Page 2 of Mr. Picture Perfect
He presses his next kiss against my cheek, then my jaw, then goes for my ear, where he takes a sudden nip. Tingles of ecstasy rocket down my neck from the feel of his teeth on my earlobe. I’m out of control with my moans as he drags his lips down the side of my neck, right where it’s the most tender, right where I have to fight an instinct to squirm against him.
My whole entire body is sensitive.
Charged. Activated. Moving.
Then something hits the stick shift. There’s no telling if it’s his arm or mine, but quite suddenly we’re not parked.
A foot hits the gas—his foot or mine?
And now it’s the car that’s charged, activated, and moving, as it roars and zooms forward.
It’s safe to say this isn’t exactly what I expected our first time alone together to be like. And I can’t with any confidence say what was going through my head when I decided to start making out with my childhood crush in my car while parked in front of his parents’ house—other than how amazing his lips taste.
All I know is that a couple of days ago, we were just two guys minding our own business at the Spruce Spring Crafts Festival.
Two guys with completely unrelated reasons for being there.
Two guys with lonely, weary, broken hearts.
Until an unexpected, life-threatening catastrophe brought the pair of us crashing together—not unlike my vehicle careening into danger right now—and changed the courses of our lives forever.
Chapter 1
Noah
Oh. God. Please. No.
“I’m callin’ ‘em Jiggle-Wiggles!” sings my mother. “All your newspaper coworker friends are gonnalove‘em!”
It’s a box full of bite-sized gelatin blobs in a bunch of colors. Little faces are drawn on the tops of them somehow. Every time the box moves, the faces wiggle and distort. I think they’re trying to smile, but they all look slightly off, just enough to be horrifying.
“Aren’t they just too cute to eat?” she goes on. “And yet you just wanna eat them up anyway? I’m eatin’ them up with my eyes right now! No, no, it’s okay,” she says before I can even open my mouth, “you can take this whole box with you, I insist! Today is a special day, and I’m justsureyou’ll win points with your boss.”
My face flushes red at the thought of bringing this box to work. What everyone will say. The looks I’ll get, twice as scary as the ones on these jiggling monstrosities.
“B-But Mom,” I start, “today’s the spring crafts festival, not the baking festival, and—”
“Jiggle-Wiggles are a craft, sweetie! Anediblecraft!”
I stare down at the gelatinous little nightmares.
It’s an understatement to say I’m shy. I tried to be a people person once. It was a few years ago back in high school, I decided to audition for the spring play. I saw it as a final (and desperate) effort to change my life and overcome all my fears. It did not go as planned. The look of abject secondhand humiliation on Ms. Joy’s face while I stood on that big stage to audition is still burned onto the backs of my eyelids to this day. I couldn’t even form words like a regular human being. I just stood there like a department store mannequin making these bizarre, elongated squeaking sounds for far too long before finally dismissing myself, bolting off the stage like my pants caught fire, and donating all of my lunch right back to the school via a nearby bathroom toilet.
The Spruce High theatre department never saw me again.
And now my mom wants me to bring a box of Jiggle-Wiggles to work. On a day that will already be stressful enough—the day of the Annual Spruce Spring Crafts Festival.
Does she want me to actually die?
“Trust your mama!” she sings, smiling so big, her eyes vanish.
While it may seem like I’m trying to somehow shrink inside my own body like a turtle, I still know my manners, so I give my kind and well-meaning mother a smile and thank her.
It’s the thought that counts, right?
A few minutes later, there I am, Noah Reed, Spruce’s oddest and most awkward anomaly, unexplainable, inexcusable, hair as messy as a hurricane, glasses at the end of my nose, sleepy-eyed, pale-faced, and stumbling down the sidewalk in the old part of town with a box of Jiggle-Wiggles in my arms. It’s one of those pastry boxes with a clear window on top, so the warped little nightmares are perfectly visible as they dance mockingly at me every step of the way. The small, narrow Spruce Press building is well within walking distance to my house, so I’m distressingly close already. I wonder if I can sneak in and drop this box off somewhere no one will see. They might assume it’s just a delivery from a sweet and thoughtful person around town. As I approach the front steps of the building, I recite to myself: “Please let me get in unnoticed, please let me get in unnoticed, please let—”
But before I make it even halfway up the steps, the doors fly open, and my tall, lanky supervisor appears, standing over me like a tower—a very cocky, weary-eyed tower. “Mornin’, Noah. Listen, I got a job for ya. You’re gonna hate it, but I’m all outta options. My dad’s on my ass. Probably up it, too. Please stop lookin’ at me like that, I have hadsucha long week. What in the heck are those?”
