Melt With You

  “No.” The word comes out hoarse, barely audible.

  “Good.” My head leans toward hers, and the sweet, clean scent of her perfume hits me. My heart pummels against my chest like a fist. My body spikes with heat. I’m going for it. I don’t think I could stop myself if I wanted to. “Because this is something I would never do to my sisters.” My mouth brushes over hers. There. It happened. My eyes remain closed longer than needed, but I want to savor it, savor her scent, her warmth. Melissa’s lips are softer than air, and I always want to remember that. I pull back, checking to see if she wants it or if she feels like knocking me to the ground. Either way, it’s her call. “Can I kiss you?”

  “Do you always ask after the fact?” She’s teasing. Her beautiful eyes are smiling, and her breathing just as erratic as mine.

  “I never have to ask, but I keep forgetting you’re the exception.”

  “Why is that?” Melissa inches forward. Her lips linger right over mine.

  “Because I seem to like you best.” My mouth crashes over hers, not waiting for an answer.

  Melissa relaxes into me before her mouth falls open as she lets me in. She tastes sweet as honey, as strawberries and bubblegum all rolled into one, the slight aftereffect of the joint layered underneath. Her tongue smooths over mine, gun shy, teasingly slow, and I lose it. I thread my fingers through her hair and pull her closer to me, my tongue unleashing an assault inside her mouth that neither of us expected. Hell, I wanted it. I’ve been thinking of it, having one wet dream after another over this girl, and here she is, moving in my mouth, tasting like innocence and heartbreak, and all I can think to do is sigh directly into her mouth.

  This right here is the single most perfect kiss I’ve ever experienced. With Kelly, with everyone else, it’s been aggressive, forced on some level, but with Melissa, it’s easy, relaxed, just hanging out, having a good time.

  We keep at it for hours, her tongue slipping over mine, flicking it, catching it between her teeth, and holding it hostage. It turns into a game, but mostly it feels like a gift. I didn’t know it could feel this good. I never knew it could feel so right.

  Just after three in the morning, I walk her home and dot her lips with a simple peck. Every muscle in my body is still electrified from the exchange.

  “Are you mad at me?” It comes from me sheepish. I’ve never asked a girl that question before.

  “No. You’re the one that’s stoned. If anything, you’re going to be mad at me in the morning for taking advantage of you.” Her eyes flit to the side as she bites down on her juicy smile, and I want to kiss her all over again. My boxers jump to life, and I know it’s time to get the heck out of here.

  “I can never be mad at you.” I steal another kiss before taking off. This time it’s Melissa pulling me in, holding me there, roaming around my mouth like she belongs there. And she does.

  Less than ten minutes after I get home, I call Kelly. I may be like my dad in a lot of respects, but I’m not a cheat.

  She picks up after a couple of rings, her voice wasted and groggy on the other end.

  “We need to talk.”

  4

  Love My Way

  Melissa

  Saturday both Jennifer and Heather come over for what I’ve deemed an emergency meeting that concerns both the French and artifact linguistics.

  “I come bearing scrunch socks.” Heather plops a few white pairs of heavily knit socks onto my bed. I love these. I’ve wanted a pair and meant to get them, but then I sort of got in Joel’s way, and the rest is French artifact linguistics history. My body heats just thinking about it. “My mother says if a friend is having a crisis, you should never show up empty-handed. She totally meant bring vodka, but hey, cotton works, too, right? What’s with the French? Is this something Mr. DeLerque is going to quiz us on in government? Because my understanding is we’re strictly covering the U.S. democracy in that class. Low blow if he’s throwing the French at us.”

  “Thanks for the socks.” I wave them in the air and squish my fingers through them before continuing. “I’ll wear one tomorrow with my new LA Gear tennis shoes—shoe.” The ones with the pink laces that I’ve been dying to wear, but thanks to my thigh-high cast, it’s been near impossible to even think of tying my own shoe. “And as for the U.S., we’re a republic, which is sort of like a democracy but technically not—and also, no to Mr. DeLerque. I promise this meeting of the minds has no scholastic implications. Well”—I think about it—“sort of.”

