The Kiss? Whose kiss? If it was about me, was it our kiss? Our kisses were lousy, and anyway, it can’t be that personal, I told myself. He wouldn’t distribute copies of something that personal, not to people I worked with. But he was a poet—maybe he would. I couldn’t stand not knowing.
“Let me see,” I said, handing him my soda and taking the poem from him.
The Kiss
Oh, for Mount Olympus’s golden apples
to capture my sweet Atalanta,
my glorious high-breasted Atalanta,
running wild through
the sylvan landscape and
Demeter’s fields.
Be still, be still,
woman of my wildest dreams,
while I kiss your eyes, your ears,
then encircle your neck
with emeralds that dim
and shyly hide their light
next to those jewels of yours
that gaze at me so adoringly.
Strand by strand I let down your hair,
unloosing your gold in my hands,
releasing the heat that runs
in your veins.
My lioness, my Atalanta,
I conquer you at last
with a deep and sumptuous
and everlasting kiss.
—Andrew Hunterton Wilcox
I shut my eyes, and for a moment I think I swayed with the horror.
“I knew you’d like it,” he said.
My eyes flew open and I stared at him, then glanced down at the poem. What was that line about my jewel eyes gazing at him adoringly? When had that happened? I barely recognized us as the two people kissing.
I handed him the sheet of paper and took back my Coke. “Andrew, we kissed, but this isn’t anything like how I remember it.”
Apparently, he thought my confusion was a literary one. “You know who Atalanta is?” he asked.
“Yes, you explained to me once before.”
“And Demeter?”
“Someone who owns fields.”
“She is the goddess of fertility.”
“Oh. Well, that clears up all my questions. Andrew, you should not have shown other people this poem. It’s very personal.”
“As a poet, I must exploit the personal,” he said, “although I know it makes it difficult for the people who share my life.”
“Well,” I told him, “as a camp counselor, I must check my supply of macaroni and glue, although I know it makes it sticky for the people who share my life. Good-bye.”
“Excuse me?”
“I said good-bye. Fare thee well, or however they write it in poetry. Do you want your necklace back?”
“No!” he exclaimed, looking angry and bewildered. “Fare thee well? Because of one poem?” Then his confidence returned. “I caught you by surprise. We’ll talk later.”
“Trust me, you’ve said enough already.”
I turned and headed toward the PE offices.
I didn’t know what I was going to do when I got there, but I certainly wasn’t returning to the dining hall. I could just imagine the remarks, and I didn’t know what I’d do if Josh said something. I thought about hiding in the locker room, but I didn’t want to face questions and comments from Caitlin, Noelle, or even Mona.
I sat for ten minutes inside the lobby of the athletic department building, my head in my hands, glad for the silence and the chance to be alone. Then a reedy voice called from Ms. Mahler’s office, “Is everything all right?”
I sat up straight. “Uh, uh, yes.”
“I left Friday’s revised schedule with Mona at the dining hall,” Ms. Mahler said, remaining behind her office door. “They thought you would be back since you hadn’t had your lunch.”
“Thanks, I’ll get it from her later.”
There was a long silence, then some rustling, and the big M emerged. She set on the table next to me some crackers, a peanut butter jar, and a battered kitchen knife, then silently returned to her office.
“Thank you. Thank you very much,” I called in to her, and munched away.
Chapter 22
I told myself that it was NCAA Finals, University of Maryland was the underdog, and I had to walk onto the court looking like I thought I could lead my team to victory. And believe me, it would have been easier to do that than to join the others at the curb where the buses deposited our campers.
“Mona,” I said, pulling her aside, “do people think it’s about me?”
It would have been reassuring if she hadn’t known immediately what I was referring to, but she did. “Jamie, he told us it was.”
I couldn’t curse, not with a group of third graders swarming around me.
Sam and I walked our group of wild things to the field that we always used, next to Josh and Noelle’s field, not that I was looking in their direction.
Sam touched me lightly on the arm. “If you take any more deep breaths, you’re going to hyperventilate.”
“I can’t believe he gave out the stupid poem!” I hissed.
“I wish I had his guts,” Sam replied, with a glance in the direction of the adjacent field, where Noelle and Josh were playing Duck, Duck, Goose.
“That was ego, Sam, not guts.”
For the first forty minutes, Sam and I held races, athletic as well as funny ones, like hopping and three-legged, then we switched to our “skilled sport,” badminton. Birdies were popping all over the place. Our second hour that day was reading and writing a group story, and our third took us back to the art room, where the kids painted self-portraits. After putting the kids on the bus, I asked Sam to switch cleanup jobs with me. I didn’t want to run into Josh at the gym.
He agreed, and I hurried off to the lower school’s art room, where I cleaned up the spills, wiped down paint containers, and rinsed the brushes. During the course of the afternoon, Caitlin had passed along a message that everyone was gathering at the swimming pool after work. That’s all I needed, to see Josh horsing around three-quarters naked at the pool. I’d wait till everyone had changed into their suits at the locker room, then I’d grab my stuff and head home.
