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one: first
Kie hated this game. She hated the warm beer John B had taken from his dad’s office. She hated the way they were sitting on the deck in the dark so they wouldn’t get caught, and probably getting splinters in their butts. But mostly, she hated how even though she was winning, even though she still had a whole seven fingers up, she felt like she was losing, and she hadn’t even wanted to play in the first place.
JJ smiled, his teeth glinting as he held the flashlight up to his chin. “Never have I ever kissed someone. With tongue.” And then he put down a finger and took a long sip of the beer.
John B and Pope both yelled his name at the same time, but for very different reasons. Pope wanted him to play the game right—you were only supposed to say things you hadn’t actually done—while John B was mad that he was hogging the beer. Kie just kept quiet as she felt the blush creeping across her face. Each one of her fingers felt like a beacon, broadcasting that she was still a little kid with no business starting high school in the fall. She was so wrapped up in it that she didn’t notice JJ’s smile grow soft when he looked at her.
It only took another two rounds for JJ to lose and Pope to declare the whole thing was stupid, but the hollow ache of being left behind stayed in Kie’s stomach until she was too tired to feel much of anything. She stopped JJ with a hand on his shoulder as they were passing the hammock, pulled him back so they were hidden in the trees. “Have you really done all that stuff?” she asked, working extra hard to keep her voice nonchalant.
“Yeah. It’s no big deal,” he said, and his tone was just as calculated. He probably had done it—JJ wasn’t a liar, never had been—but it was a big deal.
“Would you…” Kie stopped, because how the hell was she supposed to ask this question? And especially to this boy. John B would have been a little too earnest and specific, Pope would have been awkward and scientific, but with JJ, everything was a joke. She couldn’t bear it if she got made fun of for this.
But JJ just blinked at her, his gaze steady and soft blue. He wasn’t the right boy, exactly, but he was the one in front of her. The one who stayed.
She spoke the words one on top of the other, so fast they didn’t sound like words at all: “Would you want to try it with me?”
JJ’s jaw literally dropped. His tongue was still blue from the popsicle they’d shared that afternoon. She had smacked him when he’d licked her hands where it dripped. “What?”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to. I mean, obviously. I just- I haven’t kissed anyone and we’re about to be in high school.” Kie said, and then trailed off when she saw the incredulous expression on JJ’s face.
“You don’t have to kiss someone to be in high school,” he said. “If that was a rule, Pope would be stuck in eighth grade forever.”
Anger spiked in Kie’s chest, and embarrassment. She wanted to reach out and shove JJ, but the whole point of this was that she would stop feeling like such a child, and that seemed like it would do the exact opposite. “I should have known you were the worst person to ask.”
Something shuttered in JJ’s expression, all the amazement replaced by something more bitter. His eyes narrowed, and he said, “go ask someone else, then.”
“I thought you’d be excited,” said Kie. Something about the hurt in JJ’s words had softened her own. She toyed with the cuff of her sweatshirt, admitting, “I know you think I’m pretty. You told John B.”
“Yeah,” JJ said, and now it was his turn to blush. “Doesn’t mean I want to be your last resort.”
“You wouldn’t be,” said Kie. “You aren’t. I just- it’s my first kiss. You’re my friend, you know? I trust you.”
They were the most important three words she could have said. She knew it, and JJ knew it, given the way he tucked his smile into the collar of his T-shirt. “Okay.”
“Okay what?”
“Okay, I’ll do it,” he said, and then his smiling was teasing and familiar. “But I’m not using tongue.”
Kie made a face. “Gross, no, that is not what I was asking.”
His expression made it clear he didn’t believe her. “I’ll still beat you in never have I ever.”
“Actually, I was winning,” Kie said, unsure if the weird feeling in her chest was annoyance or excitement. Both, probably. “The point of the game is to keep your fingers up as long as possible and I was-“
“Kie.”
“Yeah?”
When she looked at him, she noticed he’d stepped a lot closer. “You kind of have to stop talking for this.”
“Oh.”
