Shuffle, Repeat(67)

Instead, I lean forward just a little. My knees press into his.

Oliver smiles.

I smile back.

“We don’t have a lime.” It’s a last feeble effort at self-protection, at preventing what I know is about to happen. What I want to happen.

“Remember when we were in my basement?” Oliver asks me. “When we pretended we were in the car?”

“Yes.” It comes out in a whisper.

He cocks his head, just a little, and I realize that even though I haven’t made a conscious decision to do it, I’m tilting my head in the opposite direction. I’m lining myself up for him.

“Where should I put the salt?” His gaze dances down my face, skims over my torso.

I raise my hand, because that’s what I did with Shaun, but then it’s moving of its own accord and my index finger is pointing to a spot on my collarbone.

“Good choice,” Oliver says, not in his usual joking manner. He slides his own finger over the place where I touched. “Lime.” He lifts the imaginary slice, lightly touching the corners of my mouth when he places it there. I part my lips to accept what doesn’t exist. Then Oliver shakes his hand over that spot at the base of my neck. “Salt.”

He moves even closer and now he’s looking straight into my eyes.

“Yes,” I say again, answering what he hasn’t asked out loud. He dips his head. I feel the tip of his tongue touch my collarbone and trace an inch along it. Even though his mouth is warm, even though it’s hot outside, I shiver.

Oliver lifts his head. “Still okay?” This time I don’t have the voice to answer him, so I only nod. He tips the tequila up to his mouth, pretending to drink from the unopened bottle, then sets it back on the hood of the behemoth. He looks at my mouth. “I’m supposed to have the lime now.”

Slowly, I reach up and take the pretend lime out of my mouth and wave it at him. “It’s right here.” I mime setting it back where it was.

Oliver smiles and I lean forward. He tilts and then his mouth is against mine, warm and soft and tasting not at all like tequila and limes, but instead like mint toothpaste and cherry ChapStick. All on their own, my lips part under his. All on their own, my arms wrap around him and my hands slide up his back, feeling the ripples of his muscles beneath his shirt. It’s so different from kissing Itch, from kissing Ethan, from kissing any other boy, because this boy is Oliver, and even though he’s completely familiar, I’m discovering him with every tiny movement we make.

He leans back against the windshield once more, but this time he takes me with him, pulling my entire body on top of his, and we kiss for a thousand years or maybe only five minutes. I can’t tell, because the whole world has turned into Oliver. It confirms what I already knew, what I’ve shoved away and buried over and over again.

Oliver means everything to me.

Oliver is everything.





Warm sunlight stripes my face and I roll over in my bed. The clock on my nightstand tells me it’s morning but not so late that I have to get up. I can sleep some more, because it’s the weekend and weekends mean sleeping in.

So the first thought that goes through my head is this: More sleep, please.

The second thought jolts me upright. It brings my shoulders to my ears and my hands to my mouth. That second thought is this: Oliver kissed me.

My third thought of the morning comes almost immediately. It is abrupt and shocking and loud inside my head. It is this: OH, SHIT.

? ? ?

It’s almost noon when Oliver calls. I’m sitting alone at the kitchen counter, trying to force some cheese and crackers past the knot in my chest, when my phone shivers. I see his name on the tiny screen, and I don’t even hesitate before touching the button to silence it, silence him.

I can’t talk to him.

Not yet.

What I can bring myself to do is listen to his voice mail.

“Hey, June. It’s Oliver. Flagg.” He lets out a self-deprecating chuckle. “Which you already know, because I’m calling on your cell phone and cell phones broadcast the caller’s name, so basically everything I’ve said up until this point is completely worthless. I should hang up and start over, except that then I’d be calling twice in a row and that’s super weird and creepy, so…June Rafferty”—he takes a deep breath—“I would never dream of asking you to prom. It would be an insult to your intelligence. That is why…”

This pause is the longest of all.

“That is why I want to let you know that if a certain strong-willed, brilliant feminist intellectual just so happened to take it upon herself to invite a certain behemoth-driving jock to prom…that jock would say yes. He would say it very, very happily.”

The knuckle on my right ring finger hurts, and I realize it’s because I’m clutching the phone so tightly. I loosen my grip and listen to the end of Oliver’s message.

“So I hope she asks him. I also hope she calls him back, because Saturday was…”

A mistake, a mistake, a mistake.

“…the best.” I can hear his smile through the phone. “Call me.”

And then he’s gone. I’m alone with the knowledge that I’ve opened a door that can never be closed—one that leads to a place holding my greatest vulnerabilities, my biggest weaknesses, and everything that terrifies me the most.