Page 5 of Just (Fake) Married
“Ow, shit,” I said, slapping my hand over my throbbing forehead. “Sorry. I thought…Why are we stopping?”
“Because…it was just supposed to be a kiss.”
“You mean it was more?” To you? I wanted to say. It was more to you? Because it was so much more than a kiss to me.
He shook his head and probed at his eye. “I don’t know what the fuck that was.”
“What happens next?” I asked him.
“We should get out of this pantry,” he said abruptly, and rubbed his hands against the front of his jeans. I wondered if they were sweaty. Mine were.
“I meant like…”
Our eyes met again, and I knew he was drunk, but I didn’t want him to think I thought this was anything other than what it was. Not that I knew what it was. Did Ethan kiss a lot of girls at parties? He didn’t have that kind of reputation. In fact, he never seemed to date anyone.
Were we dating?
No.
Were we?
Did he think it was something? I mean…he kissed me. And he washard.Sure, he was drunk, but he knew what was happening. Didn’t he?
“Come on,” he said, and in one smooth move, he opened the pantry door and pushed me out first, and then he beelined to Tag and his brother in the kitchen.
“The fuck?” Tag said from the other room. “What happened to your eye?”
Me, I thought. I happened to his eye.
Monday Morning
That kissin the pantry changed my whole life. Every part of it. It changed mybody.My brain. The world was different.
“What in the world is going on with you?” Sunshine asked, as we walked up the road toward the bus stop. The Gulch had one K-12 school and one school bus. You missed it, and you missed school that day.
“Nothing,” I lied, hiking my backpack higher on my shoulders. “It’s really beautiful out today, isn’t it?”
“It’s freezing,” Sunshine said, ducking her head deeper into the collar of her coat. “When people talk about hell freezing over, they mean Wyoming in winter.”
“Yeah, but the sky. So beautiful.” It was an endless Wyoming sky arching over us to the Bighorn Mountains in the far off distance. No clouds. Just a blue so blue, it didn’t seem real.
“You’re too weird right now, I can’t deal with it,” my sister muttered. “Did they give you drugs at that party?”
“No!” Unless kissing was a drug. Then I was addicted.
I wanted to tell her that Ethan McGraw had kissed me. Like for real kissing.
And that maybe we were…well, I didn’t know what we were, but we were something that we weren’t before.
Wouldn’t it be funny, if after all this time, it was me and Ethan who finally put an end to the McGraw and Calloway feud?
But something made me hold back. I could share anything with my sisters, but that kiss, in the pantry? That was mine. So, I kept the secret to myself.
Ethan’s blue truck came rattling up the dirt road from his family’s big, fancy house which was a mile down the road, past ours.
Nothing unusual about that. Of course the McGraws had their own transportation to school. I watched Ethan and Seth drive together almost every day, passing me and Sunshine, no matter if it was raining, or cold, or even scorching hot.
There had never been one reason for Ethan to pull his truck over to the side of the road and ask us if we wanted a ride.
