Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
ON THE UPPER deck—not far from the noted historical site of Cooper and JoJo’s Epic Hickey—Finn pulled us to a stop beside a section of railing. The ship’s wake stretched out beyond us, lit by the moon. The wind flapped all around. It should have been romantic.
But it wasn’t.
“What the hell was that back there?” I demanded. “You left me all alone on the dance floor!”
Finn frowned like he couldn’t understand the question. “I got a work message.”
“An urgent work message?” I asked, trying to help him answer the question better.
“No,” he said. “Just a regular one.”
“You walked out ten seconds into the song. I had to stand there by myself like a lost puppy!”
Finn couldn’t fathom the melodrama. “Why are you complaining? We won.”
“That’s not a surprise. It was rigged so we’d win.”
“Who cares? Winning is winning.”
“I’m not sure that’s right.”
But now Finn was thinking about it. “Why would it be rigged so we’d win?”
He wanted to know? Fine. He could know. “Because Ashley wants you to kiss me.”
Finn didn’t understand that, but he liked it. “Okay,” he said, stepping closer.
“Aren’t you curious about why?”
Finn frowned, like it hadn’t occurred to him to be curious. Then he said, “Why?”
“Because I had a crush on you for six long years when we were kids. And now you’re single, and so am I.
And we’re both on this ship. And apparently I have some unresolved issues about men, and love, and abandonment.
And Ashley thinks I might have imprinted on you, so you might be my destiny.
Or not. But either way, she thinks I need to find out. ”
“Okay,” Finn said, shrugging like none of that made any sense to him but he didn’t care.
“Okay?”
“Okay, sure. Twist my arm. I’ll kiss you. We can do more than kiss, if you want.” He shrugged again.
I’d never noticed how unromantic shrugging was until just this moment.
Or maybe it depended on who was doing the shrugging. A montage suddenly flashed through my head of Cooper shrugging. Shrugging a jacket over his shoulders, shrugging into a vest, shrugging his answer to my question of why the hell he was crashing my wedding. Why was it sexy when Cooper did it?
Finn reached up to smooth his hair with his hands.
I’d spent years longing for a kiss from Finn, and now here we were.
But now that I had one for the taking, I wanted it to be … better than this. In my endless, persistent fantasies about getting a real kiss from him, the moment was always dreamy and swoony. It was always breathtaking and life-changing. It was always adrenaline-infused joy sprinkled with magic.
It was never like it was now: annoying.
Now Finn cleared his throat.
This was happening, I guess.
But why didn’t I feel anything good? Why did this feel like a chore I had to perform?
Maybe I was stalling—but next thing I knew, I was explaining it all to Finn like he might care.
“You see,” I said, “you were my first kiss.” Before I lost my nerve, I kept going.
“That truth-or-dare kiss on the playground that day was a big deal for me. My sister thinks that—for personal reasons of my own—I imprinted on that kiss. And that it’s become a kind of curse for me where no other kiss can compare.
And so the theory goes that if I can get you to kiss me again, I can break the curse. ”
“Huh,” Finn said.
“Yeah,” I said, thinking he was interested by the theory.
But then Finn said, “What truth-or-dare kiss on the playground?”
I looked at him, like Seriously? “At school?” I prompted. Then, waiting for something to ring a bell: “On the playground? I was ten and you were thirteen? All the dares that day were blindfolded ones—do a handstand blindfolded, climb the pear tree blindfolded? That kind of thing?”
“I was blindfolded?” Finn asked.
“No, I was blindfolded.”
“Huh,” he said, factoring that in.
“Nothing?” I asked.
More headshaking. “It’s not ringing any bells.”
“Think,” I demanded.
“I’m thinking,” Finn said. “But I really don’t remember kissing you.”
“How many people have you kissed in life for this to not even register?”
Finn gave a little shrug of apology. “Lots,” he confessed.
I looked around. Just exactly how forgettable was I? This was wildly insulting.
“Maybe,” Finn suggested next, “if we kiss now, it’ll jog my memory.”
Great. Now I wanted to kiss him even less. Did I want a second kiss from a guy who couldn’t remember the first one?
But maybe it wasn’t a bad idea.
I should probably do it. I should get closure, if nothing else. I should see if Ashley’s theory was right.
“What else is there to do, anyway?” Finn pressed.
I cannot stress enough how surreal this was.
I was right here, on a moonlit deck, about to get exactly what I’d been working so hard for this whole time from Finn.