  “Oh, wow,” Jen muses. “She’s getting both geeky and talkative on us.” She bumps her shoulder into Heather. “This is going to be good.”

  The two of them glide in at the foot of my bed and motion for me to get on with it.

  “You mean you don’t get it?” I stare at them with a single shred of hope that they might yet decode the message. It’s not like I was going to blurt out, Get here STAT. Joel thrust his tongue down my throat last night, and I’m dying to describe the miraculous event in detail. “The French? Artifact—as in something that’s been around forever. And linguistics? Linguistics is practically code for tongue.” Now it’s me motioning them along, trying to see which one puts together the mouthwatering charade pieces first.

  “So, like what’s the big news?” Jen flatlines. Obviously, my efforts are for not.

  “Things sort of happened.” I hitch my head for Jen to shut the door, and she quickly complies.

  “Did he touch you?” Her eyes grow wild as she plops next to Heather again. “I knew that motherfucker was a freak.”

  “Would you stop?” I whack her with my E.T. doll. “He is not a freak. He’s just—I don’t know. He’s Joel. He was happy about the win. Then Kelly got sick, and he had to take her home, and he asked if I wanted to hang out.”

  “You like hung out?” Jen’s face elongates unnaturally. “As in like after I dropped you off at home?”

  I give a single nod.

  Heather and Jen glance at one another, thunderstruck.

  “Shit.” Heather gives a heavy sigh. “I think he’s messing with you.”

  Jennifer offers an aggressive nod as if someone is finally speaking her language. “I swear, I will knife that asshole and his stuck-up girlfriend, too, if he even tries to take advantage of you.”

  My throat gets tight as the truth bottlenecks around my vocal cords.

  “Did he touch you?” Heather grips my forearm as if she were trying to get me to admit to a full-blown assault. “Did he try to be with you?”

  Somehow this entire conversation has taken a turn for the worse. An abrupt knock vibrates through the door, and Ben pokes his head in.

  “Phone’s for you. It’s some chick named Amy. By the way, I’m still looking into that Enola Gay thing for you. I know for a fact it’s the name of the B-29 Superfortress bomber used to reduce Hiroshima to a load of rubble, but why would some band you listen to ever sing about that?”

  “Right. That’s pretty dark.” But my mind can’t seem to focus on OMD or Enola Gay right now. “Would you mind bringing me the phone?” I hobble to the door and wait for Ben to stretch it taut as can be—any minute now I expect the body of the phone to rip off the kitchen wall and ricochet down the corridor like a Pac Bell missile.

  Ben gives it one last tug, trying to extend it that final foot. “It won’t reach.”

  Heather pops up. “I got this.” She takes the phone from Ben and strides down toward the kitchen to keep the cord from snapping. She gasps at whatever she hears before staggering back toward my room. Her eyes lock on mine in horror.

  “What?” I try to grab the receiver out of her hand, but she’s not budging. Her eyes grow long as eggs as she eats up whatever it is that Amy is feeding her. “Don’t worry, I’ll tell her everything. Thanks. Bye.” She hands the phone to my patient little brother and entombs us back into my room. “Amy is at the Galleria. She only had a second to spare, but she wanted to tell you there’s like a huge rumor going around that Joel and Kelly broke up this morning.?
??

  “What?” Jennifer and I shout in unison.

  “That’s right.” Heather looks to me accusingly. “She said they had a big blowout, and it was over some girl.”

  “Oh, shit!” We pull it off again, shouting at the same time.

  Heather blows out an exasperated breath. “Cast or no cast, come Monday, you are so going to get your ass kicked. Heck, she might just break the rest of your bones.”

  “I don’t want to get my ass kicked! I like my bones in one piece, thank you very much—at least the rest of them.” I clutch at my chest. “God, what if this was all orchestrated by Kelly in an effort to have a bona fide reason to land me in a coma? I bet she paid Joel to run over me just to get me off the team.” It’s safe to say my paranoia is at an all-time high. “And I bet that kiss we shared was a pig’s blood moment, and I didn’t even know it.”