It was very quick. Her mouth was closed but his was open, a little. He smelled like the marsh. Not in a bad way, just in a JJ way. Before she could try and figure out what she was supposed to do next, he’d pulled back and stuck his hands in his pockets, his shoulders rounded forward self-consciously. Kie only realized he’d put his hands around her waist when she felt them leave.
“Thanks,” she said, and JJ said you’re welcome but not really, because he was kind of out of breath. “Can we not… I mean…”
“I won’t tell if you don’t,” he said.
Instead of thanking him again, Kie reached out and punched him on the shoulder. It wasn’t hard but he yelped anyways, and relaxed, which was what she’d wanted. As they walked back towards the house, Kie said, “do you think next time we could convince John B to steal a beer from the fridge? What we had tonight was like drinking pee,” and JJ laughed, and everything was normal again.
He was the wrong boy, but she trusted him, and that was enough.
two: party
In the time between their first kiss and their second, John B got a lot better at finding alcohol. Kie’s Kook year had come and gone and she’d been back at school with the Pogues for a few months when someone’s older sister decided to have a house party, and somehow they’d wrangled an invite.
Winter in the Outer Banks always paled in comparison to the summer. There were no tourists to break up the monotony, just classes and parents with less money because all the summer work dried up. When they did have something to celebrate, like Krista Carter’s parents being out of town, they celebrated hard.
That was probably why, when someone suggested spin the bottle, Kie shrugged and said “why not?”
They all sat cross-legged on the back porch. It wasn’t cold but there was a breeze that made Kie shiver a little. John B threw his sweatshirt at her and she rolled her eyes but pulled it on, ignoring the glares from the two girls around the circle who’d joined the game because they thought he was cute. Someone had put Krista’s science folder underneath the bottle because the old rotted wood might cause there to be too much gravity towards one person. Pope wasn’t there, or else Kie would have assumed it was him.
Kie sipped absently at her drink for the first few rounds, but when JJ called out “my turn!” she felt her focus shift back to the game. She’d kissed a few rich assholes and some tourists since their peck behind the Chateau, but she also knew they’d done a good job of keeping it a secret and wished fervently for the bottle to land on absolutely anyone else.
She should have known she never got what she wanted.
Someone whistled, and it sounded to Kie like she was underwater. JJ looked at her and shrugged, the expression on his face carefully neutral. Kie knew she was being given an out. She could kiss him on the cheek, or pretend to barf and let him spin again. The problem was that she’d known the rules when she’d decided to play, and Kiara Carrera was not a quitter.
When she stood up, John B almost choked on his drink. “Seriously?”
Kie shrugged, mirroring what JJ had done. The same rueful look, like, what are you gonna do? “He won’t be the worst guy I’ve ever kissed.”
A laugh bubbled out of JJ’s throat. “Please tell me it was one of those Kooks,” he said, but Kie didn’t answer because he knew better than anyone that she didn’t kiss and tell.
This time, she was the one who stepped into his space. His eyes were fixed on hers, except when she saw them dart down to her lips. A strange sort of pride surged in her stomach, which she kept in check by saying, “you know the rules. Three seconds, hands where I can see them, don’t fall in love with me.”
Kie had limited experience and only three seconds to figure it out, but she thought it was a good kiss. It didn’t feel like he was trying to devour her, which was more than she could say for plenty of other guys. She knew enough now to kiss him back, push against him a little, and she thought he liked it, too. But she couldn’t forget that it was in front of all those people, especially not when John B was counting out the seconds with mississippis and everything.
When he got to three she pulled back and wiped the back of her hand across her mouth. JJ frowned and said, “oh, don’t be like that. I have it on good authority I know what I’m doing.”
She just reached out and wiped his mouth for him, too, scrubbing with her sweatshirt sleeve until he wrinkled his nose and retreated back to his spot in the circle. The bottle didn’t land on either of them again, mostly because everyone got bored pretty quickly and went back inside to dance. Kie lingered on the deck for a moment longer, contemplating, before following everyone inside.
