I rub my index fingers against my thumbs and peer up at him through my lashes.
“You got it.” Pride sounds in his voice. His smile reflects the same emotion. He pushes the notebook back. “You want to do some more?”
I want to say no, but I’m afraid he’ll leave. And I’m feeling greedier than ever. I want my forty-five minutes. “Sure.”
Then without thinking, I blurt out, “Instead, can I just ask you something?”
We stare across at each other again. “If I can ask you something,” he counters.
“Okay.” I rub the soles of my slippers on the wood floor under the table. “Me first.” How to ask it? “I … I used to be able to tell you and your brother apart. But now…”
He grins, but almost looks disappointed. “Now you can’t? You don’t know who I am?”
“Guilty.” Frowning, I flatten my palms, now slick from nerves, on the table. “So which one are you?”
He shoulders back in the chair. His posture’s crooked. One shoulder is higher than the other. Didn’t Matt used to sit like that? “How did you tell us apart before?”
“You mean physically or your personality?” Now I’m thinking I should have kept my mouth shut.
“Both.” Anticipation brightens his eyes.
It’s as if my answer matters. As if I need to be careful what I say.
“Uh, Eric wore his hair a little longer. Matt’s hair was a little curlier.” Unable to stop myself, I look at his hair, remembering sitting behind Matt in English, studying how it would curl up, and wondering if it was as soft as it looked. A lot of girls, bolder than I, would play with his curls. I always wished I had the guts to do it. But I was gutless. The bravest thing I ever did in school was start a book club.
My gaze shifts away from his hair. “And one of you is a little broader in the shoulders.”
“Which one?” He sits straighter, his chest lifts, his shoulders stretch out.
I’m scared to answer, but that would be awkward.
“Eric?” I try to read his expression, but he seems to purposely keep it blank. “Not that both of you aren’t … buff,” I say for a lack of another word and feel myself blushing, because buff sounds … sexy or something.
He grins. “And?”
“Personality wise, Matt’s quieter, more of a thinker. Eric’s more outspoken.”
He picks up his pencil and rolls it between his two palms leaving me to think he’s rolling my answers around in his head.
The pencil slows down. I swear my heart speeds up like my old one would have.
“So which one am I? Buff and outspoken or thin and quiet.”
“I didn’t say thin or quiet. I said less buff and quieter.” The desire to say I preferred Matt over Eric tap dances on my tongue, but if he’s Eric?
He laughs and that sound is like magic, less rusty, more melting.
I’m sure he’s Matt. Eric didn’t have the same effect on me. Maybe I imagined it, but I could swear that Matt actually … noticed me. I don’t think I hit Eric’s radar. He had too many cheerleaders falling all over him. Not that Matt didn’t have the girls flashing him smiles and playing with his curls. He just didn’t seem like it went to his head as much. Sometimes, it even looked like it embarrassed him.
My backpack beeps, shattering that comfortable silence that we’d finally found. The dreaded chirp lets me know that I have less than thirty minutes of battery life left. Panic flashes in Matt eyes. Or is he Eric?
“It’s normal,” I say, but because of that noise, of that damn tube, of my own dead heart, I feel anything but normal.
“So is this like forever?” he asks.
I shake my head. “No, it’s supposed to be until I get a transplant.”
“Supposed to be?” His gaze sweeps over me.
I look toward the hall to make sure Mom isn’t around. So far, the truth has worked with him, and I decide not to waver from my approach. “I have a kind of rare blood type. AB. The odds aren’t great.”
“AB?” His brow wrinkles. “It’s not that rare. I have it. If it was a kidney, I’d give you one.”
I laugh, but this one’s forced. I hate thinking about a transplant. Not just because I don’t think it’ll happen, but because someone having to die to give me life is all kinds of wrong. And that’s what my parents and even Brandy are doing. Sitting around hoping someone will die.
That’s even worse than wishing warts on someone.
“But…” The pause seems to mean something. “You … you just stay on this until a heart’s available.”
Okay. The truth didn’t work. “Yeah,” I say what he wants to hear. What everyone wants to hear. Never mind I’ve had two infections due to the artificial heart and each one nearly killed me. Never mind that no one has lived more than four years with an artificial heart. Never mind that hundreds of AB-blood-type people are waiting for a new heart, a new life, a miracle.
