The Summer of Me & You (22 page)

Tonight.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

More than

*

Right after the rain, a blanket of purple-black clouds covered the sky. I hadn't gone inside. I sat atop the hood of my car, leaned back against the windshield, peering up into the chaos of the storm. Even though it'd rained, the heat was still stifling, the air heavy. The world was still spinning, I was certain of it, but it didn't feel that way. Not to me. It was as if someone had hit pause-play. If Kayleigh really felt that way about me, there'd be nothing I could do to change her mind. My body felt sore, like I'd been in a marathon run that'd gone into overtime.
 

I didn't want to admit it, but what she'd said stung. I didn't want to call her if she thought that. I didn't want to see her. I just wanted to forget.

The sound of water swirling around tires caught my attention and I jerked my head to the side. Kayleigh was biking up the road.

Shit.

This was too soon. Too much to deal with. I wanted to vanish. I wasn't going to look at her. I kept my eyes focused in the sky, keeping my emotions as steady as I could as she swung off and crashed her bike onto the lawn.

“What'n the fuck d'you want, Kayleigh? Here to say more?”

“I don't wanna be just another girl you've kissed, Kaleb.”

You more than just kiss me, Kayleigh.
I wanted to say.
It's more than that.
But how was she to ever understand when she'd so clearly made bold assumptions about me and my intentions from the get go? There was no point in trying to explain all of what I felt to her, and plead my case. It felt too much like begging.
 

“Kayleigh, maybe I was wrong. Perhaps you're right. We shouldn't do this. It was a bad idea, and...I'm sorry.” I hopped off the hood of the car. “Go home, Kayleigh.” I walked toward my house. I wanted to dart up the steps and close the door in her face.

“No, I don't want to go home.” She chased after me.

“You're gonna have to.”

She reached out and grabbed my arm, nearly yanking me to her, tears forming in her eyes. For a girl her size she was pretty strong. I jerked away.

“Kaleb,” she said. “Are we breaking up?”

“We're not together. Summer will be over soon and this'll all be forgotten about.” I kept my gaze focused in the tree top.

She panicked. “No it won't! You were the first guy, Kaleb.”

I kicked at the wet dirt, making my toes muddy, avoiding eye contact with her. It was too hard. Much too hard. “We didn't have sex, Kayleigh. Get over it. Whatever that was, wasn't it. I can assure you.”

“Oh,” she flared. “I
bet
you could.”
 

“It didn't mean the same for me, as it meant for you.” I knew exactly how to choose my words. I knew from the moment I said that how Kayleigh would interpret it. For her, it'd mean that she was just another girl, just another conquest. That all I wanted was sex, but in my world, in my mind, it meant the exact opposite. It'd meant more to me than that, it was Kayleigh who thought I was just trying to screw her over the summer. In her eyes, I was a pig. A guy who wanted to bang as many girls as possible. Didn't matter where. Okay, so it'd almost happened in a junkyard, but that was
my
place. It was a
special
place to
me
where I thought about her
a lot.
But of course she'd never know that because she didn't take the time to realize.
 

“I figured that,” she said, almost inaudibly.

“Yeah, I knew you would.”

“So it's true?”

“You decide. You've already decided so many things.”

She sighed. “I don't understand. I want to be with you, Kaleb?”

“Do you? Didn't seem like it to me.”

“And why not? Because I didn't have sex with you tonight? Is that it?”

“Oh yeah, Kayleigh. That's totally it.”  Now I was extra mad and even more hurt. My eyes shot away from the world around me and back to her. I blazed. “You've got it all figured out the way you always do.” Trying to hold my composure was proving difficult.

“Then tell me what it was that made you think I didn't want you.”

“Gee, I dunno. Probably something along the lines of how I made you feel like junkyard trash? Does that ring a bell?
Ding, ding ding.
”
 

She was crying now. Not just crying, she was bawling. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean any of that.”

“The damage is already done. I don't know how you really feel now.”

“Confused,” she wiped her eyes.

“Yeah, join the club.”

She sniffed.

I couldn't hold it in. I wanted her to know exactly why I was mad, angry, hurt.

“You insinuated that I told
every
girl I've ever been with the same things I told you. That I brought all of them to the junkyard where I brought you. You made me feel like complete shit during one of the most important and most wished for moments of my existence, so thanks a fucking lot. Oh, and on
top
of that, I even asked you if what you were saying was true, if that's how I really made you feel, and you said
yes.
I wasn't with you for the sex. I tried to prove that to you a thousand times over by taking my time and not rushing things. Showing you that I could be with you without anything having to happen. You knew it was a no pressure zone with me. Yeah, I know I fucked up back there, but all you had to say was
Kaleb, I think we should wait,
or
Kaleb, I'm not ready, please slow down
or
Kaleb, we should talk about this, I've never done this before.
Any combination of those things would've worked. But no, you said some hurtful shit instead. Things that you can't take back now.”
 

“You know I didn't mean it,” she sobbed. “Please don't do this. I don't understand. I don't know what happened. I was only expecting a kiss. It was the first time you'd ever kissed me, I didn't know what to think.”