He was the wrong boy, but there hadn’t been a right one, not really. She was glad that if it had to be anyone, it was him.
three: practice
That spring, Kie got her first boyfriend. His name was Chance, and he was a year older than she was. The best thing about him was that he had a car, and the worst thing about him was that when he broke up with her he said she was a bad kisser. What made it especially bad was that she couldn’t fact check him. Everyone else she’d kissed had been a one time thing, usually rushed, in time snatched from a party or bonfire.
It was clear that when Chance had said that to her, that she was a bad kisser, he hadn’t expected her reaction. Maybe the other girls had cried or asked why he would say that. Those were perfectly valid reactions. Kie just found herself filled with a blinding scarlet rage. She knew that if she had to spend one more second in the car with him, she’d explode. So she did the reasonable thing and threw herself out the door. She maintained that it was reasonable even while her mom yelled at her the whole way to the hospital—25 miles an hour was nothing to a broken heart.
Not that her heart was broken. It wasn’t, not really. It was mostly her ego, and her wrist from where she put her arm down to break her fall. All this is mostly just important to explain why, when summer came and she got her cast off, she decided to take pretty drastic measures to get over it.
She marched down to the marina, waited until JJ was on break, and dragged him towards her dad’s boat. “What are you doing?” he spluttered, but she didn’t respond until they were out of sight.
“I’m going to tell you something,” she said, looking very serious, “and I need you to listen and not laugh. And then I need you to do me a favor.”
He was already half smiling when he said “okay,” which drove Kie crazy. As he’d gotten older, it became clear that he’d never grow out of his habit of being just on the edge of a laugh at all times. Sometimes it was great, and sometimes, like now, it made her want to scream.
She managed to keep it together, though, to say, “Chance said I was a bad kisser.” He opened his mouth to say something, expression outraged, but Kie beat him to it: “Look, I know, but if anyone’s going to fucking kill him it’s gonna be me, all right? I just wanted to um… practice. With you.”
JJ’s eyebrows disappeared under the brim of his baseball hat. “You want to do what?”
She was looking anywhere but at him. “Kissing. Cause then if I’m bad I’ll know and you can help me, and if I’m not I can tell Chance to fuck off. Which I’ll probably do anyways, but I’ll feel better when I do it.”
“So… you want to make out with me,” he said, and it wasn’t a question.
“No!” Kie said, but. Well. “Yes. But only because we’ve already done it before. And, uh, I hear you’re good at it. For a guy, at least.”
JJ ducked his head, uncharacteristically shy. “I have to be back at work in like ten minutes.”
“It shouldn’t take that long,” she said, but then JJ wouldn’t look at her. He kept staring at the floor and rubbing the back of his neck, clearly stopping himself from saying something. “What?”
“You’re upset,” he said. “I don’t want to do this and have you, like, regret it or anything.”
Some of the rage simmering in Kie’s chest melted, just a little bit. “I’m not,” she said, and then she took a risk and reached out, tipping his chin up with two fingers. “I won’t.”
“You promise?” he asked, swallowing when she trailed her fingers down, grazing the side of his neck. Kie just had to nod, and then he was kissing her.
She tried to pay attention, she really did. It was important that she remembered what she was doing so she could ask him after if it was good or not. And what he was doing, too, since she wasn’t too proud to steal his moves. She got about as far as the placement of his hands—one at the base of her neck, tangled in her hair, and one squeezing her waist—before she lost all specifics.
It was different than the previous times, she could tell that much. They were alone, for starters, and they had more time than just a few seconds. But it was also that this was the first time Kie distinctly realized she wanted more. She wanted to be closer to him, somehow, even though she was as close as she could possibly get.
She didn’t realize that she was driving the kiss, pushing as he pulled, until he pulled back and said, voice breathy, “shit, Kie.”
“Good shit or bad shit?” she asked, and found that she was breathless too.
JJ dropped his head down against her shoulder and turned it into her neck. Then he kissed her twice, softly, and she shivered. “Definitely good.”
“So I don’t need any more practice?”
It was just a question, but at the word practice the bubble they were standing in popped and JJ stepped back like he couldn’t get away form her fast enough. “Nope,” he said, and opted the p, back to laughter again in a heartbeat. “Enjoy telling Chance to fuck off. And Kie?”
