As we walk down the block, I half expect him to hook his arm through mine, as if we’re in a 1940s movie, maybe even in black-and-white. I kind of like that image, so I go with it, making the first move. Lane glances down at our arms, linked together, then he raises an eyebrow at me.
He says nothing; just smiles.
I wait for the flutter to kick in. For the flip in my belly I’d feel if Noah did this. It doesn’t appear, and maybe that’s because I already exhausted my supply of flips and flutters when Noah wrote back to my last text the other day, when I told him I wished he were with me.
I would grant that wish if you wanted me to. You know that.
Right now, I wish I felt half as much for Lane as I do for Noah.
We stop near the end of the quiet street, outside Bailey’s building, a pretty gray stone structure near a tree-lined corner. She’s the publicist at LGO, and I chatted with her last week at the party at my house when my mom’s show was renewed. Her husband Sean is somewhat of a regular with my mom, the three-or-four-times-a-year guy. Bailey doesn’t know about Sean’s extracurricular habits. So Bailey is just getting a card in the mail—a cool black-and-white photograph of two kids holding hands on a beach. I signed it Best wishes for an everlasting love and I sent it off when we passed a mailbox a few blocks ago. I hope it brings her some happiness.
With the card on its way, we enter the next phase of our love letter mission.
Now, we are spies. We are clandestine, scanning her tree-lined street for the thirty-something strawberry blonde. I don’t see her anywhere, so we begin tacking up copies of an excerpt from a letter James Joyce sent to his wife, Nora.
“I love this letter,” I say as I tape a copy to a street sign. “But my favorite love letters were written by Honoré de Balzac. Only I can’t ever leave his letters. Want to know why?”
“Why?” Lane asks as he smooths out a page against a railing.
“Because he was having an affair with a married woman.”
“Ah, I can see why you wouldn’t want to go there.”
“His letters are the best. But they’re cursed,” I say, then look up at the fourth floor of Bailey’s building. My heart stops. Lo and freaking behold, there’s a blond woman walking over to the window, pulling back the curtain. Peering across the street, then down the block.
My pulse races.
“That’s Bailey,” I whisper, grabbing Lane’s arm before Bailey sees us. In a nanosecond, we are off, running once more to the end of the block and around the corner to where we parked our bikes. We unlock them so quickly we could be auditioning for the role of speed demons in an upcoming flick. We race down the sidewalk, then onto the avenue, pedaling away from the scene.
I’ve done nothing wrong, but spotting Bailey in the window reminds me that there are real people on the other side of the amends. Sure, I desperately want her to feel happiness, but I also don’t want to get caught. No one knew how complicit I was in my mother’s affairs; no one needs to know how I’m trying to extract myself from that guilt. As I ride away, the thought flashes before me: Am I going too far? The first amends felt freeing, the second and third a damn liberation. But now I have to wonder if I’m pushing, needling, worrying away at something better left alone? Like Bailey in the window?
I don’t have the answer.
Eventually, we stop at a diner and order fries and diet sodas. As the waitress walks away, Lane reaches a hand toward me. I flinch.
“It’s okay,” he says gently. “You have grease on your cheek.”
“Oh, that’s gross.”
He rubs a finger against my cheek. “Bike grease.”
“Even grosser.”
“How do you get bike grease on your cheek?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you know it’s good luck to get bike grease on your cheek?”
I laugh. “Yeah, right.”
He touches the tip of another finger to his tongue. Then he presses his finger against my cheek again, wiping off the rest of the grease. He shows me his finger, smudged now. “See?”
“Now it’s on you.”
He smears a tiny amount on his cheek. “Then it’s good luck for me too,” he says, and the faintest blush blooms across his cheeks. He flashes me a sweet smile, then holds my gaze, and I feel untethered.
Untethered to him.
He’s never looked at me like this, and I’m honestly not sure I want him to. I don’t even want to know if Lane sees me in another light. I am only in one light, and it’s not lit by a boy. It’s lit by a man. A man I shouldn’t have.
A boy my age would be better for me. I should try to like a boy my age. I know I should.
When the fries arrive, I hold one up playfully for Lane, offering it to him. He takes it happily, and we continue on like that as I try and I try and I try.
Our Stolen Kisses
Someday in London. Someday in Paris. Someday in Amsterdam. That’s what you said one evening when we were eating French fries at a diner after a show. You told me that someday you’d kiss me in all those cities. That you’d take me around the world. No one would care. No one would notice. “I’d hold your hand, and we’d walk down the street, and you’d laugh at something I said, because I always like making you laugh, then when you stopped laughing, I’d kiss you.”
“But can you kiss me if I’m laughing too?”
You raised an eyebrow, rising up to the challenge. “I would never back down from kissing you.”