “Do you want to think about it?”

“No. The answer is yes, you’re supposed to kiss me.”

“But, like, if—”

“No ifs.”

“There are always ifs.”

He flexed his hands at his side, and in the tone of a man who knows he’s sinking fast, he said, “Dash.”

“What if you’re a mummy and your face is covered in bandages? What if your lips get burned off in a horrible, um, molten-lava-cake-related disaster? What if we’re inpublic?”

The wind stirred the pine and spruce outside, and even through the window, I could hear the creak of their branches.

“Okay,” Bobby said, with that same tone.

And he came across the room and kissed me.

(In case you’re wondering, somehow in the last few hours, he’d gotten even better.)

“Any more questions?” he asked when he finally let me breathe.

“I know this is hypothetical,” I managed breathily, “but what if—”

He kissed me again. One arm was tight around my waist. The other hand was steady on my back. And I wondered if he could feel my heartbeat.

When he stepped back, he shot me an interrogatory look.

By that point, though, I didn’t have any questions. I didn’t have any brains, as a matter of fact.

Bobby settled me in my favorite chair again. He pulled the hassock over and sat. He was so close that our knees touched, and they bumped again when he raised himself slightly to retrieve something from his back pocket. A packet of folded paper. I recognized his script.

“Oh no,” I said (because it turns out when kisses turn to terror, you can’t help yourself). “That can’t be good.”

“Dash,” Bobby said, and his voice was strained with emotion I couldn’t pin down. “Please.”

That didn’t do much for my panic, but somehow I managed to nod.

Bobby unfolded the paper and smoothed the sheets against his thigh. His knee began to bounce, and the papers whispered against each other. A furrow creased Bobby’s forehead, and his jaw tightened, and a flush climbed his throat and into his cheeks. Deep inside me, a traitorous voice told me this was what he had looked like before he had broken the bad news to West.

Voice rough, he said, “I want to start by telling you that I broke up with Kiefer this morning.”

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