“Yeah?” she asked, part of her still holding out hope that this kiss wouldn’t go on the list of ones they pretended had never happened in the first place.
JJ smiled, but there wasn’t much humor behind it. “Try to pick a better one next time.”
He was the wrong boy because he convinced her he was, and because she let herself be convinced. Good thing there was time.
four: diversion
The next year was, to put it mildly, fucked. John B was in and out of foster care on the mainland. Kie’s parents started threatening boarding school, and JJ’s dad got worse and worse. It was also relentlessly messy: JJ had convinced John B Kie was into him, Pope confessed his love to her, and for some reason Rafe Cameron couldn’t stop showing up and insulting her like he was pulling her pigtails on the playground even though she’d stopped talking to his sister.
Kie was tired of literally everything.
She was lucky that her friends never took that as an excuse. Example: it was the night of their prom, and they were staging a jailbreak to get John B onto the ferry, and then the dance floor.
It had been a few weeks since his newest placement and a few weeks since they’d seen him. He’d said on the phone that the couple he was with knew what this was—for him, a place to crash until he turned 18, for them, some money from the government and the moral high ground—but that they were sticklers for the rules. He was on pretty thin ice after all the times he’d bolted last summer, so he’d mostly been playing it safe. But this was prom. Even Pope agreed they needed an escape plan.
First, they tried the safe route. Kie showed up in her dress, makeup done and holding a boutonniere. “I’m here for John B?” she said, and tried to sound like a very harmless and very nice girl when she generally was neither. “Did he show his tie? He said he got it to match my dress.”
Kie thought they’d done it the easy way when the old woman’s expression softened, but then she said, “I’m sorry, dear, but John isn’t permitted to be out past nine.”
“Oh,” Kie said, knowing JJ and Pope were waiting in the bushes for a moment just like this one. She just had to play her part. So she screwed up her eyes and, just like she’d practiced, Kie started to wail. “It’s just- he promised- I love him and this is my prom!”
This poor woman, Kie thought as she allowed herself to be comforted. Every minute or two she would dissolve into a fresh round of sobs since Pope had yet to give the all clear. All the woman could do was shush her and tell her there were probably better boys out there. Like Kie didn’t already know. Like she wasn’t going to prom with Sasha, who was really hot and better than every boy because she wasn’t one.
Finally, Kie’s phone chimes in her purse. One text, then another, and that was the all clear. She stood up, wiped her eyes, and said, “you know what? You’re probably right. I think I’ll break up with him tomorrow.” And then she ran off.
Their plan fell apart pretty quickly after that. John B’s foster parents reported him missing and because the cops were on them they missed the last ferry. They had some spectacular near-captures, including one where Pope used JJ as a human rope to climb onto a fire escape. They’d had to sit on the cold metal for five minutes while they laughed so hard they cried.
At midnight, they ended up at a playground, draped on top of the plastic structure. “I missed the hell out of you guys,” John B said. He grabbed JJ’s ankle, which was the nearest part of any of them he could reach. “One more year and all this will be over.”
“Nah,” said Pope, “that’s when everything’s just going to be starting.”
They all sat with that for a second, contemplating, and then JJ blew a raspberry. “Respectfully, Pope, that’s dumb.”
“Shut up,” Pope said, but since when had that ever worked on JJ?
“We have to live for right now. We have no clue about tomorrow, and besides, tonight is fucking prom. Go dance! We only get this once.”
Kie watched as Pope considered bringing up senior prom, but decided against it in favor of dragging John B down to the woodchips and twirling him around. “They’re cute,” she said.
“Tragically straight,” JJ responded, and gave her a private smile. It was new, this smile, and only for her. She found that she really liked it. “I’m sorry we’re missing real prom.”
“It’s okay. This is better,” Kie said, and she meant it.
“What about Sasha?” he asked.
Kie realized she hadn’t thought about Sasha in hours. “What about your date?”
JJ kicked at her, and she noticed he was still wearing his workboots. Even with his stupid blazer and tie. “You don’t know her name, do you?” he teased.
