Kiss Her Once for Me (80)
Jack swivels back to face me, smile curling in the corner of her kiss-swollen mouth. “Who says I’m trying to be sexy?”
And then her hands are back on me.
Chapter Twenty-Three
As it turns out, starting the fire is its own obstacle.
It takes more tries than I expect to get our freshly cut logs to catch fire inside the woodburning stove, especially since we’re fairly certain there are different methods for arranging the logs, but we haven’t the faintest idea what they are. We curse our mothers and their respective reasons for keeping us out of Girl Scouts.
My mom: lack of money, lack of interest, lack of sobriety.
Her mom: a busy schedule of piano lessons, swim practices, ballet recitals.
“Ballet recitals?” I gasp.
Jack gives me this bemused look, half-concealed as she bends forward to stoke the fire. “I was fucking incredible at ballet.”
After thirty minutes of blowing on measly flames and praying for the bigger logs to fucking burn already, they finally do, and we both sit on the rug, close to our hard-earned fire, four hands outstretched as we try to thaw them.
And then, our mutual goal of starting a fire achieved, we seem to simultaneously remember all the rest: the bathroom kiss, and me marrying her brother, and Andrew kissing Dylan, and her hating me, maybe for real.
It’s six o’clock in the evening, and we’re trapped in this ramshackle little cabin together for at least the next twelve hours, and oh my God, what the hell should I say?
Thankfully, Jack starts saying things first. “We should, uh—” Jack looks nervous. Jack never looks nervous. “We should get out of our wet clothes.”
I want to find a way to turn that statement into a joke, but my mouth has gone as completely dry as my clothes are not.
Jack climbs off the rug and goes to the antique dresser beside the one bed. It turns out the Singhs both went to Cornell and enjoy advertising the fact on their Tshirts and sweatshirts and sweatpants. It also turns out they’re both significantly smaller than we are, but we don’t have any other options. Our clothes will never dry on our bodies, and my teeth have been chattering for so long, my jaw hurts.
Jack hands me a pile of clothes, and then we both stand there, staring at each other uncertainly. Without agreeing to, we slowly turn our backs like cowboys in a duel. Which is ridiculous. We’ve seen each other naked before.
Though perhaps seeing each other naked now might complicate things.
I can hear the shifting of wet flannel, and I imagine her removing her shirt to reveal the inky sketches of tattoos all down her arms.
But I have no right to be imagining that, so I promptly stop and get changed. It’s a slow process to take off my jacket and my snowsuit and my long johns, all the way down to my bra and underwear. I slide off my bra but leave the underwear on. Mrs. Singh’s sweatpants cut me halfway across the calves and the sweatshirt has a distinct crop-top vibe, but there’s a pair of wool socks to keep my feet warm, and I already feel a thousand times better.
Jack waits until I say, “Ready,” before turning around. She looks equally hilarious, at least, in her cropped gray sweats and her midriff-bearing sweatshirt. Jack’s eyes slip down my body and get noticeably stuck around my cleavage, which is on display in these too-tight clothes.
I am not blessed with the kind of figure that enables me to go casually braless, as I learned from watching my busty mother go tits-wild in her Cleveland Browns jersey at all of my middle school sleepovers. “Sorry, but my bra was wet,” I grumble.
“Yeah, of course.” Jack’s voice is husky, and she clears her throat. “Cool.”
Cool. Nothing about this turn of events is cool. We’ve reverted back to standing awkwardly in front of each other. I’m trying not to stare at that patch of stomach revealed above the low-slung waistband of her borrowed gray sweatpants.
I am doing an unbelievably bad job at trying not to stare at that patch of stomach.
“Are you hungry?” Jack asks, pulling my eyes back up to her mouth. In truth, that’s not much better. I can’t stop thinking about all the places that mouth has been on my body.
It’s only another ten feet from the “bedroom” to the “kitchen,” and the refrigerator is predictably empty. The cupboards are a different story, stocked full of dry goods, and we pull down any food we find to take inventory of our options. Without running water, we make do with a can of chicken noodle soup, a packet of saltines, and some semi-stale Fig Newtons for dessert. “I would expect more refined palates from Cornell graduates.”
“I think they just have different priorities,” Jack says as she pulls down a brown bottle from a high cupboard. “Do you know what this is?”
“Alcohol?” I venture.
“Expensive alcohol.” The bottle is covered in a thin layer of dust, which she rubs against the stomach of her sweatshirt. “This is a twenty-five-year-old Macallan scotch whisky. Three hundred dollars a bottle.”
I nod absentmindedly as I take out a pan from a bottom cupboard and put it on the stove top for our soup.
“We should probably drink some.”
“We absolutely should not,” I correct her, but she’s already popping the top as I peel back the lids on the can of soup.
“Why not?”
“Well, first of all, because it’s not ours. We already broke into their house and are eating their food. We do not need to also steal their expensive whisky like an Adult Swim Goldilocks.”