Kye slipped his phone into his pocket, took hold of her elbow, and led her to the building. It was all a blur in her mind. The music blaring and bodies moving. Kye took her past the dance area and found one of the other chaperones—an overweight man with gray hair who looked at Elsie with sympathetic eyes while Kye explained what had happened. “Does she need to go to the hospital?”
Kye brushed away her bangs to look at her injury. “I don’t think it will need stitches. We should put something on it, though.”
Elise hated feeling like a victim. This was not the sort of attention she’d wanted.
The man led them to the nurse’s office and got first aid supplies from one of the cupboards. The lights seemed too bright here. Everything looked too colorful and happy.
Kye was still clenching his jaw. He handed Bono’s keys and wallet to the other chaperone.
The man looked them over. “I’ll go wait for the police to get here. We’ll see if they can find the kid at his address.” He hesitated, then took note of Kye’s stern expression. “Don’t worry about getting in trouble for punching the kid. He swung at you first. It was self-defense. Neither the school board or the police will have anything to say about it.”
Kye nodded. “Thanks for your help.”
The man left and Elsie sat down on the plastic-coated bed. Kye took out a wash cloth and some antiseptic cream. He dampened the washcloth, then dabbed it at the lump on her head, wiping away the blood so he could see the wound beneath.
“It isn’t too bad,” he said. “It could have been a lot worse.”
Yeah. In a lot of ways. She shut her eyes and didn’t flinch as he continued cleaning the cut. “Thanks for pulling that guy off of me.”
“I was afraid you were going to get in the car with him. I was afraid he would drive away with you, and then who knows what would have happened.”
“I wasn’t—”
Kye didn’t let her finish. “Why did you leave the dance with him? You knew it was against the rules.”
She couldn’t answer that question. How could she tell Kye she’d gone because she’d wanted to make him jealous? It seemed so foolish, so petty. The tears she’d cried in the parking lot were back now, filling her eyes and brimming over her lashes. Her shoulders shook with the weight of silent sobs.
Kye sighed, sat down next to her, and put his arm around her. His voice grew softer. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to yell at you. You’ve been through a lot.” His arm felt warm and strong. She leaned against him without thinking about it.
“I care about you, Elsie. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
She kept her gaze on his knees, couldn’t look at his eyes. She tried to stop crying but instead made a noise that sound like a gasp for breath. He pulled her closer. She let her head sink against his chest.
He rubbed her back while she left mascara deposits on the front of his shirt. “It’s all right, Elsie,” he told her again and again, each time murmuring the words with more sympathy, more . . . what else was in those words?
She stopped crying. She didn’t move her head, though. It felt so comfortable to lean against Kye this way, to feel the hard muscles of his chest against her cheek. Finally she asked, “How did you get to me so fast?”
“I went after you as soon as I saw you leave with that idiot.”
Kye had been watching her. He’d come after her. He cared about her. And now he had his arm around her and they were alone in this room. She felt the steady beat of his heart beneath her cheek. She felt all the years of longing welling up inside of her. Everything was converging in a single point. He was warm and strong and perfect. This was supposed to happen. Why should either of them fight it?
She lifted her head, took a steadying breath, and pressed her lips to his.
For two seconds he kissed her back. His mouth moved against hers, tasting of mint and hope. It was a real kiss and she was blissful. Or at least it had seemed like a real kiss at the time. Later on, as she relived those two seconds, examined them in microscopic detail, she was never sure whether he had truly kissed her back or whether he’d just been so surprised, he hadn’t been able to react before then. Maybe his mouth had only been moving in horrified alarm.
Kye dropped his hand from her shoulder and pulled away from her as though she was fire. “What are you doing?” he demanded. He stood up, putting space between them. “Why would you—do you want to get me fired?”
She blinked at him, heart pounding painfully against her ribs. “I wouldn’t tell anyone about us. You don’t have to worry.”
