Kiss Me Again by Rachel Vail Read Free Book Online Page A

you’re right. I don’t know.” I watched my ice cream melt down over the cone and drip onto the sidewalk between my sneakers. First really warm spring day, and this is how I was spending it.
    “I am right,” he said. “Go on.”
    “Yeah. Or maybe, like my father loves to tell me, I am too quick to let myself off the hook. I don’t know.”
    “Your father is a tool. Sorry, just saying.”
    “That’s okay. Thanks, actually. But anyway, what I need, I think, is to sort some stuff out. For myself.”
    “Fine.”
    “But, I can’t do it, I can’t figure out why I did what I did and how to make up for it—to Tess, or to Kevin, even to you …”
    “You have nothing to make up to me, Charlie. I told you. Leave me out of your self-flagellation. I wasn’t going out with you at the time of the Great Transgression.”
    “Stop calling it that, George, seriously,” I said. “Besides. Still.”
    “No,” he said, sounding for the first time ever a little angry at me. “Really, leave me out of that part. You don’t owe me any apologies or reparations or whatever you think you owe everybody. And I am pretty sure you don’t owe Kevin an apology, either. No way. So, what? You were a jerk? Okay, fine, maybe you were. Whatever. Everybody’s a jerk at some point. Get over it.”
    “I was a very large jerk,” I pointed out.
    “Now we’re just haggling about size,” he said.
    “What?”
    “Never mind,” he muttered. “Go on. You were in the middle of breaking up with me.”
    “Oh, George.”
    “I never asked you out, by the way. Just saying. But still. Go ahead.”
    “See? This is what I mean. I can’t figure all this out if I’m your sort-of unofficial girlfriend, because you are way too nice and funny and it confuses me.”
    “Sorry,” he said. “I’ll work on being less nice, for future unofficial girlfriends.”
    “I know you think you’re doing the moral thing by sticking by me …”
    “Yeah, that’s why I’ve stuck with you. Making a moral point. If I get a hundred moral points, I can trade them in for valuable merchandise.”
    “George.”
    “Toasters, pencil sharpeners, dusting cloths …”
    “George!”
    “Go on. I’ve stuck with you because … ?”
    “Because you are very, I don’t know, gallant.”
    “Gallant? Really? Gallant? Like a knight?”
    “Yes. And I’ve appreciated it, this whole time, so much, but I just, I have to ask you to stop. Okay? Please understand.”
    He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth to say something, but stopped before any words came out. We sat there silent for a minute or three, both miserable.
    “I just, I need to be alone for a while,” I said. “To be independent, as you once said I was, but you were wrong then, or at least maybe just … optimistic.”
    “Okay.”
    “This is my mess, so I have to sleep in it. Or whatever.”
    “Yeah, or, are you dumping me because now you’ve suddenly got Tess back? So you don’t need me?”
    “George, no.” The ice cream was gurgling around in my clenched stomach. “That’s not it.”
    “Or maybe,” he said, “you’re giving me the boot because you’re hot for Kevin Lazarus.”
    “No!” Wow, that was loud. “No, George. I swear that’s not why.”
    He didn’t say anything, so I forced myself to turn and look at him.
    “I mean, I’m not. George, come on. Why are you being so mean suddenly?”
    He shrugged. “Somebody really smart who I used to love suggested I should be less nice. Thanks for the ice cream.”
    He used to love me?
    He stood up, so I did, too. My hands were sticky with radioactive-looking melted mint chip ice cream.
    “Hey, George … ,” I said, launching into the conclusion I’d written in the margin of my notebook earlier in the day. “I just, I hope you will know someday that this is a new leaf for me, my first step in trying to do the right thing and be a good friend.”
    “It is what it is,” George said, and started to walk away. He turned around after