I watched the big black hand of the school clock inch its way over the passing minutes, then locked the art room door behind me and left. On the way out, I leaned over a water fountain—a very short one since it was in a lower school—and took a long drink. My necklace flopped against my nose and got wet. Straightening up, I caught hold of it, and turned just as Josh came through the library door.
His eyes darted to my hand and the necklace, and I immediately felt defensive.
“Why aren’t you in the gym?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you?” he shot back.
I hung on to the necklace like an electrocuted person who couldn’t let go of a live wire. “Sam and I thought it would be good to change jobs.”
“Noelle thought the same,” he said.
“Oh. Well, I guess that makes sense. See you later.”
I walked past him. There was plenty of room in the school hall, but it seemed to me as if he took it all up. Just get to the door, Jamie, I told myself.
“Some poem,” he said.
I stopped. “Excuse me?”
“Some poem,” he repeated. “Fortunately, your boyfriend gave out copies, so none of us had to take notes, as you suggested the last time. Now, Todd, Jake, and I know exactly how to kiss a well-dressed girl.”
Embarrassment merged with anger, and I spun around. “He wasn’t describing me—us—whatever!”
“Well, the necklace was the same,” Josh pointed out.
“That’s the only thing that was.”
“I’d be willing to bet otherwise.”
“How much?” I asked.
Josh blinked with surprise at the question.
“It’s pretty easy to fall into a stupid bet, isn’t it?” I said, making my little point.
“Five bucks,” he replied.
Now I blinked.
“Backing out?” he asked.
&n
bsp; I seethed. “Oh, I’d be willing to bet a lot more that that.”
“Let’s keep it at five.”
“Cheap,” I said, and he took a swift step toward me. Surprised, I backed against the wall.
“Losing your nerve?” he asked.
“My nerve for what?” My voice sounded shaky. He kept moving toward me. His face was four inches from mine.
“To win the bet. To prove that it wasn’t a description of what it’s like to kiss you.”
“Win the bet—you mean by kissing?”
“How else?”
“We could ask Andrew,” I said, which made no sense.
“Andrew’s already told us what he thinks. It’s down to he said, she said.”
I tried to see past Josh’s shoulders. I remembered how broad they were, how they felt like a protective cape the day he had pulled me back from the picket fence. And I remembered how, the longer we had played that day, the more I became aware of him, the stronger the sensations were each time we made contact. The slightest brush of his arm against mine had made me tingle. These feelings hadn’t started last night. I was just too jaded about jocks and distracted by Andrew to recognize the signs last week. The fat guy with the arrow had snuck in then.
Oh, Lord, I’m in deep, I thought. Run, girlfriend, run. But an insane voice said, If you don’t kiss him now, you’ll have lost your only chance.
“So?” I challenged Josh. “I’m ready.”
That made him hesitate.
“I thought you said you didn’t need to take notes, but already you’ve forgotten. You start with the hair.”
Josh’s eyes flicked to the elastic fastener on my high ponytail. He reached around my head with both hands, as if he were going to yank the tail straight off. But instead, he examined the silky band and tried to slip his finger under its tight elastic. He tried several times and frowned. I wanted to laugh—a few barrettes and a little braiding had made Andrew’s challenge much easier. The laughter died in my throat, however, as Josh attempted to painlessly remove the fastener, his face a picture of concentration, one hand inching the stubborn elastic down the ponytail, the other holding onto the hair above it so it wouldn’t be pulled.
He was so careful, so gentle. By the time he had gotten the troublesome thing off and had slipped it over his wrist, I couldn’t wait to feel his fingers in my hair. I was afraid he’d forgotten the next line of the poem, but he hadn’t. Ever so slowly he loosened my hair and let it tumble in his hands, his eyes avoiding mine, but gazing at my hair so intently that I found myself looking down at it rippling in his fingers. I had a crazy impulse to kiss his wrists. But that wasn’t part of the script.
He held my face in his hands, but still would not meet my eyes. He kissed me on the forehead. That wasn’t part of the script, either; how could it be, kisses on foreheads were for children, not lovers, and yet it sent a sweet buzz zizzing through me. Just having his face that close to mine made my cheeks warm.
He softly kissed one eyelid, then the other, then slowly moved his head to one side, all the while keeping his face whisper-close to mine. With his thumb, he drew back my hair and kissed my left earlobe, then he moved his head and lightly touched his lips to my right ear. More zizzing.
One hand touched my neck and he gently slid my necklace around, moving the clasp. He carefully unfastened it and held up the beads for me to take. I gazed at the thing as if I were hypnotized. He put it in my hands and curled my fingers around it, then lowered his head, and ever so gently touched his lips to my skin, kissing me on the spot where the clasp had lain against my neck. I shivered.
His hands let go of my face and hair, and I sank back against the wall, as if I had just had the most passionate, all-consuming kiss in the world. How could that be? Was it the way he kissed, or the fact that it was Josh who was kissing me? I had a bad feeling that those two things couldn’t be teased apart. I had a doomed feeling that it all came back to Josh, and no one else in the world could do it like him, not for me.
He rested his hands against the wall, his palms flat and supporting him, so that not one bit of his body touched mine, although he was just two inches away and every millimeter of my skin felt his presence like an intense heat.
