Diary of a Crush: Kiss and Make Up

Adorkable

Nobody’s Girl

Guitar Girl

Let’s Get Lost

Pretty Things

Fashionistas series

French Kiss

Kiss and Make Up

Sealed With a Kiss

Table of Contents

• By Sarra Manning
  
• COPYRIGHT
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• Note to future biographer
  
• Edie’s Journal: Manchester
  
• Edie’s Twelve Degrees of Crushing
  
• Sealed With a Kiss
  
• Manchester – America – London Edie’s Diary Volume 3
  

Thanks to Ally Oliver, my editor at
J17
, who commissioned me to write the
Diary of a Crush
as a monthly column and her successor, Sophie Wilson, for continuing to commission me to write
Diary of a Crush
.

I would also like to thank Emily Thomas for giving me my first proper book deal after reading
Diary of a Crush
, my agent Karolina Sutton for working so hard and tirelessly on my behalf and Samantha Smith, Kate Agar and all at Atom for giving these books a shiny, new home.

Finally, I’d like to thank all the readers of
Diary of a Crush
. From the
J17
days, to the people who bought the books first time round, to you (yes YOU!) discovering Dylan and Edie for the first time. What a long, strange trip it’s been.

Dedicated to the late, great, never out of date Gordon and Regina Shaw, who put up with me when I was a teenager.

In the faint hope that I become a great British novelist by the time I’m twenty-five but die young and tragically, you’ll probably be sifting through these diaries for the good of future generations.
 

Problem is, I’ve hidden the diary before this, away from my mother’s prying eyes, and can’t actually remember where I put it. So I’ll just give you the greatest hits:
 

I have this photograph of me and Dylan tucked into my diary. We’re standing on the deck of the ferry on our way back from France in a force-ten gale, so his tufty dark brown hair is even more dishevelled than usual. Dylan’s got his arm around my shoulders and he’s squinting down at me and smiling fondly like I’m the greatest thing in the world. Even greater than our recent discovery that chopping up chocolate chip cookies and scooping them into vanilla ice cream will give you twice the sugar rush you normally get from eating them straight.

He certainly looks happy to be my boyfriend.

But over the last week I’ve made the startling discovery that having a boyfriend is nothing like I imagined. No. Scratch that. Having Dylan as a boyfriend is
exactly
how I imagined it. Or thought it might be in my worst nightmares.

All that stuff he came out with on the boat about how being boyfriend and girlfriend was going to be like we were before but even better? And we’d hang out with each other like we used to but there’d be all this amazing kissing and touching and, I don’t know, boyfriendly behaviour? Well, not so much.

Because now that Dylan’s my boyfriend, I have to handle his weirdness head-on. His weirdness has, like, rules. Not that he’s given me a written list but if he did, it would go something like this:

Some of it is good. A lot of it is good. And my kissing technique has drastically improved with all the extra practice I’m getting but Dylan was way more affectionate when we were bickering mates.

I was sitting by the piddly college fountain with Shona when Dylan sauntered over to us.

‘God, Edie,’ Shona muttered when she caught sight of Dylan, ‘you can’t be planning to go off and make out
again
. You look like you’ve had collagen lip implants as it is.’

‘Shut up,’ I said plaintively. ‘You make me feel like I’m just a big kiss slut.’

She arched an eyebrow. ‘Oh, I must be getting you confused with someone else then.’

Then Dylan was there. ‘Which hand?’ he drawled, putting his arms behind his back. My heart leapt. Had he bought me a present?

‘The left?’

Dylan gave me a huge, sunshiney grin. ‘That was the right answer,’ he said, swinging a key in front of my eyes.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, though it was pretty obvious what it was, but I felt like I needed more details.

‘It’s the key to the darkroom. You coming?’

‘Who said romance was dead?’ I heard Shona hiss to no-one in particular as I jumped off the wall and followed Dylan in the direction of the art block.

I had been planning to tell Dylan a few truths, I really had, but once we got into the darkroom he immediately reached for me and I kind of forgot. Dylan had me wedged against the enlarger so I couldn’t move but I didn’t want to. I felt sort of boneless and lethargic like Pudding does when she’s all sleepy and lying in the sun. Dylan’s tongue was causing havoc everywhere it went when we were suddenly interrupted by the door banging open.

‘Sod off,’ snarled Dylan, not bothering to turn round, which was a pretty stupid thing to do. Or at least that’s what Martyn, our Photography tutor, said when he proceeded to give us a major, major bollocking. With, like, knobs on. No pun intended.

Martyn frogmarched me to my personal tutor who sent me home for the rest of the afternoon. Which actually is my kind of punishment.

