Little Miss Red (16 page)

He stood up. “Man, that made me thirsty. I’m gonna get a Coke. Want anything?”

I shook my head.

He leaned down and pecked me on the cheek. “I’ll be right back.”

I nodded. Maybe the kiss had been so bad because he was just really nervous. Even though it was hard to believe, beautiful people did, in fact, get nervous. I had read about it once in a magazine article about a twenty-year-old Russian supermodel.

As I watched him bang at the soda machine, I looked up at the three-quarters-full moon.

“Hi, God?” I said quietly. “I know we don’t talk a lot, so You might just ignore this because of that, but if You
are
listening, I just wanted to ask if maybe You could do something about the kissing stuff? You know, like teach Jack how to do it better? Because I was thinking…I mean, the fact that You put Jack in that seat next to me on
the plane…it just
had
to be because You want us to be together and fall in love, right? It’s just too…
fateful
. Like how Devon walked into the diner in Montana just as Dante was walking out and they bumped into each other and Devon almost fell because she was wearing high heels in the snow and so she grabbed onto Dante’s arms to steady herself and he pulled her close and they fell madly in love at that moment.”

A light went on in one of the condos near the gazebo, and an old woman in curlers glared at me from the window. I wasn’t sure if it was because of Jack’s banging or because it looked like I was talking to myself instead of God.

“Anyway,” I continued once she put the shade back down, “I know kissing isn’t everything, but it
does
mean a lot—especially since, You know, I don’t really do…more than that.”

Boy, even though I wasn’t Catholic, it was still really weird talking to God about sex stuff.

“Ha! Gotcha!” Jack yelled as I heard the can clunk down to the bottom of the machine.

“Okay, listen, I have to go because he’s coming back,” I whispered. “But I’d
reallyreallyreally
appreciate anything You can do. Thanks.”

As I waved to Jack, I turned my head to the side. “Oh, right. Amen,” I added.

After he chugged down half the can, he yawned. “Wow, I’m beat.” He patted his stomach. “Must be that third helping of brisket. Ready to go in?”

“I guess so,” I said as I stood up. I knew the emotional and intellectual connection in a relationship was much more important than the physical stuff, but I couldn’t help feeling completely bummed out. Did that make me beyond shallow? I hoped not.

“Cool. But I think I need another one of these first,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulders and kissing me again.

After he chewed on my face for a few seconds, I pushed him away. God must have been busy listening to someone in the Middle East or Africa or something because this kiss was just as bad. This time he
licked my nose
. Obviously, I couldn’t rely on Him to fix this. The time had come to take matters into my own hands.

“Jack?”

“Yeah?”

“I was thinking…my mouth is on the small side, so maybe we could try it with a little less…tongue?” I said nervously. Was it rude to give guys kissing pointers? I had never had to say anything to Michael, because he was a good kisser, so I wasn’t sure.

“You mean like this?” he asked, leaning in and kissing me gently. He pulled away. “How’s that?”

It was definitely better. Kind of like a B-minus instead of a D. “That was great. Just one more thing: do you think that instead of tilting your head to the left, you could tilt it to the right instead?”

“I’m left-handed, though,” he replied.

I wasn’t sure what that had to do with anything.

He smiled. “But I’ll give it a try,” he said, leaning in.

That was the last thing I remembered before the fireworks started exploding. Just a few at first. But within an hour, he was up to an A-minus. Jack may have been teaching me how to walk on the wild side, but
I
was teaching
him
how to kiss.

It’s funny how you can go from hating something to loving it, which is what happened for me with Florida that week. Suddenly, the fact that it took three times as long to get anywhere in the Delray Beach/Boca Raton area than it did in the rest of the world—because old people are horrible drivers—didn’t bother me anymore. In fact, I started to see it as cute and charming. The idea that the old man at Red Robin was yelling at the waitress because she had brought him real butter and not light canola oil spread for his baked potato wasn’t annoying; instead, I saw that he loved his wife so much he wanted to stay alive and be with her for as long as possible. The fact that it took Jack and I almost fifteen minutes to get from one end of the mall to the other because we were behind an old woman with a walker wasn’t frustrating; it just gave us time to gaze into each other’s eyes as we enjoyed the cheesy piano player playing “It Had to Be You.”

“Red, you’re so much fun to make out with,” he said
one evening as we came up for air. We had driven to the beach to watch the sunset, but because a huge downpour started when we got there, we were stuck in the Buick. Not that I minded.

“I feel the same way about you,” I whispered, reaching down into my boot to pull up my sock.

Occasionally, I still thought about Michael. But even when things were at their best with him, they had never been this good. For the last few months I had spent our make-out sessions—the few that we had had—going over the chemical element tables and conjugating the past perfect tenses of French verbs in my head. But with Jack I was 100 percent right there in the moment. Even when I tried to jump ahead into the future and think about the fights we’d have about the appropriate age for our son to get a motorbike, or whether it was okay for our daughter to get a tramp stamp of a butterfly before she went off to college, something about being with Jack just took me out of my head and slammed me back into my body. He was like a living, breathing yoga class.

“It’s weird, but I just feel so
safe
with you,” he went on. “Maybe it’s because most of the girls I go out with are real drama queens and you’re so…not.”

I smiled. I was so glad I had talked to him about being a normal girl. Ever since he compared me to a hearty stew, I had been okay with not having a dramatic life like Devon or Juliet. Girls who wore seat belts and sunblock could still be sexy.

