Chapter Seven
Seven
OKAY. THIS WAS big.
We all looked around at each other, like Are we all thinking what we’re all thinking?
Finally, Grandma Dodie patted my hand and said, “Well, that’s a nice distraction for you, sweetheart.”
Boy, was it.
Finn, just so you know, grew up across the street from us—the oldest, tallest, and handsomest of three brothers—and he had been class president, the captain of the baseball team, and an actual, literal Prom King.
He was the reason I broke my arm—falling out of the tree near his bedroom while trying to spy on him. He took up 80 percent of the pages in my middle and high school diaries. And yes—he was definitely responsible for giving me a very memorable first kiss.
A first kiss I’d never forgotten.
A first kiss that every single kiss that followed had competed against—and lost.
The title of the study Ashley read was “Can Humans Imprint on a First Kiss?” But did we need a scientific study for this? All we had to do was look at my interminable crush. Six formative years!
Now that was the longest relationship of my life.
Ashley had known all about that crush. My mom, too.
Everybody in my house knew—even Pete. It was inescapable.
I’d cut out Finn’s yearbook photo and taped it to the mirror in my bedroom.
I doodled his initials in little 3D lettering.
I gazed mooningly at his house from our living room window for countless hours.
And now Finn was single. And coming on the cruise. We’d be trapped on the MS Enchantment together for eight potential-filled days.
And nights.
Ashley was on this. She flipped the legal pad to a fresh page.
“What do you remember about that moment?” she asked, leaning in like we were on 60 Minutes.
I went with it. “Mostly sounds and sensations,” I said. “Because I was blindfolded.”
“And why were you blindfolded?” she asked.
“All the dares were blindfolded that day.” I listed neighborhood kids. “Evan had to climb a tree blindfolded. Sean had to go down the slide blindfolded. Cooper had to hang from the monkey bars blindfolded.”
“And you had to get kissed?”
“We were running out of ideas.”
Ashley wrote something down but didn’t say what. “And what do you remember about the kiss?”
“I remember waiting a long time—so long that I worried Finn wouldn’t show up. Which would’ve been so embarrassing, right? Getting stood up for your first kiss?”
“And then he finally made it?”
“He finally made it, yeah,” I said. “I heard his feet crunch on the gravel, and I was like, Here we go.”
“And?”
“And…” I thought back. “And he came close. And he put his hands on my shoulders. And then he stepped closer. And then he leaned in and kissed me.”
“Just a peck?”
“Mostly,” I said. “But there was a bit of a linger.”
Ashley wrote down peck and then circled it. “Define linger.”
“You know, it wasn’t like how you’d kiss your grandparents. It was … softer. And, you know, kind of on the longer side. Duration-wise. As far as pecks go.”
Ashley studied her notes.
“That was it?”
“Yeah.”
Ashley sighed.
“What?”
“It’s just: Aside from the whole ‘blindfolded’ thing, this kiss doesn’t sound very special.”
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “It was massively special!”
Ashley studied her notes like she couldn’t make the numbers add up. “Was it?”
“Very,” I insisted again. “It had a kind of … tenderness to it.” Yes. That word was right. I committed to it: “An epic kind of tenderness.”
“Okay,” Ashley said, like that might be promising.
I pushed on. “Maybe the mechanics of it, from the outside, don’t seem like much. But on the inside?” I paused and pressed my palm to my chest—not sure of the right words.
“On the inside, what?”
“On the inside, it felt like an avalanche.”
“Ooooh,” Ashley said, like that was helping.
“I’ve never felt anything like it again. And the memory of that feeling has kept me company in sad times ever since.”
Ashley and my mom glanced at each other like maybe that was a bit much.
“For example,” I went on, trying to make my case, “on that very same afternoon, Dad was supposed to pick me up from school.”
Grandma Dodie corrected: “Your dad never picked you up from school.”
But my mom remembered.
I nodded. “It was the day Pete broke his ankle. Mom had gone to the ER, and my bike chain was broken, so I couldn’t ride home with everybody else, and Dad was supposed to get me. But he didn’t show up.”