As I stood outside the college gates applying some Vaseline to my lips, which seem to be permanently desensitised from over-use these days, Dylan caught up with me.

‘Soooo, are we going back to yours?’ he purred.

‘No! I was
this
close to being sent home with a note,’ I snapped. ‘You know my parents don’t trust us to be alone.’

It’s true. They don’t seem overjoyed about me dating Dylan and he’s forbidden from my room unless the door’s open. It hasn’t occurred to them that we could get up to all sorts of inappropriate touching in plenty of other venues but I’m not going to be the one to shatter their illusions.

‘Oh, c’mon Edie,’ he said, nudging me. ‘I don’t want to go home and Martyn told me to get out of his sight for the rest of the day.’

‘Well, OK, then,’ I conceded. ‘I need to talk to you anyway.’

‘That sounds ominous,’ Dylan said out of the side of his mouth but then we spent the rest of the walk to my house in silence, which hacked me off.

It was like Dylan had forgotten how to speak to me.

‘What the hell is your problem?’ I blurted out the minute we got through the front door. ‘Why aren’t you talking to me?’

‘I am,’ he protested, following me up the stairs. ‘You’re the one who’s not talking to me.’

‘You’re treating me like a… a… a kiss slut!’ I said furiously.

Dylan snorted. ‘Like, you don’t treat me that way too.’

Then he sat down next to me on the bed and put an arm round my shoulders. ‘Look, Eeds, this is a bit weird for both of us. So, what do you want to talk about then?’

I shrugged. ‘Stuff. Like, y’know, stuff about each other. You never tell me what’s going on with you.’

‘The only thing going on with me is you,’ Dylan snarked. ‘There’s nothing else to tell you about.’

If there was nothing else to talk about there was only one thing else to do: investigate each other’s mouths with our tongues.

Two minutes later we were rolling about on my bed. I think it was when we landed on the floor with a loud thud that my mum realised that the house wasn’t empty. She came charging up the stairs and banished Dylan from the house forever for daring to lay his evil boy hands on her innocent, virginal daughter. It was all I could do to stop her from grounding me.

I didn’t speak to Dylan today. I think the credit has run out on his phone. Which led to the revelation that I didn’t have Dylan’s home number. He always, always calls me. And that’s weird. It’s very weird. It’s a whole world of weird. I’ve known Dylan for more than six months now. Been on intimate terms with his mouth for a little less time than that so you’d think I’d have his home phone number. I could have done the whole telephone directory thing but instead I went round to Shona’s.

‘So, are you going to have a go at me for not telling you about Dylan’s dysfunctional family?’ she wanted to know, a tad belligerently, when I asked her for his number.

I was like, woah!, but reined it back in. ‘Look, I wouldn’t expect you to betray Dylan’s confidence,’ I said sweetly. ‘You’re his oldest mate.’ Which was actually her cue to explain what the hell she meant by her strange and cryptic remark about Dylan’s family. His surname was strange, Kowalski (I think it’s Polish or Czech or even Ukrainian or something), and I allowed myself a small daydream that Dylan’s parents were dissidents from the former Eastern bloc and had come over to England to start a new life with their little baby Dylan away from the harsh totalitarian regime and the jackboot of Communist oppression, but I think that was heavily influenced by the module I was studying in History.

I came back from a vision of Dylan’s very young, very beautiful mother shielding a baby Dylan from a granite-faced Communist soldier to find Shona looking at me with an exasperated expression on her face. ‘Did you enjoy the little trip you just took with the fairies?’

‘Dylan hasn’t said anything about having a dysfunctional family,’ I said grumpily. ‘In fact, he hasn’t even admitted to having a family. I was beginning to think he was manufactured in an art boy factory.’

Shona fiddled nervously with some of the piles of junk on top of her bedside cabinet. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘Sometimes it’s hard being stuck in the middle of you two.’

Then Shona started telling me about the eye-raising stuff (can I just say, ewwwww?) she was getting up to with Paul and how she reckoned Mia was behind these weird phone calls she was getting and I forgot about ringing Dylan.

By the time I got home, it was really late and The Mothership was fuming. So, like, what else is new? She and Dad were heading off to the grandparents in Brighton for a long weekend (thank the sweet baby Jesus) and they were convinced I had Dylan stashed down the road somewhere and was just waiting for them to leave so he could enter the house and violate me on their new IKEA rug. She said as much. When your mother doesn’t want to have the sex talk with you any more but instead wants to talk to you about the possibility that you might have sex on her soft furnishings, it’s a watershed moment in any girl’s life. I know I’ll remember it fondly for many years to come.