He stared at her with wide-eyed disbelief. “There is no us, Elsie. This isn’t some game. This isn’t you blowing kisses to me during the prayers at church—”
“You knew about that?” she interrupted, mortified. “You saw me?”
“No, Carson saw you. He told me about it.”
Elsie put her hand over her face. Of course Carson had told Kye about her crush. He’d always known.
“The point is,” Kye went on, mercilessly logical. “I’m your teacher and you’re just a kid. So none of this ever happened. I’m going to chalk it up to you being in shock, and nothing like this will ever happen again. Agreed?”
As if he needed to drag that sort of agreement out of her. He’d just cut her heart to ribbons. Did he really think she would try for another kiss after this?
She had been so mortified she’d rushed out of the room and away from him, taking refuge in the girls’ bathroom. It was safer to cry there. She sat on the cold tile floor, shivering, and realized she had read Kye wrong all along. He’d never been the slightest bit attracted to her. He didn’t see her as any sort of equal, let alone a love interest. She was a kid to him—a foolish, silly girl who didn’t know when to stop blowing him kisses.
A while later, a police woman came in looking for her. Elsie gave a statement, numbly repeating what had happened. She was glad she had an excuse for her red eyes. Trauma over the attack. That’s all that was causing her to tremble.
Kye—no, Mr. McBride—must have given the other students on the team some details about what had happened. They were all so sympathetic and kind to her on the trip home, asking her if she was okay and threatening Bono with all sorts of creative amputations should he ever come near her again.
She wasn’t too worried about that. After Bono was charged with assault, she doubted he’d risk setting foot in Lark Field. She was glad the two other girls from the team kept near her. It saved her from having to talk to the chaperones.
Elsie didn’t come to class early on Monday or give her teacher a bottle of applesauce. Her mother had still given her one--rhubarb applesauce this time. Elsie left it in her locker. She wasn’t going to look at Kye again, let alone talk to him. During his explanation of L’Hopital’s rule, she stared at her calc book, her paper, the white board behind him, anything but his face.
He didn’t speak to her that day, didn’t mention the missing applesauce, and the week plodded by on its slow countdown to graduation. By the weekend Elsie felt an impatient restlessness to be done with high school, done with the summer too. It was time to start her new life—a new her where she was officially an adult. People took you seriously when you were an adult.
On Sunday night Elsie pulled an old tanning lamp out of the garage. Her mother had bought it years ago but hadn’t used it for a long time. A healthy glow would make Elsie look better and, therefore, feel better. She took the lamp to her room, twisted her hair in a ponytail, then put on her bikini. She lay on her floor underneath the lamp and pretended she was sunning herself on a yacht. A yacht owned by the hot son of some billionaire tycoon.
After ten minutes, Elsie wondered if the sunlamp was actually doing anything. Wasn’t it supposed to put out some heat? It felt like a normal lamp; the same type she had on her desk.
Then she vaguely remembered that Lucas, one of her brothers, had used the sunlamp for a science project once—something to do with how different types of light affected plant growth. Fo
r all she knew, the lamp had a regular bulb in it right now.
While she examined it, her mother called from the foot of the stairs. “Elsie, dinner!”
She didn’t want dinner. She wanted to spend the remaining days of school with a beautiful glowing tan.
Carson was coming home today, taking a break from his sales job in Billings to visit and see her graduate. Her mother had been making a special dinner for him, so he must have arrived. Well, maybe he could tell her what sort of bulb this was. Elsie tied her bikini straps back up, unplugged the lamp, and went downstairs to talk to him.
She was looking at the lamp, and not at anything else, as she rounded the corner and walked into the kitchen. “I can’t get the sunlamp to work,” she said, knowing Carson would be somewhere near the food. “Is this the right kind of bulb?”
Elsie’s first clue that something horrible was happening was her mother’s inward gasp. “Elsie, for heaven’s sake! Get some clothes on!”
