Say You Still Love Me(10)

“Forty-five years, this summer,” Christa confirms.

“Wow!” my mom gasps with astonishment. “He was always my favorite. I have to say hello to him before I go. Which,” she checks her diamond-encrusted wristwatch, “is really soon if I want to get to your aunt Jackie’s by dinner.”

An odd rumble and sputtering sounds behind us. We turn to watch a boxy pea-soup-green hatchback park next to my mom’s shiny black Porsche. With its multiple dents and scrapes along the passenger door, the two of them side-by-side looks almost comical. I have no idea what that car is, but it’s definitely old and not in a good, classic-car way.

The driver’s-side door opens and a tall, lean guy emerges. He lifts his arms above his head and arches his back with an exaggerated stretch before reaching down to slide his wallet into the back pocket of his baggy black jeans.

A flock of people runs toward him.

“I didn’t think Kyle was coming back.” Ashley’s emerald eyes keenly watch him.

“Yup.” Christa sighs with resignation. “Why . . . I don’t know.”

Kyle. I file that away as I watch him take turns slapping hands with the guys and hugging the girls, his cheeks lifting with a broad smile. He’s sporting a punkish hairstyle, his chestnut-brown hair short on the sides but longer on top and at the back, where a two-inch strip runs down the center. It’s been gelled to stand on end.

I struggle to make out his face from this distance—he has on dark, shield-style sunglasses—but I have that odd gut feeling that when I do finally see him up close, he’s going to be jaw-droppingly gorgeous.

“I guess they’ve relaxed the dress code since I was here last,” my mother murmurs, and I can’t tell whether she disapproves. She always has been a huge proponent of my school’s uniform guidelines, which includes modest hairstyles.

The guy—Kyle—observes my mom’s car a moment and then says something to his friends. Who showed up here in that? or something along those lines, I imagine. A few fingers point our way, and suddenly Kyle’s walking toward the registration desk, his focus on us.

Maybe on me.

The flutters in my stomach tell me that I hope it’s the latter.

Christa begins busying herself with the pens next to the activities clipboard, lining them up in a perfect row. Is she an obsessively neat person?

Or is she suddenly nervous?

At forty feet away, I note that Kyle is lean but has a muscular frame. At thirty feet, I’m able to size up his solid, angular jaw. At twenty-five feet, I decide his faux Mohawk suits the shape of his face just fine. At twenty feet, the sun flickers off his full mouth and I notice the silver ring through the left corner of his bottom lip. At ten feet, I realize he has my favorite type of nose on a guy—long and slender, not too prominent. At five feet, he slides off his sunglasses to show me irises the color of burnt sugar.

My gut was one hundred percent right.

“Oh! Look, there’s Russell!” my mom exclaims. “Come on, Piper, I want to introduce you to him before he disappears again,” she urges, hooking a slender hand through my arm.

“Uh . . . But Ashley is going to give me a tour . . .” I stall, eagerly waiting to hear Kyle speak.

“I’ll find you over there in a minute!” Ashley waves me off, her excited eyes glued to Kyle.

I guess that settles that.

With a small huff, I let Mom pull me toward the mud-brown building and the man in a black-and-white checkered cook’s uniform, peeling carrots into a bucket at the picnic table. “Get on Russell’s good side and he’ll give you a double helping of his homemade chocolate pudding whenever it’s on the menu,” she says in a low voice. “And trust me, that stuff is currency around here.”

“Just like prison.”

“Hush!” She swats playfully at my arm. “Your aunt Jackie and I never had any money to buy candy at the canteen, so we’d trade our bowls to kids for . . .” She rambles on about SweeTarts and Snickers bars; meanwhile I glance over my shoulder.

Kyle is chuckling at something Ashley’s saying as he shifts from foot to foot, a red nylon welcome bag dangling casually from his fingers.

“Piper?” my mom calls out, slowing. “What do you think?”

“Uh . . . Yeah, sure.”

“Were you even listening to me?”

I meet her gaze. “No. Sorry. What?”

Frowning, she peers back to see where my focus was, just as Kyle turns to find our eyes on him. He smirks and casts a small wave.

“Ahh . . . I see,” Mom murmurs knowingly. “So it’s going to be the boy with the Mohawk, is it?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble, my cheeks heating. “And it’s a Fauxhawk.”





Chapter 3



NOW


When I unlock and open the front door to my condo that evening, my mind is still swirling with memories.

Kyle has lingered in my thoughts all afternoon, like the constant prick of an embedded thorn—impossible to ignore. I was late for my one o’clock meeting and mentally absent for all of them, as a summer long since filed away into the past came flooding into my present. Even David, normally too self-involved to notice anyone else’s struggles, paused his relentless press to confiscate Mark for his own needs long enough to ask if I was feeling all right.