“Well, there are just so many of them,” she said, and he kicked at her a little harder until she was sliding down to join the dance. They hopped and twirled and dipped, all of them in fancy clothes except for John B, who was wearing cargo shorts and a button-down with flamingoes on it. They had five, maybe ten minutes of pure fun before the playground was bathed in red and blue lights.
“Hide,” JJ hissed, and shoved John B and Pope into the tube part of a plastic tunnel slide. “And stop complaining, they’ll hear you.”
It was dark, except for the flashing lights, but the car was still rounding the corner and Kie didn’t think whoever was in it had seen them yet. Her heart was thudding in her chest so loud she was surprised she could hear JJ when he spoke to her, told her they needed a diversion. She startled even herself when she said, “kiss me.”
“What?”
“Kiss me,” Kie said, grabbing at the lapels of his jacket. “I saw on TV that it makes people uncomfortable, and since they don’t want to look at it they go away.”
A car door opened and then closed. JJ’s eyes widened for a split second before he said “shit, yeah,” and then they were making out against a tree.
This kiss was aggressive from the very start, but whether it was from the need for a diversion or the adrenaline pumping in their veins Kie wasn’t sure. Her hands were in his hair, on his jaw, clutching his shoulders, everywhere. And he was the same but with his mouth, managing to kiss down her neck and back up before she’d even registered he’d moved. She hiked her leg around his—for the authenticity, she told herself—and he gasped and pushed her more firmly against the tree.
They startled apart at the sound of a cough. The guilty expressions on their faces were not manufactured. JJ took a subtle step in front of Kie, obscuring her from the beam of the flashlight that was pointed at them. “Do you kids have somewhere to be?” the officer asked.
JJ laughed. “Here, actually. You kind of interrupted something.”
The cop took stock of their outfits. “Shouldn’t you two be in a gymnasium somewhere?”
“Well,” Kie said from over JJ’s shoulder, slipping back into character, “I was supposed to go with my boyfriend. His name’s John B, do you know him? Well then his foster mom convinced me I could do better, so I called his best friend. We never even made it to prom,” she finished, pouting. “We missed the ferry.”
JJ’s eyes darted to the side, and Kie knew they were thinking the same thing: John B and Pope were likely seconds from making a noise and blowing everything.
“You know what?” Kie said, stepping out from behind JJ. “I think I’m done with boys for the night. Do you think you could give me a ride to the docks? I’ll call my parents, they have a boat.”
The boys met Kie there, and if they’d been calling the night great before, now they were calling it legendary. Mythological. John B and Pope didn’t ask her what they’d done as a diversion, and Kie didn’t tell them. She was just happy her boys were happy, and laughing like normal. No residual awkwardness, not even from JJ. Although she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised, given how many times they’d kissed at this point.
He just smiled at her, and twirled her into John B’s arms so she would throw her head back to the stars and laugh.
He was the wrong boy, because all four of them were better like this, and that would never change. And besides, she was almost sure she didn’t want it to.
five: proof
Years went by. There were boyfriends, and girlfriends, but no one even came close to cracking the top spot in Kie’s heart. That was reserved for the Pogues.
They’d scattered, but not too far. John B had moved back to the Chateau the second he turned eighteen. He and JJ worked at the marina and supplemented with plenty of other odd jobs, since the pay at the marina had always been shit. Pope was at Chapel Hill, and Kie had appeased her parents by going to school in Wilmington, although she was taking classes at random and had no idea what to do with her life.
On her 20th birthday, she came home to find out that everyone had mostly settled. Pope loved school, but that wasn’t a shock to anyone. John B had worked his way up in the marina’s hierarchy and was also inexplicably dating Sarah Cameron long distance while she studied something typical like marketing or communications. Even JJ was picking up extra shifts at this old garage, said he was being taught the ropes so he could take over for the owner when he retired.
Kie felt untethered. When she closed her eyes, she imagined herself as a kite with a cut string, fluttering all over the place. A gigantic injured bird with wooden bones and no way to flap her wings. She was tipsy, or else she wouldn’t have come up with something so dramatic, but still. It was how she felt.