Elsie’s gaze shot up. Kye McBride was standing three feet away from her. He stared at her, taking in her bikini and everything it didn’t cover. Carson and her father paused in their efforts of putting food on the table to look at her as well.
The lamp slipped from Elsie’s hands, which was too bad, as it had provided a partial shield. The cracking sound of glass told her the bulb had broken, perhaps the entire lamp had too. She didn’t check. “What are you doing here?” she asked Kye, her voice high-pitched.
She regretted the question as soon as the words left her mouth. Mature women shouldn’t get flustered when they walked into their kitchens in swimwear and found their crushes—or ex-crushes—standing around. She should have been able to laugh and brush it off, to come up with some clever retort. Besides it was a stupid question. Kye was obviously visiting her brother, and the way she’d asked the question sounded like an accusation.
Kye didn’t answer. Her mother did, while making shooing motions with her hand. “He didn’t come to check your homework. He’s having dinner with us. Go get dressed.”
Before her mother was even done speaking, Elsie was out of the room and running up the stairs.
Great. Why hadn’t her mother mentioned Kye was coming for dinner? Elsie knew the answer, and it was another piece of bitterness to add to her collection. Her mother hadn’t told her because Kye was Carson’s friend, not hers. Her mother hadn’t considered it would matter to Elsie. After all, she was nothing to him . . . just another replaceable, forgettable student.
Elsie reached her room, slammed her bedroom door, and flung open her dresser drawer to find clothes. She was tired of being the youngest and always overlooked and eighteen. She shimmied into her jeans, then flipped through her closet for a shirt. She needed something nice, something that made her feel confident and beautiful. Which was hard to do at this point. Even the best of shirts couldn’t work miracles.
Did Kye think she had known he was coming over? Did he think she’d come down wearing a bikini as a way to . . . to tempt him? The idea made her feel sick. It was what some pitiable starstruck Lolita would do. And Elsie wasn’t like that.
She changed into a light blue T-shirt, took her hair out of her ponytail, and checked her makeup. She reapplied powder, but that was mostly because she was stalling, looking for reasons not to go downstairs again.
Finally she couldn’t put it off any longer. She made the slow walk of shame back to the kitchen. The lamp had been cleaned up. No sight of it remained. The family was already seated at the table, eating and talking. “Did you like the rhubarb applesauce I sent last Monday?” Mrs. Clark asked Kye. “Elsie thinks it’s too tart, but I like a little zing.”
The bottle still sat in Elsie’s locker. How was it that the one time she had skipped out on delivering applesauce, her mother asked Kye about it? Could Elsie believably profess forgetfulness?
Kye raised his gaze to hers. For one second something was in that gaze, though she couldn’t tell what. “It was great,” he said. “I like a little zing. I’m surprised Elsie doesn’t.”
Yeah, well, Elsie had been full of surprises lately.
Elsie sat down in her chair, knowing she was blushing.
“So,” Carson said, shoveling some pot roast into his mouth. “I figured out why your lamp doesn’t work. Turns out, it’s in about ten different pieces.”
“That would explain it.” Elsie reached for a roll. It was about all she had an appetite for.
Carson speared a potato chunk on his fork. “Hey, when did Lark Field High implement flash-your-teacher-day? When I went to school all we got was crazy hair day.”
Kye spread butter on a roll, unfazed. “It’s part of the new math curriculum.”
Carson bit into his potato. “See, I knew there was a reason the old math sucked.”
They were trying to tease away her embarrassment, but it didn’t help. She wanted to slide under the table. Could this dinner possibly be more uncomfortable?
As it turned out . . . yes, it could.
They weren’t even halfway through the meal when Mrs. Clark thanked Kye—again—for protecting Elsie during the Mathematics Decathlon. Carson ask about what had happened, which meant Elsie had to sit there at the table and relive the whole thing again: how she’d broken the rules and gone outside with a hoodlum, how Kye had rescued her, how he’d called the police so she could file a report. Kye left out the part about the kiss, but it was there anyway. It was there in the way Elsie’s heart beat faster every time she was forced to look at Kye. It was there in the sympathetic way he kept gazing at her, slightly amused at times, as though he already thought their kiss was something she would look back at and laugh about someday.