“He never showed up?” Grandma Dodie asked.
“I almost killed him. I really almost murdered him.”
I went on. “When it started getting dark, I decided to walk home.”
Our school was an okay bike-riding distance, but it was a bit far for walking. Plus, you had to go under a freeway bridge that had, as Grandma Dodie always put it, “no shortage of shady characters.”
“You walked home?” Ashley said.
“I did. And just before the overpass, it started to rain. And it was cold out, and I’d forgotten my sweater, and it got dark fast—and more than one car splashed me with puddle water.
I got drenched. At one point, I slipped and scraped up my knees.
And even when I finally made it home, no one was there.
The house key was missing from the hide-a-key rock, and so I just sat on the front steps, in the rain, with my knees and hands stinging, wet and shivering, waiting for Dad to show up. ”
So far, this felt like fodder for the absentee father theory.
But then I gave it a twist and said, “And that whole time, do you want to know why I didn’t cry?”
I gave such a long, dramatic pause that by the time I finally said it, my mom and Ashley said it with me: “Because of that kiss.”
“There’s our answer,” Ashley said then, circling something on her paper. “You got your first kiss on a day your father abandoned you. Was that the year you had pneumonia?” Ashley asked next, thinking back.
“Yes,” I said.
“From being in the rain?”
“I don’t think rain can give you a lung infection,” I said.
“But being left out in it for hours can stress your system,” Ashley pointed out.
I shrugged, like Fair enough.
“So Dad abandoned you and gave you pneumonia,” Ashley said, making a note.
Then I said, “But that kiss … made things better. That kiss gave me something nice to remember in the hospital, too. I thought about it while taking my breathing treatments. And while waiting for X-rays. And when they woke me at night to take a sample of fluid from my lungs. I just kept replaying it in my head.”
“Case closed,” Ashley said then, slapping her hands down on the table. “That’s plenty.”
“Plenty of what?” I asked.
“Plenty of intense emotions to react to.”
I hadn’t thought about that day in so long.
Ashley went on. “You really did imprint on your first kiss. Maybe that’s been your problem all along.”
It was certainly a new spin on things.
“Is this good or bad?” my mother asked.
“It’s always good to get to the root of your troubles,” Ashley said.
“Are you saying,” I said, just wanting to be clear, “that because I imprinted on one particular kiss at the age of ten, there is only one man on this earth I’ll ever be able to love?”
Ashley winked. “Let’s find out.”
“Because that seems like a pretty narrow set of options,” I went on. “In a world containing four billion men.”
“It’s just a theory,” Ashley said. “But it does seem very lucky that he’s coming to the wedding—single.”
“Why?”
“Because now you can test the theory out.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying you should sleep with Finn on the cruise.”
“Ashley!” I said, glancing over like she must’ve shocked Grandma Dodie.
But Grandma Dodie was just laughing.
I lowered my voice to a stage whisper anyway. “I’m not sleeping with my childhood crush at your wedding!”
“Fine,” Ashley said. “Don’t sleep with him. Just conquer him.”
“Conquer him?”
“Just make him fall in love with you,” she said with a shrug, like Simple.
“I have no idea how to make anyone do that—least of all my appallingly unrequited childhood crush.”
“We’ll figure it out. I’ll help you.”
“You’re going to be a little busy.”
“I’m never too busy for love.”
“Ashley,” I said. “Are we getting carried away here?”
“Think of it as an emotional reset,” Ashley said, getting serious. “A chance to heal old wounds, and reevaluate emotional scripts you wrote years ago, and come to a new understanding of the story of your life.” She paused. “But an epic one-night stand wouldn’t kill you, either.”
“Ashley!”
But Grandma Dodie started laughing again.
“This is impossible,” I protested. “Finn was never, ever interested in me,” I said. “Ever. At all.”
“You were a kid back then,” Ashley said.
“Now you’ve grown up.” She looked me over.
“We’re going to have to get your hair done.
And your nails. And I will teach you how to walk in heels.