He frowns. “The way you say it sounds as if you don’t believe…”
I need to work on that. “I’m sure it’ll happen,” I lie, and then suddenly I don’t want to. I don’t have to. Not with him. I sit up taller. “Look, it takes a lot more energy to hope than to accept. I’d rather spend my energy enjoying what I’ve got now.”
“That really sucks.” His frown deepens.
“Yeah, it does. But I’m okay with it.” And for the most part, I really am. At first I kept telling myself that I had to hope, that a heart would come. But the more I read about statistics, the more I came to realize that the odds of getting a heart were slim to none. And rather than fooling myself or sitting around being miserable, I decided to make the most of the time I have left. Hence the bucket list. And I’m happier now. Really.
He looks up at the clock. “I guess I should be going.”
I want to tell him he doesn’t have to rush off. How sad is it that this is the most fun and the most alive I’ve felt all year?
He stands up. I do the same, then slip on the backpack, always hiding the tube.
He moves down the hall. I follow. I’m staring at his hair, the way it flips up. Again hoping he’s Matt. I’m so into his hair, I don’t notice him swing around.
We run smack-dab into each other.
“Shit.” He grabs me by my shoulders and pulls me against him. “Are you okay?”
His hands are on my upper arms. My breasts are against his chest.
Then bam! I feel something I haven’t felt in a long time. Excitement. My very own I’m-a-girl-and-you’re-a-boy excitement. Not the borrowed thrill I get from reading romances.
I can smell him. Like men’s soap, or deodorant; a little spicy, a lot masculine. The desire to lean in and bury my nose in his shoulder is so strong I have to fist my hands.
“I’m fine,” I say. Don’t pull away. Don’t pull away. Please don’t pull away.
He doesn’t pull away. He gazes down at me. This close I can see he has gold and green flecks in his brown eyes. A voice inside of me says I should step back, but you couldn’t pay me to move. I’m dying. Is it wrong of me to want this?
“I … I forgot my books.” The words fall from his lips in an uncertain tone. The pads of his thumbs rubs the insides of my arm. Just the tiniest, softest friction that feels so damn good.
I run my tongue over my bottom lip. “Oh, I … I thought you were going to kiss me.” I hear my own words and wonder where I got the balls to say that.
His eyes widen. Not in an oh-crap way, but in a surprised kind of way. “Do you want me to kiss you?”
I grin. “If you’re Matt, I’ve wanted you to kiss me since seventh grade.”
His gaze lowers to my mouth and lingers. “Is your heart strong enough?”
I burst out laughing. “Are you that good of a kisser?”
“Maybe.” A smile crinkles the corners of his eyes. He leans down. His lips are against mine, soft and sweet. I slip into sensory overload. I lean in and open my mouth and ease my tongue between his lips. Yeah, it’s bold, but it’s not lik
e I’ll live long enough to regret it.
His tongue brushes against mine. One hand moves to my waist, the other slides back behind my neck. He gently angles my face to deepen the kiss. I feel it, every contact that is his skin against mine. I feel awesome. So freaking alive.
I get even ballsier and reach up and run my fingers through his hair. It’s even softer than I thought it’d be.
When he pulls back, we’re breathing hard, and we stare at each other. The dazed look in his eyes tells me that this wasn’t a pity kiss. We start inching closer. His lips are almost on mine again when the sound of the front door opening shatters the moment.
We jerk apart and walk back down the hall to the dining room. He picks up his books.
My dad calls out to my mom.
I ignore it.
All of my attention is on the guy standing in front of me, his lips still wet from our kiss. I grab a pen off the table, scribble my number on a notebook paper, rip it out, and hand it to him.
“If you ever want to talk. About everything that sucks,” I add. Then I worry that sounded stupid.
He takes the paper. Our fingers meet and I feel that magic spark and I don’t care if it sounded stupid. I vow not to regret this. If he calls. If he doesn’t. This was too good to ever regret.