Not likely.
Carson gave Elsie another lecture on safety—she never got tired of those after her brush with danger—and then turned to Kye. “Thanks for saving my kid sister’s neck.”
“I’m glad I could be there for Elsie . . . for all of it.” Kye’s lips quirked up into an almost smile as he said the last part. It was so subtle Carson probably didn’t notice, let alone wonder what it meant. But Elsie couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Did he mean he was glad he was there for the kiss even though he’d rebuffed her? No, that wasn’t it. She was still reading things into his actions, although now the book was one penned with rejection. Kye meant he was glad he could set her straight. He’d known about her crush all along but had never had an opportunity to properly deflate it. Now he had.
Elsie hadn’t expected to have any time alone with Kye. As he was leaving, though, Mrs. Clark instructed Elsie to get a box of the rhubarb applesauce and give it to Kye.
“You don’t have to do that,” Kye told Mrs. Clark. “If you keep giving it to me, you won’t have any left for yourself.”
Mrs. Clark waved away his protest. “We still have plenty, and Elsie won’t help me eat the jars with the rhubarb—no appreciation of zing.”
Kye nodded, acquiescing, and Elsie was sent to get applesauce from the basement pantry. While she pulled a box from the shelf, she heard someone coming slowly down the stairs. Kye.
She tramped over to him and shoved the box into his outstretched arms. “Here’s your zing. I hope you like it.”
“Elsie . . .”
“By the way, I didn’t know you were coming to dinner tonight.”
He shifted the box so he could hold it with one arm. “Yeah, that was pretty obvious by the way you threw your lamp at me.”
“I didn’t throw it at you. I dropped it in shock.”
Kye held one hand up as though she was being overly touchy—as though he had every right to hang out at her house, and it shouldn’t upset her to run into him when she was barely dressed. “I’m just kidding,” he said. “I didn’t really think you tried to club me with a random appliance.”
She was getting sick of his amused tone. She glanced at the stairs to make sure they were still alone, then lowered her voice. “How could you come to dinner at my house?”
He lowered his
voice too. “How could I not? Your mother kept asking me for a day that worked with my schedule.”
Elsie let out a huff of exasperation. He was right. Her mother had most likely hounded Kye into coming. Applesauce wasn’t enough of a thank you for the man who had saved Elsie from a hoodlum. Pot roast was required for that task.
Kye leaned closer to Elsie, so close she caught the scent of his aftershave. “Look, when you’re older, we’ll talk about all of this.”
He meant when she was mature enough to realize how stupid she’d been to throw herself at a teacher. It wasn’t a conversation she ever planned on having. “Have a nice night, Mr. McBride,” she said and walked around him. She pounded up the stairs without waiting for a response. All the way to her room it bothered her that she hadn’t been able to come up with a better parting line.
Chapter 4
After the graduation ceremony, while Elsie’s parents snapped pictures of her holding her diploma, Kye emerged from a group of black-cloaked faculty. He strolled up to her, waited for her parents to finish with their photo shoot, and then shook her hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “I know you’ll go far.”
“I plan to,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I’m going as far away from Lark Field as I can get.”
He looked at her questioningly, as though he wasn’t sure if she meant it.
She pulled her hand away from his. She meant it. But just so that her parents wouldn’t think she was being rude, she smiled the entire time she said it. “Thanks for being my teacher. I learned a lot from you.” She had learned she wasn’t pretty enough or charming enough to tempt Kye into kissing her. She had learned that age mattered much more than personality.
“Did you?” he asked, his expression unchanged. “Good. I hope my lessons stick.”
And then he was gone, leaving her with only frustration and a vague underlying humiliation rattling around in her chest.