I used to hate the way that the way-too-bright Florida sun made everything look so harsh—especially the scowls on the faces of all the Edenites whenever kids made the mistake of making noise in the pool as if they were having fun. But the next morning, I sat on a lounge chair slathered in SPF 55 (thankfully, I still had enough of my emergency money left over to buy some) with zinc oxide on my nose and my red cowboy hat on my head, and it looked like the Edenites were charmed and not at all annoyed by Jack’s whooping and splashing as he did cannonball after cannonball off the edge of the pool. I mean, I couldn’t tell for sure, because I was wearing my Chunnels, but how could they
not
find him as adorable as I did?

“Hey Red, watch this!” he yelled as he climbed out of the pool in the neon yellow swim trunks Grandma Roz had insisted he borrow from Art.

“Okay, I’m watching!” I yelled back, cringing slightly when he almost tripped on an oxygen tank as he made his way back to the edge of the pool.

“You sure you’re watching?” he shouted, doing knee bends and cracking his knuckles.

“Yup!” I yelled back. It was very inspiring to be around a person who had such high self-esteem and so much confidence. Not only didn’t he mind people looking at him, but he actually seemed to love it.

He walked back a few paces and, with a running start, did a flip into the water.

“Jack, that was
awesome
!” I yelled once he came up for air. I don’t think he had planned to land on his belly like that, but the fact that he could stand that amount of pain (the smack of his stomach on the water was
really
loud) was beyond impressive.

He swam over to the side of the pool and jumped out, making his way through the sea of Edenites who stared at him in awe. Although, when I squinted, I realized that maybe they were staring at him in annoyance. He
was
dripping all over them. But one of the things I loved about Jack was the fact that even though the old people didn’t even try to hide their disapproval when they first met him and saw his tattoo, he still was able to completely win them over with his charm. Even Grandma Roz’s best friend, Mrs. Bernstein (who was crankier than Grandma Roz), was now calling him
bubelah
.

When he got to me, I put aside my copy of
Propelled by Passion
so he wouldn’t drip on it and handed him a towel.

He pointed to the book. “Wow, I can’t believe what a fast reader you are. So that’ll be the third time you’ve read that?”

I nodded. Now that we had talked and sealed our bond with numerous make-out sessions, I felt comfortable enough to be my truest self with him. Which is why I told him all about Devon over breakfast that morning. I even read some of the more romantic parts of the book aloud to him.

He plopped down on the lounge chair next to me and
reached for his faux Ray-Ban aviator sunglasses. As we lay there with our faces tilted up to the sky—him in his Rye-Buns and me in my Chunnels—I felt like part of an ad for a fancy Caribbean resort. As long as the motorized wheelchair that belonged to the woman sitting in the chair next to me was cropped out of the photo.

I turned to him and took my glasses off. “Jack?”

“Yeah, Red?” he replied, sliding his own glasses up his face and staring out into the distance. I wasn’t sure what he was looking at because all I saw was an overly tan, bikini-clad woman in the distance, but she was at least forty, so I doubted he was looking at her.

“I just wanted to say…well, these past few days, being with you has been just great.”

“I feel the same way,” he replied.

I reached for the sunscreen. “Want me to do your back?”

He shook his head. “Nah, I’m okay.”

“I know you like to live on the edge, but you need to take care of yourself more,” I said.

“You’re right,” he said, turning his back to me. “My shrink says a lot of my self-destructive behavior patterns are because I have low self-worth.”

“Anyway, as I was saying, not only has it been educational, like learning all about classic rock and stuff,” I continued, “but I think the most important thing is you’ve really taught me how to stay in the moment.”

He turned his head toward me and smiled. “I have?”

“Uh huh. I just love that you’re all about the ‘now’ rather than last week, or next month. You’re just…
here
.” I sounded like Luca, the Italian olive oil heir turned yoga teacher that Devon had a mad, passionate rebound affair with in
Excited by Envy
when she was trying to get over Dante.

Once I was done doing his back, he settled into his chair again and reached for the ziplock bag of pistachios Grandma Roz had given him. “Thanks, Red. That’s a huge compliment.” When I had said I liked pistachios during my last trip, she had complained about how expensive they were, but when
Jack
mentioned in passing that he liked them, she immediately sent Art out to get some. Of course, I was glad that she loved Jack as much as I did, but you’d think because she was
my
grandmother, she’d care more about whether I was better fed. He threw a pistachio in the air and caught it in his mouth. Then he turned and flashed me that brain-scrambling grin.

I smiled back and started tickling his right arm with my now-chipped Cotton Candy nails. Obviously, although I was keeping
some
of my responsible self, in light of my new life with Jack, I would be making the leap to Dark as Midnight at my next manicure. “It’s just so cool,” I continued, “because when I’m in the moment like this, I’m not thinking about the future, you know?”

“I hear you,” he said. “I
never
think about the future,” he added proudly.

“I mean, I’m not thinking about what’s going to happen with us when we’re back in L.A.,” I said, “if, you know, this was just a Spring Break fling…or if it’s going to continue.” Okay, maybe I
had
been thinking about it. Just a little bit.

He shifted in his chair.

“And I’m not thinking about the fact that if it
does
continue, what’s going to happen to us when I go east for college, and whether our relationship can handle the distance.” It felt so good to feel comfortable enough to be able to say exactly what was on my mind without thinking it through.

He shifted again. He was so fidgety. Maybe he had to go to the bathroom.

“Or how we’re going to manage to see each other when your music career takes off and you’re on the road a lot.” I sat up and looked over at him, squinting against the sunlight. “Jack? Are you okay? You look a little pale.”

“Uh, yeah,” he said, reaching for my water bottle and chugging it down. “Just too much sun, I think.”

I settled back in my chair. “Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I’m not thinking about any of that stuff. I’m just enjoying the time we have together, rather than, I don’t know, having any sort of
expectations
about what’s going to happen with us.”