  “What the hell are you babbling about?” Jennifer waves her hand in front of my face. It’s clear we’re no longer on the same page.

  “We kissed.” I fall back onto my bed and pull a pillow over my face. The word kiss sounds far too simplistic to describe what happened last night. It was something more, something intense, electric, spiritual even. It felt as though Joel Miller had grafted his heart over mine, and that kiss was simply a way of stitching our souls together. That kiss felt like more of an I love you than words could ever be.

  The pillow is snatched abruptly off my face as the two of them stare down at me.

  “You did what?” Jen looks crushed as if I took a sledgehammer to all one hundred of her beloved Smurfs.

  Heather’s jaw goes slack. “French artifact linguistics is code for you French kissed Joel Miller? You are such a nerd. Dude, you need to speak English next time. This is big.”

  “You kissed him?” Jennifer is suddenly affronted.

  “It was an accident. He wasn’t even in his right mind. He was stoned.”

  “What!” Now it’s the two of them going off in unison.

  “Relax! It was just a couple of hits. He mentioned something about it being a gift for winning the game. And I only took like one puff. Obviously, it didn’t kill me.”

  Jennifer looks genuinely afraid for me. “Who are you? And what did you do with Melissa Malinowski?”

  “I second that.” Heather takes back the socks she gave me and smacks me across both cheeks with them. “He has a girlfriend!”

  “Had.” I snatch them back. “Like I said, it was a total accident—”

  “Oh”—Jen gesticulates wildly with her arms—“your faces just so happened to bump into one another, and boom? His tongue was looking for the nearest esophagus to massage, and yours just happened to volunteer?”

  “Something like that.” I scoot up on the bed and consider whacking them with either the hardback version of Chances or an entire stack of Sweet Valley High books. I opt for the hardback, bopping them both on the head in turn. “It wasn’t like that. He asked if he could kiss me.” Sort of.

  “Great, so it was premeditated. You realize that’s the worst kind of cheating.”

  “We weren’t thinking of Kelly.” I pull the book over my face and give an exasperated groan. Crap. We should probably have been thinking of Kelly.

  “Cheaters never do.” Jen remains staunch in her hatred for him.

  “Now I feel like a total asshole.” All night I floated on those kisses. I dreamed that my tongue was back in his mouth doing those amazing French artifact linguistics type things. But with Kelly on the brain, with her intense heated anger searing through the phone via Amy, it’s sort of taken the shine off those stolen kisses Joel and I shared. “What do you think I should do?” I’m still quaking in my cast at the thought of being jumped in a dark alleyway by Kelly and her nail-sharpening cronies.

  “I don’t know.” Heather takes the book from me. “Has he called you?”

  “No. But apparently, he talked to Kelly.”

  Jen scoffs. “And in your eyes, that’s one step closer for you and Joel to be together?” She scoots off the bed. “You’re staying away from that idiot from now on. I knew he was a moron the second he ran you over. I’ll be taking you to school on Monday, and there’s no way I’m letting you say no.”

  “No,” I say as she opens the door. “I don’t want to piss off Joel. He ended it with Kelly. I know his head is all over the place. He gets me, and I get him. I want to be there for him. And where are you going?”

  Jennifer pulls Heather off the mattress and snatches up my copy of Chances. Jen and I share library books like we do clothes. She’s just as obsessed with a good read as I am. That’s one of my favorite things about her. In fact, I like most everything about her, except for her sudden distrust of the boy I shared French artifact linguistics with last night. “We’re going to the mall to get to the bottom of this. You stay put and relax. Try to work on your left hook or something. You might need it.”

  “Crap,” I whisper as they head down the hall.

  I’m not really going to get my ass kicked, am I?

  Oh hell. I pluck my nail file out just in case.