Luckily, the Boneyard hadn’t changed. The flow of the party was familiar and comforting. She could still push through the tourons to get to the keg, was still passed a joint from what felt like nowhere and took a hit, even though the weed was shit and would probably do nothing. She passed of group of kids and wondered if she’d ever looked so young. Kie had, she knew, and still she thought she’d known everything there was to know.
When she finally found her friends they were in the middle of an argument with Krista Carter of all people. “Girls and guys cannot be just friends,” she was saying.
“Okay, When Harry Met Sally,” John B said, because he loved Nora Ephron movies and was annoying about it. “That’s literally not true.”
Krista tossed her hair over one shoulder. She was flirting with him, which would have been futile even if he hadn’t already been taken. “You’re proving my point! They don’t stay friends in that movie. They can’t. It’s impossible.”
“No, listen, where is- oh, Kie, you’re here! All three of us have been friends since middle school and none of us are romantically involved.” John B gestured at the Pogues. They were all projecting various levels of boredom.
“Okay, but have you tried?” Krista addressed this question at Kie, who rolled her eyes. “Have you even-“
“I’ve kissed all three of them. It went nowhere. Now go away, Krista.”
Pope’s eyes widened, looking between JJ and Kie as Krista huffed and walked back towards the bonfire. “You and JJ-?”
“Spin the bottle at a party,” John B explained. “I had to watch. It was harrowing. I hope you let him down as gently as you let down me and Pope,” he finished, directing the last part at Kie.
She glanced toward JJ and he read her expression easily, tilted his head as if to say tell them if you want. She wasn’t sure why, but she did want to. It had been so many years, anyway, and it was probably time they were honest. “JJ and I have actually kissed a bunch of times. Four, I think. Right?”
JJ made a big show of counting on his fingers. “Yeah. Four’s right.”
“What the fuck?” Pope said, which was more than John B could say at least. “Four is a lot of times.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Kie said, and she couldn’t keep the defensiveness out of her voice, nor could she decipher JJ’s expression as she said it. “I meant what I said, earlier. It didn’t go anywhere.”
She refused to confront the fact that she hadn’t said it meant nothing. Everyone’s first kiss meant something, and she didn’t like to lie to her friends. That was all it was.
“She kept coming to me and saying”—he pitched his voice an octave higher—“everyone says you’re such a good kisser, JJ, please.”
Kie swatted at him as he puckered his lips at her. “Shut the fuck up. You’re such a liar.”
And that was all the conversation was, until much later, when the sky was starting to lighten again and everyone was almost sober, headaches hiding in the nooks and crannies of their skills. Kie was sitting on her butt in the sand, leaning back against one of the old, gnarled driftwood logs that gave the Boneyard its name. She closed her eyes for a second, just to rest, and when she opened them JJ was sitting next to her. He laughed when she jumped, and passed her a cup of water.
“I forgot how shitty these parties get at the end,” Kie said between sips.
“Yeah, well. It’s our beach, so we’re the ones who stick around to clean it up.” JJ shifted a little, nervous for some reason, but Kie was too busy dealing with the happiness that bloomed in her chest when he said our beach. It had been so long since she felt like she belonged somewhere. “Hey, Kie?”
She hummed a response, tucking her hair behind her ears so she could look at him.
“I really missed you.”
This was new territory, Kie thought wildly, and then as she looked at JJ’s eyes, his soft blue gaze, a memory flickered in the back on her mind. It wasn’t new. It was just JJ, and what he looked like when he was focused on only her. On the enormity of their relationship.
Their friendship. She forced the word into the front of her brain. Her smile felt artificial, the way she swatted his shoulder forced. She wasn’t even sure it was her own voice that said, “since when are you so sappy?”
There were so many risks to thinking of him differently. There were the Pogues, and how it would change the group dynamics. There was her tenuous relationship with her parents, which college was barely holding together. There was the fact that she’d just said all the times they kissed were no big deal. But that wasn’t it, not really. All those reasons were bullshit. The real thing, the only thing, was that they’d be risking everything.
