19. Emory
EMORY
Ikissed Jake.
Not a polite kiss. Not a friendly peck. Not even one of those tentative, testing-the-waters kisses where you spend the next twelve hours pretending it could still be classified as accidental.
Kissed.
Full-on, both-hands-in-his-hair, meteor-shower-as-witness kiss.
And he kissed me back.
If a person wanted to be honest about this, she might admit it was the best thing that’s happened to her in a very, very long time.
I stare at the ceiling. Florida is still there.
The alien, if I squint, hasn’t moved. The room looks exactly the same as it did yesterday.
There should be some visible evidence that I detonated ten years of emotional repression with my own mouth last night.
A scorch mark. A commemorative plaque. Something.
My phone buzzes on the nightstand. I grab it so fast I nearly knock over my bkr in the process, which feels symbolic somehow. Of course the morning after I finally kiss Jake Wheeler would be the morning I die because I launch my water bottle into my own face.
It’s Granny.
The whole town knows.
How
Gladys Kravitz has binoculars.
The lighthouse is half a mile away
She’s very committed.
I drop the phone on my chest and close my eyes.
This is Blue Crab Bay. Privacy is not a real thing here. Privacy is a “one size fits all” label on a pair of leggings. A lie that ignores the messy reality of the situation.
My lips still feel warm.
This is not helping.
Neither is the fact that I can still feel his broad shoulders under my hands and the way he kissed me back. Slow and careful at first, giving me time to change my mind. Then, when I didn’t pull away, when I leaned closer instead, the way he stopped being quite so careful.
“Don’t disappear on me,” he said.
The sentence joins the kissed-me-back track running laps through my head.
He wasn’t dramatic or angry. Just quiet and true in a way that hit me square in the chest and has apparently decided to live there now.
I did disappear on him. There isn’t a kinder version of what I did.
Downstairs, something clatters. “Frank,” Granny says, in a tone that tells me Frank dropped a tray, got busted for eating a doughnut, or both.
I should get up. That seems like something a healthy, functioning person would do after one kiss. They brush their teeth. They put on pants. They do not stare at Florida and negotiate with an alien made of ceiling texture.
I throw the covers back before I can talk myself out of it.
In the bathroom mirror, I look exactly the same. Same hair. Same face. Same woman who kissed Jake under a meteor shower and now has to go downstairs and act like she’s completely fine.
“You’re fine,” I tell my reflection.
My reflection appears unconvinced.
“You kissed him. He kissed you. That’s how kissing works. This is a sequence of events that has occurred between other adults. Society continues.”
Still unconvinced.
“You initiated.”
That one shuts us both up.
I pull on shorts and the first clean shirt I find, an old Blue Crab Bay Festival tee from 2015. It’s soft and faded and fits like a security blanket with a CRABS FOR ALL slogan.
As I walk downstairs, the fryer sizzles and the radio plays a song about love being a battlefield, which feels hostile this early in the morning.
Granny swivels on her rolling stool when she sees me. “Well,” she says.
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You said well.” I reach for a doughnut hole because sugar and carbohydrates are medicinal when taken correctly.
“It’s nearly eight. You never sleep this late.”
“I had a late night.”
Frank coughs. Granny clears her throat.
I point at both of them. “Do not.”
“I wasn’t going to say a thing.”
“You were going to say seventeen things.”
“No. I was going to say one thing with seventeen meanings.” She folds her hands on the counter. “The town’s talking.”
“You mentioned.”
“Gladys Kravitz saw the whole thing. She’s calling it The Lighthouse Lip Lock.”
I choke on air. “She is not.”
“She is. It’s on the town chat.”
“There’s a town chat?”
“There’s always been a town chat. You just never did anything worth posting before.”
Frank snorts.
“So?” Granny asks.
“So what?”
I pop a doughnut hole into my mouth and immediately burn the roof of it.
“So, how was it?”
I point at my mouth. “Hot.”
She rolls her eyes. “Not the doughnut. The kiss.”
Frank makes a sound and turns away, shoulders shaking.
“Granny.”
“What? I’m old, not dead.”
I press a hand to my forehead. “Can we maybe not have this conversation in front of Frank?”
Frank, still facing away from us, says, “I’ve heard it all.”
Granny folds her hands in her lap and waits. That’s one of her more powerful and disturbing skills. She can outwait almost anything. The truth eventually gets tired and crawls out on its own.
“It was good,” I say finally.
I reach for another doughnut hole so I don’t have to say anything more.
“What now?” she asks.
I start loading a box with doughnuts and include a chocolate with sprinkles for myself.
“I don’t know,” I admit. That’s the truest thing I’ve said all morning.
Granny slides a pink box across the counter. “Then start with delivering this to Tall Tales. Walt’s been texting.”
I narrow my eyes. “Why does this feel like a setup?”
“Because it is.”
Outside, the breakfast crowd at Lazy Larry’s is laughing.
I just missed the punchline of how lazy Larry is.
Across The Green, someone is working on the fountain in front of Town Hall.
Two women in visors are gossiping while walking so they can call it cardio.
A man in khaki shorts is halfway up a ladder changing the banner on a lamp post.
“Emory!” Miss Hattie calls, grinning like a cat that just ate a canary.
I lift one hand in a pageant wave.
She starts singing “At Last.”
I keep walking because if I stop, I’ll simply pass away right here next to the planter of mums.
Here lies Emory, brave at last.
The whole damn town noticed fast.
Tall Tales is crowded this morning, with coffee-drinking witnesses pressed against the big windows and spilling onto the patio. There’s a new chalkboard out front.
Today’s Featured Novel:
LOVE’S FIRST KISS
Underneath, in smaller letters.
(Fine. It’s actually Snow White)
I stare at the sign.
The sign stares back.
“Walt,” I mumble.
When I walk in, every head turns with choreographed precision.
Walt looks at me like he’s already three chapters ahead. “Morning, Emory,” he says, loud enough that absolutely everybody pretending not to pay attention now gets to stop pretending.
“Morning, Walt.” I set the top pink box down on the counter. “Delivery.”
He takes it, sets it behind the counter without opening it, then reaches for a cup and starts making my usual. “Heard you had an eventful night,” he says mildly.
I should leave. I should absolutely leave. I have delivered the doughnuts. My legal and emotional obligation is complete. Instead, I stand there with both hands wrapped around the edge of the counter like it might try to escape first.
“News travels fast,” I say.
“News runs this town.”
Walt slides the iced latte toward me. “On the house.”
“You never give me free coffee.”
“Special occasion.”
I pick up the cup and turn it.
COURAGE IS ONE STEP PAST FEAR
He talks casually, then hands you a sentence that wedges itself under your ribs for the rest of the day.
“You know,” I say, “for a man who barely speaks, you are very loud.”
His mouth tucks at one corner. “You don’t need a lot of words. Just the right ones.”
Across the shop, someone sneezes. I glance over, and every person in the coffee shop and bookstore instantly becomes fascinated by something else. Books. Flooring. The structural integrity of napkins.
“Go on,” he says. “He’s probably waiting.”
The cup is cold in my hand. The words on it stare back at me.
I think about last night. Jake’s hand around mine. His mouth on mine. His voice asking me not to disappear. And I think about me, ten years ago, doing exactly that.
I take a sip of the latte. Then a breath. “Thanks, Walt,” I say quietly.
I walk outside and raise my cup to Willard as I turn toward the dock. Toward The Knuckle.
Toward him.
My grip tightens on the cup hard enough to pop the lid. But I don’t stop walking.
One step past fear.
I’m doing that.
I think.