The Kiss Lottery

Chapter 6 Beckett

Chapter 6

Beckett

The next day, it’s raining outside and the downpour fits my mood. I chop vegetables, my mind replaying the Bake-Off. I toss the knife into the sink and stick the chicken and veggies into the oven, slamming the door a little harder than necessary. She said she was lonely. Wait, no, she actually said that the house was lonely, but I knew what she meant. She feels alone. Like me.

Then she ran off before we could talk.

She truly doesn’t want to have anything to do with me.

I get out a single plate and silverware, resigned to eating alone tonight. Aunt Margo is out at what she calls a “town meeting,” but I know it’s just a cover for a girls’ night out at the bar.

I take my food out of the oven, set it on my plate, and settle down in a chair in the dining room and eat without really tasting it.

Everly.

Jesus, she’s still pretty.

Her pale-pink hair, the astonishment in her blue eyes when she saw me waiting for her at the Bake-Off.

She actually came back.

After dinner, I pull on a coat and shove my feet into hiking boots. Grabbing an umbrella and flashlight, I go toward the back door instead of the usual front path.

The farm is over two hundred acres, with rolling hills, forests, and mountains in the distance. It belonged to my maternal grandfather. It’s not a working farm anymore, but I still keep a few cows and horses.

I walk through the fields, stopping at the grove of cherry trees my mother planted when I was just a kid. Pink blooms will appear in the spring for a couple of weeks.

“These trees are yours,” Mom told me before she passed. “To remind you that life is short, but it has moments of beauty.”

I touch one of the rough trunks.

Of course, my father hated the farm.

I think he hated us.

The first time I realized he was cheating on her, I’d been in the study, hiding behind a decorative screen. I was ten. He came in and shut the door to make a phone call. I listened as his voice softened to a tone I’d never heard him use with my mother. He detailed to the woman on the other end how much he wanted her, how he couldn’t wait to see her again.

Everyone in town knew he hated Rose and that he had affairs. The whispers in the grocery store, the sideways glances at church, they devastated Mom.

The farm was her solace, and so it became mine.

I glance toward the bottom of the hill, where Everly’s house is, a two-story lavender Victorian.

I wander down, stopping at the edge of her property, marked by a small garden and a clothesline. The clothesline was where I kissed her for the first time. I still recall the white sheets swaying in the wind. We were ten, maybe, and it was barely a peck.

I was with her for a lot of firsts.

I taught her how to drive in my dad’s truck when she was barely tall enough to see over the wheel.

I was the first one to get her to jump off the rope swing at the lake. The water was freezing, but she came up grinning. That was her—fearless.

When she was fourteen, I was the one she confided in about her first crush. Some guy a couple of years older. I played it cool, but it killed me. Even then.

I taught her to ride horses. It’s when we had our first real kiss—god, I can’t forget that. We’d dismounted at the cherry grove to look over the valley, and I had my arm draped around her shoulders, and she was snuggled up to me in the cold. She looked up at me, her eyes soft, and I leaned down and kissed her, long and sweet. We were fifteen.

And when she lost her mom, she called me that night. I ran to her house, climbed through her window, and just held her.

Her other firsts went to other people.

After all, she can never be mine. Not with the secrets I know.

The rain pours harder, bringing me back as I stare at her house, my gaze lingering on the light from her window.

How many nights over the past ten years have I stood in this spot, replaying everything and trying to figure it all out.

Her mom was one of my father’s affairs.

It was several months after Everly’s mom had passed away when I discovered the truth in my dad’s office. I’d opened a drawer and found countless letters addressed to him from Ciara—Everly’s mom and one of my mother’s friends.

Discovering the affair explained a lot, like the time I found them in the barn in an embrace, when he told me he was just teaching her to ride horses. Right. He was screwing the neighbor on my mom’s land.

My mother probably even knew the truth.

When I confronted my dad, he brushed it off and told me that life was too complicated for a boy my age to understand.

But I understood enough.

That the world was messy.

And painful.

Everly and her mom were part of the reason my family was screwed up, and while part of me adored Everly, the other part despised her for the sadness in my mother’s eyes.

Gradually, I distanced myself from Everly.

Then Carson fell in love with her, and she let him give her the rest of her firsts.