We stare at each other again. I want to kiss him again so badly, I’m shaking. The sound of my parents talking in the kitchen echoes and invades this magical moment. I wish we were somewhere different. I wish … I wish … But before I stumble down that dangerous path of wishing for the impossible, I push it away.
He starts down the hall and I follow him to the door. He reaches for the knob then turns. We don’t say anything, but we exchange smiles. In his eyes, I see a whisper of embarrassment, a touch of uncertainty, and a hint of something raw. I hope desire. He glances over my shoulder, as if making sure we’re alone, then brushes a finger over my lips. Soft. Slow. Sensual.
I tell myself to memorize how it feels. This is the good stuff.
He turns and leaves, way before I’m ready for him to go.
I bolt to the side window, not too close in case he looks back, but close enough so I can watch him walking down my sidewalk. I watch him get in his car. I watch him drive off. I watch his car disappear down the road.
I lick my lips, still tasting his kiss. If I died right now, I’d go happy.
Mom and Dad’s footsteps echo behind me. They say something, but I ignore them. I’m in that moment, reliving it. How his kiss felt. How his kiss tasted. How his hair felt. How sweet life is. It doesn’t even matter that I’m dying.
I move in and press my forehead to the glass. It’s cool, the April weather still holds a hint of chill in the air. Then I frown when I realize he never told me if he was Eric or Matt. I remember what I said about wanting Matt to kiss me since seventh grade. If he hadn’t been Matt, he’d have told me, right?
My heart says it was Matt, but my heart isn’t real. Can I believe it? Damn, I don’t know who I kissed.
“Leah?”
I turn. Dad and Mom are staring at me, all happy like.
“That seemed to go well.” Mom offers up a real smile. The kind that wrinkles the sides of her nose. It hits me then that I can’t remember the last time her nose wrinkled like that. I put that on my bucket list. Give mom more nose wrinkles.
They look at me all goofy like. Part of me wonders if Mom saw us kissing. I don’t care. If it makes her happy, I’d kiss him again. It wouldn’t be a hardship.
“Yeah. It went well.” Moving in, I hug her, then Dad. It becomes one of those group hugs. I hear my mom’s breath shake, but it’s not the bad kind of shake.
“I love you both.” Emotion laces my words. Happy emotion. Then I break free and me and my Donald Ducks bounce back to my bedroom to plug in my heart.
While it’s not supposed to work like that, I’m sure that kiss ate up a lot of battery life.
Once I plug in, I pick up the phone to call Brandy to tell her my boy news. Then I stop. Knowing Brandy, she’d feel obligated to find out whom I’d kissed, and even try to push him to come back. Maybe I’ll just keep this to myself. My secret. The one I’ll take with me to the grave.
2
The pizza’s cold, the consistency of cardboard. For a moment, Matt Kenner thinks he’s cut into the box, but he eats it anyway. It fills the hole in his stomach, but not his heart. He wants to call Leah. Wants to see her again. Wants to kiss her again.
Wants to freaking pound his fist into the kitchen table. Death had already robbed him of his dad.
The thump of a car door shutting has Matt sitting straighter. The swish and thud of the front door opening and closing adds to the late-night murmurs of the house. His brother’s footsteps clip across the wood floors as he no doubt follows the one light on in the kitchen.
Matt looks over. Eric stands in the doorway. Eric, the buffer, more outspoken twin.
Matt’s mind rolls that around for a second. It bumps into his ego. But Leah had wanted to kiss him—not Eric. Most girls Matt dated came to him by the way of Eric. When they couldn’t catch the eye of the more popular twin, they set their sights on him. He never blamed his brother, but who wanted to be someone’s second choice?
“Hey.” Eric’s keys hit the table. He sees the pizza, goes to the kitchen candy drawer and pulls out a handful of M&Ms, then drops into a chair. Snatching a piece of pizza, he takes a bite, then drops three M&Ms into his mouth. He swears chocolate and pizza were meant to be eaten together.
Right then, stale beer and another unpleasant smell mingle with the cold-pizza aroma. If his mom were up, and aware, she’d give Eric hell for drinking and driving. She isn’t up. Isn’t aware.