  * * *

  Monday morning, I rush to get myself together as if a tornado were chasing me out of the house. I’ve pulled on a hot pink miniskirt that I might have issues with if I don’t cross my feet at the ankles, and a white crop turtleneck that shows off my toned, and thankfully, still tan stomach. I might as well get all the mileage I can off the parts of this body that aren’t hermetically sealed by plaster. It’s nice to know I didn’t spend all summer broiling under the sun for nothing. And, if I’m going to be eating dirt later on today, I might as well look good while I’m writhing in pain.

  “Hey, dork.” My sister pokes her head into my room just as I’m dusting powder over my face. Heather left her makeup bag here yesterday, and I’ve always wanted to try the Shine Free cover-up she wears. Personally, I’m partial to my CoverGirl compact with the Noxema infused into the powder, but I’m all for reducing the shine on my T-zone, too. “Get your lazy ass up. Your ride is here.”

  “Who is it?” I’ll be shocked if it’s Jen. I called her last night and threatened her within an inch of her book-loving life. I said I’d crutch her to death if she bothered to show, but it is a whole fifteen minutes earlier than Joel normally picks me up.

  “It’s that boy with the truck. You’re not sleeping with him, are you?”

  “What? Eww. I’m not discussing this with you—and to answer your question, no!”

  “Good. The last thing I want is a knocked-up kid sister.” She heads into my closet.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting these.” She waves my brand new Jordache jeans at me. “You can’t wear ’em anyway.”

  “Wait!” I cry after her, but the slam of her bedroom door lets me know I can’t stop her. Ugh! I hate when she does that. It’s bad enough that she steals my clothes behind my back, but right in front of my face? One day, I’m going to get a pair of scissors and cut up the entire top drawer of her dresser—not that she’d care. Half of her tights are shredded on purpose.

  “Nice.” I reach far and wide to gather my things like a mother hen gathering baby chicks. I lunge for my crutches and hobble out the door as fast as I can to find Joel sitting out front, his dark hair bobbing with the beat to “Cum on Feel the Noize” as Quiet Riot vibrates from his truck. He spots me as I make my way over.

  “Morning.” He winces. His eyes illuminate an unearthly shade of blue, the exact shade you might see at the horizon where day meets night, and the sky is about to turn lavender. I’m sure Mr. Sardona would hate that flowery rendition of Joel Miller’s eyes, but right now, it’s the only appropriate one in existence. “Are you still speaking to me?” His dimples dip in deep, and my stomach dissolves to nothing.

  “Are you still speaking to me?”

  He takes my crutches and places them into the back of his truck. His eyes meet up with mine, and my insides catch fire.

  “Of course, I’m still speaking to you.?
?? He gives a lazy grin as he helps me into the passenger’s seat. “You’re a tough stoner chick,” he teases. “I always speak to tough stoner chicks.”

  “Very funny. I hear there’s one person you’re not really speaking to anymore.” I glance down at my ridiculously short skirt and feel the burn on my cheeks. I’m not sure why I brought it up.

  “Good news gets around fast.” He holds up a finger as if to say just a moment, while jumping over to the driver’s side. “That’s sort of why I wanted to pick you up a little earlier.” He drives down to the park where the now-infamous incident occurred—the fusing of our mouths for hours—and, for a brief moment, I’m hopeful we’re here for a reprisal. “You mind if I talk about it for a second?”

  “Go right ahead. Are you okay? Did you throw things at each other? Did anyone’s mother’s china suffer the consequences?” I really don’t know what rich people do when they get angry. I know that throwing things is a perfectly acceptable human way of venting, and in the case of the wealthy—they simply have nicer things to throw.

  He barks out a laugh. “No, but believe me, you’re not that far off. I called her as soon as I got home, and we talked a little over the phone. Then we met up the next morning for breakfast. We were at Denny’s, and the waitresses asked us to leave before the food ever came. It was pretty bad.”

  “Note to self: don’t instigate a breakup at Denny’s.”

  He shakes his head, his gaze steady over mine. “Trust me, none of your breakups will ever be so dramatic. Guys aren’t like that—most guys, anyway. And, you’re nowhere near a lethal level of crazy.”

  Our eyes stay locked like that for a few minutes, and neither of us knows quite what to say.