My life’s biggest crush—the guy I’d longed for, fantasized about, and lightly stalked for so long—was standing in front of me on a moonlit ship’s deck, Cary Grant style, leaning in.
It was a personal triumph beyond description.
My inner teenager needed a fainting couch.
But as Finn’s face came at me like a fish-eye lens, his lips already puckered in a way that seemed premature, I realized something: I didn’t really want that kiss.
I was curious about it. I still thought it might turn out to be the closure I needed to fix my whole life. I was still determined to do it …
But those were all head decisions.
My heart? Wasn’t interested.
I didn’t stop him. I watched his face come in for a landing, and then I felt those puckered lips collide with mine. And then I stood very still and endured it.
I can’t say he was a bad kisser. I was the bad kisser.
But as he mopped my face with his mouth, slurping me like I was a plate of spaghetti, all I could do was wait for it to be over.
When he was finished at last, he pulled back with a self-satisfied expression.
“There,” he said. “How was that?”
I wiped my mouth with the hem of my dress and then gave him a thumbs-up. “I think we can check closure off the list.”
He took it like a compliment. “Did I just solve all your problems?”
“Maybe. I’ll report back.”
Then Finn said, “Want to go back to my cabin?”
I squinted. “Not really, no.”
Another unromantic shrug from him. “I should go find someone else, then.”
Another thumbs-up from me.
“And you,” Finn said, “should probably go find Cooper.”
“I should?”
“Yep.”
“Why?”
“Because I think he really does have a thing for you,” Finn said. Then he gestured toward the staircase. “And he followed us here. And he just saw me kiss you.”
I TOOK OFF running toward the stairs—in my dumb heels: no easy feat.
But it felt impossibly important to set Cooper straight right this instant.
Finn had gestured like Cooper might still be there, but when I got to the stairway, he was gone. Would he have gone back to the after-party in the side theater? Or one of the many bars? Or the casino?
Of course not.
He’d have gone back to our room.
I hobbled down the two flights to our floor as fast as I could, and then, defeated, I took my shoes off.
Cooper really wasn’t wrong about my footwear choices.
I resolved to start listening to him more often.
Barefoot, I doubled my speed. I wasn’t sprinting, exactly—but close.
I passed a bar, and then a casino—all while slaloming through crowded passageways and around random passengers without slowing.
Even when I passed a second bar and, out of the side of my eye, I spotted my dad, alone, perched on a stool under a tiki-style thatched bar hut—with a bourbon in one hand and his head in the other—I didn’t break stride.
At first.
Right? I mean, yes—that was my father looking like the dictionary definition of despair.
But I couldn’t stop! Right?! I was smack in the middle of the mad dash of a lifetime!
But then, my dad decided to get up from his barstool. And I guess that wasn’t his first bourbon of the night. I saw him rise, take a step—and then lose his balance and collapse to the floor.
Gah. Couldn’t not stop for that.
It’s a big thing when a large man falls to the floor. A collapsing human makes a thud sound that’s really unlike anything else. Despite the bar music and human chatter and ambient noise, the sound of the impact cut through it all.
“Dad!” I called out, stopping for just a second before rerouting over to him.
I kneeled over him as I arrived—expecting him to be choking, or unconscious, or mid–heart attack, at least. But as he rolled onto his back and I got a look at his face, he was laughing.
“You’re laughing?” I demanded.
“Mostly out of humiliation,” my dad said.
“Are you hurt?”
“Just drunk, I think.”
“Did you break anything?” I asked. “Did you hit your head?”
“I think my body broke my fall,” he said.
“Let’s get you up,” I said as the bartender came around to help.
We each took an arm and maneuvered my dad toward a captain’s chair at a low table nearby. Once we had him positioned, the bartender and I watched him for a minute, like he might tumble back out, but he didn’t.
“I’ve never seen you drunk before,” I said next, taking the chair across from him.
My dad met my eyes with a little wince before pulling it together enough to say, “She said no.”
“Mom?” I don’t know who else she would’ve been.
My dad nodded.
“To what? To taking you back?”
He nodded again.
“But…” I was so flabbergasted. “Did you tell her all that stuff you told me?”
The bartender showed up with some water in a pint glass, and my dad waited until he was gone.
“I tried to,” he said. “But I panicked.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You know that I’m a man of few words, right?”
“Yes,” I said. If there was one thing any of us knew about him, it was that.
“Well,” he said. “In that moment, I was a man of fewer words.”
“Did you panic?” I asked. “Or did you choke?”
My dad considered that and then said, “Both.”