Because JJ was everything, wasn’t he? Every time he’d made her laugh, every time he’d annoyed her so much she literally screamed. When they were sixteen she’d convinced him to move out of his dad’s house and held him when he cried. When they were seventeen he’d yelled at her parents when they tried to send her to a wilderness camp, really yelled, so hard his hand shook, and she woke up in her bed the next morning with a promise that she could stay in Kildare. She Facetimed him any time she had more than four drinks at a college party just to see his smile, the way it pulled up higher on one side of his face like he had a secret just for her. The way he said “hey, Kie,” was the sweetest sound in the world.
She couldn’t risk it. But God, she wanted to.
So she did the next best thing: “I think I need you to kiss me.”
They’d done this so many times before that when he looked at her slack-jawed and said “what?” she had to suppress the urge to laugh.
“I’ve been thinking about earlier, and Pope might be right. Four times is a lot. What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that there’s history, and you’re too important to me to let it get in the way. I think… I think I need closure? Like, proof you’re not into me, and the other way around.”
“Proof I’m not…” JJ repeated. He was staring at where his hands rested in his lap, palms up like he was going to grab at something and not let it go. But then his hands clenched into fists and he said, “fine.”
There was a joke to be made, something about how that was a lackluster response, but Kie didn’t make it. Instead she twisted so she was facing him, shifted her weight up onto her knees so her face was level with his. One of his hands came up to her face and she realized she was holding her breath. His thumb ghosted across her bottom lip and then drifted down, the backs of his fingers skimming her neck, an echo of a previous kiss. Even though this one wasn’t on a boat Kie still felt like the ground was shifting beneath her and she wanted to move with it, let it bring her closer to him.
It wasn’t clear to Kie who closed the gap, but it also didn’t matter. The second JJ’s lips touched hers she realized she was screwed. She was proving exactly the opposite of what she’d set out to prove. Their would never be closure, not really, because everything about the way JJ kissed was open: how he pressed into her like he wanted to be as close as she did, how he eased her mouth open gently with his tongue, how he wrapped the hair at the nape of her neck in his fingers and pulled so she tipped her head back.
Kie wanted, needed to be closer so she slid into his lap, swallowing the groan he let out when she settled against him. Her cutoffs slid up her thighs, helped along by the way JJ smoothed his hands up her legs and toyed with the frayed edges of her shorts. She felt lost—no, she felt found—but that wasn’t it, either. She kissed across JJ’s neck, biting down gently when she found the soft place where his jaw began and realized that what she was feeling was safe.
He gasped, and it was like the sudden intake of air cleared his head because he pulled back, eyes closed. “Hang on,” he said, but his voice was strangled so he breathed in and spoke again, “Kie, just- please.”
She’d moved away the moment he first spoke, which meant she got to watch his brain catch up with the rest of him. He opened his eyes and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed at the sight of her. “What is it?” she asked.
“We can’t do this,” he said, and Kie felt fear like ice settle over her chest.
She didn’t respond, couldn’t, instead slid off his lap and back onto the sand.
JJ scrubbed a hand through his hair. “Fuck, Kie, you can’t- that was too much.”
Kie found her voice in time to say, “not bad too much, right?” but JJ barely heard her.
“Nothing is going to prove that I don’t”—he stood up, scrubbed at his face, and Kie scrambled up alongside him—“I’ve been in love with you since the first one. You said you trusted me and that was it. I tried to get over you, I swear, but it’s like- damn it,” he said, kicking a plume of sand in front of him when words failed.
“It’s okay,” Kie said, reaching for him.
He pulled away. “It’s not. You can’t keep asking for shit like that, okay? It’s too…”
Before Kie could respond or even really begin to process what she was hearing, John B was trotting up from the parking lot, calling out, “all good here?”
No. Never again.
But Kie gritted out a smile and said, “yeah. Just ready to go home.”
The look JJ shot her was a thousand things: confusion, hurt, resignation. A furrow deepened between his eyebrows as it all collapsed into one on his face. His bottom jaw jutted out, making him look impossibly young, and then it was smoothed over and he was fine. “Let’s go.”