She’d been like this ever since their dad died. Going to sleep by eight after crashing from Xanax, only to get up the next morning and load up all over again.
“Should you be driving?” Matt fills in for his mom.
“I had two beers.” Matt’s disapproving expression is one more reserved for a parent than a brother, but the look doesn’t hang on. His brother has done his share of filling in when it came to Matt too.
Eric rears his chair back on two legs. “I thought you were going with Ted to stay at his dad’s lake house.”
“I changed my mind.”
“Why?”
Matt’s only answer is a shoulder shrug. After he’d left Leah’s, he’d just wanted to feed his stomach and be alone.
“Were you talking to someone?” Eric eyes the phone in Matt’s hand.
“No. Just thinking.” Matt sits his phone down on top of Leah’s number.
His brother, pizza balanced on his fingertips in front of his face, studies Matt as if picking up on his mood. “About what?”
“Leah McKenzie.” No real reason not to tell Eric.
“Who?” Eric shoves the pizza into his mouth, tosses in three candies, chews, then swallows. “Wait, isn’t she that girl who’s sick? The pretty one, dark hair and light blue eyes, but too shy.”
Matt swipes his phone, pretends to read it, but his mind’s on Leah. Oh, I … thought you were going to kiss me. She isn’t shy anymore.
“You had a thing for her. Wasn’t she the one you were trying to get the nerve to ask out but she started dating someone else?”
Matt feels Eric staring. “Yeah.”
His brother takes another bite. Matt’s ego feels dinged again. The day he’d been about to ask Leah out, he saw her in the school hall, standing shoulder to shoulder with Trent Becker. Matt had lost his chance. Which was the real reason he’d jumped at the opportunity to go to her house today. Yeah, he needed the extra credit, but he’d already resigned himself to getting a C.
“Why are you thinking about her?” Eric lowers the front chair legs, gets up, and pulls a soda from the fridge. “You want one?” he mumbles around a mouthful of pizza.
“Yeah.” Matt takes the can, puts it on the table, palms it, and feels the cold burn on the inside of his hands. “I went to see her today.”
/>
“Why?” Eric pops the top on the soda, downs the fizzy noise, and drops back in the chair.
“Ms. Strong tutors her and couldn’t make it today. She offered me extra credit to do it.”
Eric’s brow wrinkles. “Is she like dying sick, or just sick-sick?”
Leah appears in his mind, soft, smiling, and for some reason happy. “She doesn’t look sick, but … she’s got an artificial heart.”
“Really? Like connected to a machine?”
“It’s small, like a backpack. But…”
“But what?”
Matt spills, hoping it will lighten the weight in his chest. “She doesn’t think she’s gonna make it.” Which is why he can’t get how she could be happy.
“Damn.” Empathy laces Eric’s voice. He sips his soda and studies Matt over the rim as if he knows there’s more to the story.
“I kissed her,” Matt confesses. Keeping something from Eric is impossible. Identical twins know each other’s secrets. That weird twin-connection thing. Mom used to tell the story of how Eric, only three, had broken his arm playing at a friend’s house and Matt had come to her crying that his arm hurt before she’d even been notified. Matt couldn’t remember it, so he wasn’t a 100 percent certain it was true.
“Why?” Eric nearly chokes on the soda.
“She wanted me to. I wanted to.”
Eric sets the can on the table with a half-full clunk. “No. You can’t do this. Don’t go there.”
Matt stares at his unopened can. He wants to pick the damn thing up and throw it. “It’s just—”
“No!” His brother’s sharp tone brings Matt’s gaze up. “Look at us. We haven’t … We haven’t gotten over losing Dad. Mom can’t handle another loss. You can’t handle another loss. We gotta heal, damn it. No more death around here.”
Matt stops short of taking his anger out on Eric. Hadn’t he just said the exact thing to himself? Wasn’t that why he hadn’t already called Leah? “I know.”
“Seriously,” Eric says. “We can’t take on more grief.”
“I said I know!” Matt closes his eyes, then opens them, wishing he didn’t see Leah’s smile, didn’t see her dreamy expression after he’d kissed her. Silence fills the yellow kitchen. The color reminds him of Leah’s Donald Duck house shoes.