Lessons in Love (26 page)

“Snow in October?” He looks doubtful.

“Anything’s possible.” I stand near him, looking at my house from a slight distance, and feeling it. I thought coming home would be this great, comfy embrace, but it feels now like I’m visiting — trespassing, even, and that it’s time to go. “Sounds fun…a weekend in the Berkshires.”

“It’ll be a full house — you, me, the good folks inside…” he point to the house. “Plus Chloe and maybe one or two others.”

I picture random couplings, doors opening and shutting, me walking in on Chloe and Jacob. I flash for a second to Linsday Parrish and suddenly I remember something Charlie said during our break-up call. He’s hosting. Hosting potential students? He could be hosting Lindsay — she is signed out of the dorms tonight. What if Lindsay and Charlie were more than gracious? What if she beds down with Jacob and Charlie? What if Jacob reads my journal? What if Amelia never confronts Nick Cooper head on? “Has all the makings of a French farce,” I say, striving for literary humor.
Amelia finds Nick in the orchard, the trees bare of fruit.
How did an orchard get to the beach? I mentally pinch myself. “But count me in.”

“Did you just disappear to writing land in your head?”

I nod. “I can’t shake the sensation that I’m missing something — in the story. That’s why I threw the shark in.”

Dalton takes his hands from his pockets, the slanting light from the porch and the moon on his hair, and takes a step toward me. “You know you skipped over me, right?”

I pull my head back, pigeon style, surprised. “When?” Then I know. “Oh, right, with the hug.”

“Yeah.” He stands closer to me than before, his tall frame half a foot away. “Why do you think that is, exactly?”

I look up at him then turn my head to the side, biting my lip. Stirring way down inside me I feel something — a crumbling of sorts, and a tumbling sweep of lust or crush or something more or in between — something that leaps from the page. Sparks. Electricity. That’s what the air is between us. “What, that we don’t…”

“That for all of our intense conversations, I don’t think you’ve so much as poked me in the arm.”

“Oh, like you’ve been all over me?” I take a step back and raise my eyebrows. “You’re the least touchy-feely person I’ve ever met.”

Dalton moves back so he can lean on the front of the golf cart. “Not really.”

“Oh, just with me then? Do I disgust you?” I make a joke of it.

Dalton taps the golf cart’s nose with his palms. “So — my story — just so you’re aware — takes place in high school.”

“He said, switching the subject….” I pull my arms around my waist, my jacket forgotten inside. “Isn’t that the kiss of death?”

Dalton shrugs. “It’s the truth, though.”

“What’s it called?” From inside, I hear a tapping and look back at the house. Jacob’s face appears at the window. If I look closely I can see he’s holding up my journal and pointing to it, but I don’t know what he’s saying.

“Sweet Potato.” Dalton removes himself from the golf cart. Like lots of things he says, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or not. “It’s about tonight.”

Looking at him, I decide for action instead of motion — not the easy way out where I think, think, think and leave my characters on the beach — but where I do something. “I’ll hug you now, if that’s okay.”

I take a step forward. Dalton stands in front of me his hands at his sides and it occurs to me I don’t know if he’ll be a good hugger, one of those people who pats or rubs your back, or if he’ll do the a-frame, where only your shoulders touch. I open myself up, and wrap my arms around his back. The hug slides seamlessly from a thank you hug to a full embrace, bringing me closer to him like good writing pulls you somewhere, my heart and chest pressed into his while his hands, ones I’ve never felt before, grip my shoulder. We stay there like that, with his hands now in my hair, my arms wrapped around him like I’m afraid he’ll move or slip away. “So what happens, at the end?” I ask turning my face up to him.

His pale eyes write sentences I will never have to write down to remember, and all of it — the applications, the stories, the lingering questions about Jacob and Chloe and Lindsay and Charlie, my family, the whole rest of senior year — are bottled up into this moment. I keep my face titled up to him, hoping he’ll finally punctuate the instant with a kiss.

All along I wanted my writing to stand on its own — to not involve high school or my life, to just be. I thought Amelia and Nick Cooper were just random characters. Then, maybe I thought they were symbols, amalgams of me and Charlie, or maybe Jacob and Charlie mushed together leading me — and Amelia — nowhere. Maybe that’s the biggest lesson of all, about writing and about love, knowing where your motivation comes from, why you act the way you do. What makes up that part of you that no one else ever touches.

“It’s you,” I say to Dalton. “You’re Nick Cooper.”

Dalton keeps a grip on me but darts his eyes away. “When I read the story — I asked Chaucer if I could…It wasn’t that the characters weren’t believable.”

“But you said…”

“I know what I said — but it’s just that I wanted them to act differently. Only, it’s not my story, is it?”

Amelia could see the fin out in the water. Unsure if it was a dolphin or a shark, she pointed to it so Nick could see. He stood up but didn’t bother looking out to the water at what could be lurking underneath.

“It kind of is now.” Then I do more — more than just tilt my face up to him. I touch his cheek with my hand feeling each contour of his face, the slight stubble on his jaw, the easy sweep of his neck and the soft cotton of his shirt.

“Then try this. Nick Cooper didn’t bother with what was lurking underneath. He could see — and so could Amelia — everything very clearly.”

The last moments of my illicit birthday tick on, the rest of the year tugs us forward with Jacob pounding the window inside, my empty dorm bed waiting for my return, applications and choices ahead. Above us, the sky ripples like seawater and here, on this planet Earth, Dalton leans down and puts his mouth onto mine. We kiss once and then kiss more; all at once kicking the past to the side, and unfurling the future.