Anyway after much foot-stamping and gagging noises, which I’ve found work much better than rational debate, I managed to persuade them that I hadn’t seen Dylan all day and they left. Then they came back to harangue me with instructions about the boiler and not forgetting to give Pudding her worming tablets. Then they left again. Time for some fish fingers and Mum’s
Downton Abbey
box-set, I think.

Oh God, Dylan’s on his way round. I wasn’t going to let him but when he heard that the ’rents were off the premises for forty-eight hours there was no stopping him. He didn’t exactly ask if he could stay over but then it’s 10.30 pm now…

Oh, hell, that’s him at the door now…

Dylan was practically leaning on the doorbell but straightened up when I took the security chain off and peered out.

‘It’ll be just my luck if you actually turn out to be a serial killer,’ was my cheery greeting.

‘Hey you,’ he murmured with a fairly half-hearted smile. ‘I brought you something.’

Usually when Dylan gets me a present it’s kiss-related (lip balm, chocolate ‘to boost your energy levels’, etc.). So I was worried that it was like, alcohol or condoms or something and he was going to try and seduce me.

But when Dylan shoved a carrier bag at me, inside was a vintage red T-shirt with the Tizer logo on it.

‘Aw, I love it,’ I squealed, giving him a hug. I
did
love it and I was also really relieved that it wasn’t going to lead to a BIG TALK ABOUT SEX.

‘Try it on now!’ Dylan insisted.

‘You coming in? You can’t stand on the doorstep all night.’

Him being there felt awkward all of a sudden – normally Dylan and I camp out in my bedroom but with the ’rents away it seemed wrong (which actually goes to show that all those Mother-sponsored talks about the dangers of teen pregnancy and having sex before I was ready did the trick).

But then again, I didn’t want Dylan in the lounge with all my embarrassing school photos. I never noticed how small our hall was or what naff pictures we had until Dylan stood there looming over me and smirking at the reproduction Canalettos.

‘Nice art,’ he remarked. ‘You can never have too many paintings of Venice in the late seventeenth century, I always say.’

‘My parents went there on honeymoon,’ I volunteered reluctantly. ‘Where did your parents go?’

Words were coming out of my mouth. Really stupid words. I so needed to work on that.

Dylan ignored my crass attempt to ferret out any information that might have to do with his personal life.

‘So, here we are,’ he purred. ‘And no authority figures within 200 miles.’

‘Um, tea?’

Dylan followed me into the kitchen and watched through narrowed eyes as I put the kettle on and pondered the mug situation. Why did all our cups have slogans on them like, ‘World’s Best Dad’ and ‘Cat owner and proud of it’? I lived in the tackiest house in the world.

‘Why are you acting like you’re scared to be alone with me?’ Dylan suddenly asked.

I blushed big time. ‘I’m not.’

‘I won’t pounce on you just ’cause your parents are off the premises. Not unless you ask really nicely, that is.’

‘God, don’t be so cheesy,’ I muttered. ‘It just feels odd, that’s all.’

By the time Dylan’d finished his tea it was past midnight. I could tell that something was bothering him ’cause he hadn’t tried to kiss me once. But as I walked past him to put his cup in the dishwasher, he pulled me onto his lap and buried his face in my neck.

I put my arms around him. ‘I know there’s something wrong, Dylan,’ I said cajolingly. ‘C’mon, tell me what’s up.’

Dylan hugged me tighter. ‘Oh, well… no, it’s nothing.’

‘Dylan!’

‘My mum’s chucked me out,’ he finally said after I’d watched the second hand on the clock do a full 360 degrees. ‘It’s not serious, she does it a couple of times a month.’

‘But why?’ I gasped.

Dylan’s lips twisted wryly. ‘Nothing earth-shattering. I forgot to put the milk back in the fridge, and the time before that I came home a bit late. She’s a bit irrational sometimes.’

I was completely out of my depth. When my mum’s being irrational, it’s usually because I’ve pinched her favourite earrings or changed all her email settings on the computer. And she would never, ever throw me out of the house. Ever.

‘Maybe she’s going through the menopause,’ I suggested feebly and Dylan snorted. ‘I’m sorry, D. I don’t know what to say, just y’know, I’m sorry.’

I gently disentangled myself from his arms, so I could be the one that did the hugging. ‘It will work itself out,’ I told him because it seemed like the right thing to say.

Despite it being in actual fact a lame thing to say, Dylan seemed ridiculously pleased to be the huggee, rather than the hugger. ‘Don’t know what I’d do without you,’ he mumbled into my hair.