She stayed five steps behind him on the way to the Twinkie, watching. One for each kiss. His shoulders were tight, even as he joked around with Pope. It was like her gaze was hurting him, making him curl in on himself.
Something had broken, with this kiss. Hope was too small an emotion to describe how much she wanted it glued back together.
He was the wrong boy. Because he was her best friend, and that was more important. Right?
one: two
She showed up at the Chateau the next afternoon. If he was anyone else, Kie would have spent an hour trying to decide what to wear, and another one doing her hair and putting on makeup she’d rub off before leaving the house. But this was JJ, who’d seen her in every moment. The most important, the most insignificant. He’d seen her cry over sea turtle habitats, like, seven times. She pulled on an old T-shirt and the cleanest pair of shorts she could find, and then she drove over.
“Hey,” JJ said when he opened the door. They both were a little surprised she’d knocked; no one had knocked at the Chateau for years.
There was something about the way JJ hovered in the doorway, blocking the inside, that made a lump rise up in Kie’s throat. She wouldn’t cry. She would take a deep breath, and say what she needed to say, which was “I’m sorry.”
“What?”
“Do you ever hear me the first time?” Kie muttered, and she thought she saw the flash of a smile in JJ’s eyes before they settled back into an unfamiliar coldness. “I’m sorry.”
He took his hand off the door, which was a start. “Okay.”
“Okay, what?” There was the deja vu again, just like the night before, so strong it barely left room for anything else.
JJ felt it too, she thought. His hands twitched at his sides, involuntary, but he kept them away from her. “Okay, let’s go outside.”
They ended up by the hammock, because of course they did. The tree, the house behind them, everything felt so much smaller. Except the two of them. They’d always been as big and as limitless as the ocean.
“I’m sorry,” Kie said again.
“Are you going to say anything else?”
She pressed her fingertips against the tree, grounding herself against the rough grain. “I just- I want you to believe it.”
“What are you sorry for?” JJ asked, and already his facade of nonchalance was cracking. “Is it because I’m right? Because you shouldn’t keep asking to kiss me when you don’t mean it? Like, when it’s not real, or you’re using me for something else? Or are you sorry because—“ he couldn’t say it.
Kie didn’t need him to, though. “The second one.”
“Wh- I didn’t say anything.”
“But you know what you meant to say.” Kie chances a smile at him, just one corner of her mouth ticking up because now she was the one with the secret just for him. “And I know you better than anyone.”
The look he gave her was desperate, and it was strange that it made her so happy. “You love me,” he said.
She nodded. “I’m sorry it took me so long to realize.”
And there was the smile, although there were tears in his eyes. They didn’t dim the joy of seeing his crooked eyeteeth, the crinkle around his eyes, which were the softest blue she’d ever seen.
“Ask me,” she said and when he tilted his head in a question she kept going, “I’m always the one to ask. You do it. Please.”
He paused for a second, then said, “this is hard. How did you do it five whole times?"
“JJ.”
“Okay.” He stepped towards her, his hands finally coming to rest on her, where they belonged. “Kiss me?”
She barely had time to say yes—although it was all breath because she, like JJ, had never realized how hard it was to be on the other side of things—before he was crashing into her like a wave on the beach.
This kiss wasn’t different than the others, because it was still the two of them. Kie was still running her hands over the hard and soft planes of him, anywhere she could reach. JJ still nuzzled into her like he would spend eternity with his lips on her skin if he could. What was different was the knowledge that, if they had their way, they’d never be kissing anyone else again.
Suddenly, Kie was smiling so hard she had to pull back. Unwilling to go very far, she rested her forehead against JJ’s and breathed in his air. “I love you,” she whispered.
JJ sucked in a breath, which made Kie laugh. Then he said “I love you too,” which made them both laugh, so hard they couldn’t stop and they had to sit down in the hammock. Of course, that tipped them onto their backs and into each other, a pile of tangled limbs, which only made them laugh harder.
Then there was a seventh kiss, and an eighth, and a ninth. At some point they lost count.
He was the right boy. It had taken all those wrong moments to get them here, right where she wanted: Best friends. More.