Tilting his head, he let his lips brush mine once…twice…three times.
Kiss me! I wanted to scream, but I got control of myself. I swallowed hard, then I took a deep breath and said, “That’s not how Andrew and I kiss.”
“So you’re admitting the poem was a description of him kissing you.”
“I’m not admitting anything,” I replied, wanting only one thing, the kiss—or whatever it was we were doing—to continue.
His mouth touched mine and this time stayed longer. Oh, God, what sweetness there was in such a simple kiss! Where did he get this magic? And why didn’t he put his arms around me? If he didn’t soon, he was going to find me on the floor—both my knees were ready to give out.
But now his lips were returning to my eyelids and my ears.
You’ve done that part! I wanted to say, except I really didn’t want him to stop. I wanted this bet to go on forever.
He brushed his lips over one cheek, then the other, and I caught his mouth with mine, unable to stand too much more wandering. There was such purity in his kiss, tears burned in my eyes.
Then I felt his arms around me, his hands on my back. I realized I had been standing there with my hands almost limp by my side. I had no idea what I had done with the necklace. I raised my arms and slid them around Josh’s neck.
He stopped kissing me then. I pulled my head back slightly to look at him. I really wanted to see his eyes, that golden shine in them, but he wouldn’t meet my gaze. His eyes were trained on my mouth and I thought he was deciding whether or not to continue.
Don’t stop! I thought. I pulled him toward me and pressed my mouth to his in a way that would have made the fictional Andrea and Brad shout, “You go, girl! I heard Josh’s quick intake of breath as his arms tightened around me. I felt a delicious shudder run the entire length of us.
I didn’t know who was holding up who as we kissed. We let go at the same time, both of us staggering back against the wall. A long silence followed, during which I tried to figure out how to breathe normally again.
“So,” I said at last.
“So,” Josh replied.
I peeked sideways at him. Did he have any idea how he had just rocked my world, how he had changed all that I thought was possible? I wondered how I was going to walk down the hall and out the door in a straight line. Maybe that’s what Melanie meant when she talked about bringing a guy to his knees. At the moment, mine felt totally unreliable.
Then Josh reached in his pocket and pulled out a five-dollar bill. “You were right,” he said, “the poem doesn’t describe your kiss. Andrew must have been fantasizing.”
I stared at Josh with disbelief, stared down at his hand forcing the money in mine. My fingers closed around the bill and squeezed it hard, like the way his words had just squeezed my heart. How could two people kiss, one feel a major earthquake, and the other just a tremor? I watched him as he strode down the hall and out the door. He wasn’t having a bit of trouble walking in a straight line, I noted, as my knees slowly buckled and my back slid down the wall, till I was sitting on the floor.
Chapter 23
Wednesday night, I wished for the deep and dreamless sleep of the night before, but it was impossible. When I did sleep, I dreamed of Josh; and the rest of the time I tossed and turned and heard Andrew’s words in my head: “All last night, I lay in bed thinking of you, dreaming of you, longing for you—” What goes around comes around, I thought, and I knew this wasn’t going away any time soon.
I would go to college, graduate, get a job coaching at Stonegate, and eventually take over Ms. Mahler’s job, living out my life as a single woman dedicated to my students and players. I would make it my special job to distribute crackers and peanut butter to girls who ask guys, “Can’t we just be friends?
” and then stupidly fall for them.
Oh, the self-pity was flowing.
At six A.M., I told myself to get a grip. I arrived at Stonegate right on time for my morning run with Mona. I had taken an extra-long shower, eaten a healthy breakfast, and thought I was looking pretty good.
Mona studied me as we did our stretches. “Did you sleep last night?”
“I sleep every night.”
“What’s wrong, Jamie?”
“Nothing.”
How do you tell a friend who is blissfully in love that you think heart surgery may be the only answer for you?
“Jamie, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing much, really. It’ll pass.” In about a hundred years, I thought.
“You don’t want to talk about it?” she guessed.
“Maybe some time later, okay?”
“No problem.” She gave my ponytail a yank. “I just don’t like to see my friend unhappy.”
We finished stretching, did a lap of the track, then Sam hailed us from the baseball diamond.
“So, is either of you interested in going out Friday night?” Mona asked as the three of us ran together.
“Uh, well, I’m not sure what I’m doing then,” I replied.
Tuesday night, I had made a vow to my satin rose that I would not go out with Ted and Mona until they started acting normal.
“Me, neither,” said Sam. “I’m trying to decide between the three girls who are begging to go out with me.”
Mona and I turned to him at the same time, and he laughed.
“Sam, you’re a catch,” Mona said. “Noelle will see that sooner or later.”
“Then it’s going to have to be later,” he said. “I asked her out Friday night, and she already has a date.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” I said.
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Mona assured him. “Lots of girls go on dates they don’t really want to go on, right, Jamie?”
“True,” I replied. “We all fake it some.”
The three of us chugged up a hill. “I don’t think this is one of those times,” Sam said. “Caitlin told me the date was with a guy Noelle has been interested in since forever and ever.”