“Yeah, well it could've been our thousandth kiss, but you ran away from me the first time, too.”

“So what happens now?” She slowed the crying down to a minimum.

I shrugged. “Nothing happens now.”

“Can we at least be friends?” Oh my fucking lightning bugs, there went that
dreaded
fucking stupid ass question all girls couldn't wait to ask after you clearly made it obvious to them that it was over.
All
of it was over. Not part of it.
All
of it. You couldn't be friends with the girl you wanted to fuck. If you were
me,
you wouldn't even be able to sit in the same damn room with her for thirty seconds. They only wanted to ask that so they could see how far they could push you before you couldn't take it anymore. It's like they wanted to tuck you into a nice corner like a stuffed toy and play with your emotions until they made a decision to turn the action on full blast or not.
 

 Did she really think I'd go for that? Hang out with her and pretend I had no desire boiling rapidly in my blood? How could she even
ask
me that after what had happened between us this afternoon? How could
she
want to be only friends with
me?
It couldn't possibly be that easy for her, and if it was then that  added to the theory—she didn't know
what
the hell she wanted.
 

She either had to be mine,
all
mine in
all
aspects of the word, or nothing at all. Yes, I wanted it all or nothing at all.
 

“No,” I said. “Absolutely not. There's no need for you to hold onto me. And I've already told you that I don't want to be your friend.”

“Then what is it that you want! God!” She was mad. Hurt. Confused. But so was I. Everything was going so great with us. I'd waited for that kiss and it felt like it'd taken forever to happen. And when it finally did? I screwed it all up, I'd lost control because I'd spent so damn long wanting her, I couldn't hold it in anymore. I know that I screwed up, but it didn't call for what she'd said to me, not when everything about her— especially her body, had said that she wanted me, too. She practically enticed it. She couldn't fuck with my head like that and get away with it. She couldn't want me one minute, knowing that I wanted her, too and then make me feel like complete shit the next by freaking out and running away.

“I want you to leave. Now.”

“Fine!” In a mad fit, she stormed across the lawn and jerked up her bike.

But before she biked away into the distance, she said, “You were also my first kiss. I probably rehearsed it a thousand times in my mind. I always imagined it having a better ending.”

The kiss had been amazing. Best kiss of my life. It was everything else that happened after that sucked. I watched her disappear before pulling open the door and stepping inside my house.

She didn't know that I'd seen her. Mom reached quickly for a magazine, arbitrarily ruffling its pages back, feigning that she'd been reading it the entire time instead of eavesdropping. When I stepped into the room, she made a show of being suddenly interrupted by my presence, and “courteously” closed the magazine.

“Is everything okay?”

“It amazes me how you ask that as though you weren't listening in through the window the entire time. I know you way better than that, so stop with the games already, mom.”

“Is it true?”

“Is what true?” I plopped down on the couch, exhausted.

“Is it really over for you and Kayleigh.”

I bit down on my thumb nail. “Yeah, it is.”

“Well, Kaleb, it's your own damn fault. You knew better than to pull what you pulled with that girl. You've confused her! She doesn't know what to think!”

“She's always assuming things.”

“Because you're always leaving her with blanks!”

“Oh my God, I don't understand women. I thought you fuckers
loved
madlibs and puzzles. You're supposed to come fully equipped with the mental capacity to fill in a damn blank
properly
.”

“Kaleb, let me express this to you in the most firm, yet
gentle
way possible. If you
ever, ever, EVER
refer to us women as
fuckers
one more time, I will beat you with an ugly stick and you'll never catch a girl again. You got it?
Good.
Now tell me how you're going to get Kayleigh back.”
 

“What?!” I flew up off the couch. I already had a headache. “I'm going to my room. If you need me for anything I won't respond.”

“Okay, but you can't avoid me forever. We're going to talk about this eventually.”

“Why are you so concerned with my life, anyway?”

“Because. I live vicariously through you my darling.” She flashed me a smile.

“Well, if that's true, you have no life, in both senses of the meaning.”

“I'm about to.”

“How's that?”

“I have a mission—a purpose. I'm going to help my idiotic son win back the love of his teenage life.”

“You pester me too much. Go crochet something or join a damn book club.”

“You shouldn't tempt me, Kaleb. I really do have an ugly stick and it has your name written all over it.”

“I'll take my chances.”

“You seem to be doing a lot of that lately. Look where it's gotten you so far.”

I reached down to the coffee table and scooped up all the magazines.

“What are you doing!” she cried.

“Throwing these in the trash. You never read them anyway.”

“Yes I do!”

“Oh really? Then tell me, what lovely article were you reading when you eavesdropped on me and Kayleigh?”

“That's easy. From
Parenting
magazine: Thirteen signs that there's a good chance your son was dropped on his head as an infant.”
 

I sniggered. “You
do
realize that would involve the high probability that you were a terrible and neglectful mother though, right? I mean, if that did happen, it wasn't
my
fault. It was yours. So, no offense taken.”
 

“Shit,” she said. “Okay, fine. You win this round. But the game is
on
.”