Happy Birthday to Me Again (Birthday Trilogy, Book 2) by Brian Rowe Read Free Book Online

picked
up and Liesel wrapped her arms around my waist. “Are you scared?”     
    I shook my head
before kissing her on the cheek. “Never. I’m sorry to say, Ms. Maupin, that
you’re gonna be stuck with me for a long time.”
    “Soon it’ll be
Mrs. Martin .”
    I shrugged.
“Sounds the same to me.”
    We could hear a
group of teenagers counting down in the distance. Ten, nine… I turned around and pulled Liesel close to me. Six, five… We stared into each others’
eyes and waited as the wind picked up even more. Two, one…
    “Please don’t
lift us up in the air,” I said.
    “Believe it or
not,” Liesel said, “this wind isn’t me.”
    “Glad to hear
it,” I whispered, before we started kissing, our arms wrapped around each
other, the wind and the chill and the cheering fading around us.
    After a minute,
I looked down. Our feet were still planted on the gravel. “Yay for gravity,” I
said.
    “Shut up and
kiss me,” Liesel said.
    “Gladly.” I
stared at her, our eyes just inches away. “Do you have any idea how great this
coming year’s gonna be?”
    “None
whatsoever,” she said.
    Our lips didn’t
part ways for another twenty minutes.   
    ---
    January came and
went, offering day after day of snow, as well as Kimber’s fourteenth birthday.
We celebrated by going out to dinner, but then she met up with friends and her
boyfriend Tommy for some bowling later that night. It was the first birthday
Kimber celebrated not entirely with us. “She’s growing up,” my mom said. “She’s
not our baby any longer,” my dad said. “She’s kissing boys now… doesn’t that
gross you guys out?” I asked my parents, but they didn’t respond. They were
still irked at me about the wedding, even though I guaranteed them that it
wasn’t going to be a crowded, lavish affair.
    My dad still
seemed confused that he’d be the one paying for the wedding, as opposed to
anyone on Liesel’s side. I’d been dating Liesel for eight months, and still,
her family history was murky to me, no matter how much I tried to get Liesel to
talk about her past. Her dad had died years ago, which I knew from the
beginning, but it wasn’t until recently that I learned she had no idea where
her mom lived, or if she was even alive. The only family she had in all of Reno
was her uncle Dom, a man in his eighties with bad hearing and a heart
condition; I had met him on only two occasions at Liesel’s dumpy apartment. No wonder the girl wants to marry me, I
kept telling myself. I’m not the only one
who wants to start a new life.
    Liesel had
almost no one, as if she had deliberately tried throughout high school to make
herself invisible. Her only friends were from her waitressing job. She had
next-to-no family. I was her shining light, and all I wanted to do was make her
happy. But underneath all the joys of the time we spent together, there was
always this feeling that there was something big Liesel wasn’t telling me. I
was the one person who knew her big secret, but she still hadn’t really opened
up about her childhood, or where she came from. If I was going to marry her, I
wanted to know everything . But given
her lack of communication about these kinds of things, I found myself pushing
all my questions to the back of my mind for a later date.
    That date turned
out to be on a real date, on
Valentine’s Day, when Liesel and I escaped to a small cabin in Lake Almanor,
California, where we could spend a glorious weekend by ourselves, she away from
her grandfather and waitressing job, me away from the questioning parents,
maturing younger sister, and my internship with Faye Snider Architects, which
had sucked up a lot of my time since I started working there (unpaid) the first
week of January.
    I found Liesel
that morning sipping coffee at the kitchen table, going over the seating
arrangement, yet again, for our April wedding.
    “Do you think
your mom would want the seat closest to the aisle, or your dad?” she