Do you have any sexy outfits? Scratch that.
We’ll raid my closet.” She squinted at me. “Should we do lash extensions?”
“I don’t—”
“It’s fine. Mascara will do.”
“You can’t turn your wedding cruise into some kind of Rube Goldberg love trap,” I said.
I was trying to make it sound ridiculous, but Ashley nodded, like Exactly!
“He’s on the ship, and you’re on the ship.
He’s newly divorced, and you’re newly—not married.
This is a no-brainer. You just need to show him that you’re not a scrappy little pain-in-the-butt neighborhood kid spying on him from that oak tree anymore.
He needs to understand that you’ve grown up into an irresistible, obsession-worthy love sorceress. ”
This felt like a high bar.
Reading my face, Ashley said, “And maybe you need to understand that, too.”
“Nobody has time for any of that,” my mother interrupted. “We’ll be lucky to get these programs ready.”
“Mom’s right,” I said. “Everybody’s overwhelmed.”
But Ashley shook her head. “This is easy. I was already working to set up half the bridesmaids. Think of all the team activities we’ve already planned.
What if JoJo and Finn just happen to get paired up for all of them?
And just happen to get seated together at every single meal?
That’s not more work—that’s just tiny changes to a spreadsheet. ”
Ashley met my eyes. She knew I loved spreadsheets.
“That’s just,” she went on, pressing her advantage, “holding space for destiny.”
My mom peered over her readers at Ashley like she was getting grandiose, but she let it all stand.
I let it stand, too.
And that’s how, by consent agenda, we wound up launching Operation Conquest.
Ashley went back to making notes on her pad. “We should switch Finn’s room, too,” she went on, “and put him near Harmony’s. So that JoJo has every opportunity to”—she wiggled her eyebrows a little—“upgrade roommates.”
“Ashley!” I said.
But her point was valid.
Even if Finn wasn’t my destiny, he was better—and I realized this could also be said of every other passenger on the ship—than rooming with Harmony.
WE WOUND UP talking so late into the night that I didn’t go home to my apartment and slept over at my parents’ house instead.
Lying on my old bed in my old room, my personal Finn Turner wheels really did start turning.
Had I imprinted on him? Was this the answer?
Could I conquer him? He’d been quite the teenage heartthrob.
The competition might be stiff. Wasn’t he a fancy lawyer now?
Flipping over onto my tummy on my hydrangea-print bedspread, I googled him.
Yes. Finn was a lawyer now—a young, hotshot, on-a-partner-track lawyer at a fancy law firm in Chicago. And there was only one current image of him online—his professional portrait in a suit on his law firm’s website. But it confirmed what was never in question: He was still handsome.
He didn’t look the same, of course. He’d filled out, and solidified, and lost the wiry vibes of a teenager.
His tousled high school hair was replaced with a groomed, brushed-back cut with a fade.
I have no idea how much time passed as I studied that one photo, but it was long enough to notice that his eyebrows were more groomed now, and he had a new little scar on his cheek, and his jaw was more defined.
Different, but good. Different, but maybe even better?
Wait. Had Finn Turner gotten better looking since high school?
Of course he had.
Maybe Ashley was right.
Maybe he was the reason I’d never been able to connect to somebody else. Fair or unfair, reasonable or unreasonable, maybe my heart had just decided that Finn was the one—and would accept no substitutes.
At least it had standards.
Maybe it was lucky that I’d left Pearce at the altar. Maybe fate was keeping my options open. Maybe this was the cure for my curse, at last.
When I got tired of staring at the internet’s only picture of Finn, I looked up “imprinting on a first kiss,” found several more articles, read them all, and came away convinced.
This explained it. People did sometimes imprint on one other person.
And as much as I would never recommend that course of action to anyone else …
if it had already happened, then maybe I’d just stumbled on some very good intel.
A chance to change my life—and get it right at last. Maybe all I had to do was force myself onto a cruise ship, make Finn Turner fall in love with me, and let my poor, forgotten heart have what it had always wanted.
That didn’t sound so hard. Did it?