During the kiss, and even afterwards, when we’re standing in my driveway holding hands in the autumn air, I suddenly get it.

“What’re you thinking?” Dalton pushes the tips of his fingers into mine.

“About the Beverly William Award.” I nearly whisper this.

Dalton’s arm finds its way around my waist. “Really? Not just how much you’ve wanted to kiss me for so long?”

I feel my mouth wrinkly into a half-smile and look at his pale eyes. “That, too. But it’s just…”

“I know — you can’t control when plot takes over and life sends you inspiration,” he says.

“Is that what you are?? I ask but as I say it I understand that it’s true. Somehow he is the past and present all mushed together. “Everything just feels so crisp, you know? Like I’m suddenly ready for…anything.” I don’t blush or stammer, I just stand there with this new-old boy who gets me and breathe in the night air.

“So,” Dalton looks over to the house. The window opens and I can hear Jacob’s guitar. He strums chords that in another season might be diluted by breeze or spring birds but right now just float out to where we are.

I have to acknowledge the music. “Elvis Costello.” I listen to the words and then sing. “Almost blue/there’s a girl here and she’s almost you.”

Dalton nods. “Yeah — he wrote that song for Chet Baker.” Dalton clears his throat. “He will get over this, you know.”

“Jacob?” I ask but don’t need a reply. I nod. “I wasn’t really sure there was much to get over.” But maybe that’s impossible. Maybe your past is always rushing up to you and your job is to swat at it or ignore it or put it in its place so you can greet whatever’s on deck (oh, Dad would be proud of my baseball analogy!).

Dalton raises his eyebrows. “I hope I never have to.”

Our sides meet. I press my sweatered self into him, feeling my face on his sweater. “Never have to what?”

Dalton turns so we’re facing each other and puts his hands firmly on my shoulders as though giving me a pep talk. “You. Love. I hope I never have to get over you.” He grins. Get it?”

“I do. Yeah.” I stand on my tip toes to kiss him and lose myself in the moment. Then my mind wanders. “You know, if we ended up together — like, long term, tonight would be our last first kiss.”

Dalton breathes in through his nose and licks his lips, humor and his usual bittersweet air playing a duet in his eyes. “The last, first kiss?” I nod. “I’m so using that as the title of my Beverly William Award story.”

I punch his shoulder. “Thief.”

“Good writers steal, bad writers borrow.” He grins. “Chaucer told me that.”

I shrug my shoulders, all fake disinterest and ingénue pouting. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”

“Why’s that?” He laces his fingers with mine and I am all at once seeing the moment as a close-up and long distance.

“Because.” My hair falls from behind my ears and I tuck it back. What will be happening when my hair is back to shoulder-length? Where will things stand with Dalton? What stories will I have written? “Because I already know how my Beverly William story starts. That’s what I realized when you kissed me.”

“You kissed me, too.”

“Fine. When
we
kissed.” I slide my shoes on the pavement and the scratchy sound echoes, mixing with the music from inside. We will go back in and have candy and cake and celebrate my eighteenth year. I tug on his hand and he tugs me back into the immediate. The right now. This minute.

“So, aren’t you gonna tell me? This infamous start to what is surely going to secure you the prize — jointly with my entry, of course, so we can travel the world together and write about our adventures?”

A huge smile overtakes my face as the thought of this coming true. “Okay. So, I don’t have a title yet but — you know how you’re supposed to write what you know but write it with some perspective? Some distance? That’s what I do all the time in my head — why I always said things like ‘in the movie version of this’. It’s just another way of backing up or focusing in.”

“Exactly.” Dalton takes this moment not to kiss me, though he looks as though he’d like to, but to straighten my jacket collar. Such a sweet and unassuming gesture. “Let’s hear it.”

I look at the campus, my house that isn’t mind anymore, hear the noises from inside, and feel myself firmly on this earth, in this place. “Okay. Here goes. This is how it begins:
Just to get this out of the way: yes, it’s my real name. And no, I wasn’t born on a commune. In the movie version of my life, there’d be some great story to go with how I got my name — a rock star absentee father who named me in his hit song, or a promise my real father made to his grandmother in the old country, at least a weepy love story of two people so happy about their daughter they had to give her my name. But there’s not — there’s just me.”

Dalton nods, listening intently. “That’s it?” He plants a kiss on my mouth and then looks at my eyes, questioning.

“Yes,” I nod. “That’s it.”

Emily Franklin is the author of
Liner Notes
and a story collection,
The Girls’ Almanac
. She is also the author or coauthor of over a dozen young adult books including
The Half-Life of Planets
(nominated for YALSA’s Best Book of the Year) and
Tessa Masterson Will Go to Prom
(named to the 2013 Rainbow List). A former chef, she wrote the cookbook-memoir
Too Many Cooks: Kitchen Adventures with 1 Mom, 4 Kids, and 102 Recipes
to chronicle a year in the life of new foods, family meals, and heartache around the table. Her fiction and essays have appeared in the
Boston Globe
, Monkeybicycle, the
Mississippi Review
,
Post Road Magazine
, Carve Magazine, and Word Riot, as well as on National Public Radio, among others. Her recipes have been featured in numerous magazines and newspapers, and on many food websites. She lives with her husband, four kids, and one-hundred-sixty-pound dog outside of Boston.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Emily Franklin

Cover design by Mimi Bark

978-1-4804-5227-5

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com