Page 8

8. I Was Kissing Her, Moron!

Kerry

It took two hours of driving and another one of hiking to reach our destination. We looked around for a decent place to make camp and Maddy found a spot that was sheltered by a steep rock face on two sides. As the others split up to find firewood, I stood guard as Tara dug into the earth to make a small crater.

As I watched her smooth out the sides, I had an idea.

#

Gemma

“You’re not throwing that at her.”

John moved in front of Tara and crossed his arms as Kerry bounced a fist-sized rock in his hand.

“Okay, I’ll throw it at you . Tara, shield him with a wall of dirt before this rock hits him.”

“Um, can you throw a practice one off to the side first?” Tara requested. “So I can see how fast you’re going to throw it.”

Kerry tossed the rock up and down a few times before winding up and hurling it across the small clearing faster than my eye could follow. I did, however, see the explosion when it impacted a tree’s trunk. Bark, stone fragments, and splinters of wood flew everywhere as a deafening crack! resounded through the clearing.

“Oh my goodness!” I squeaked.

“And you wanted to throw that at her ?!” John shouted, his fists clenched at his sides.

“Okay, Tara,” Kerry picked up another rock, oblivious or indifferent to John’s anger and Tara’s panic. “On three. One, two, three!”

Biting my lip, I watched as Tara dropped straight to the ground and touched her fingers to the earth. A thick slab of dirt rocketed up a few inches in front of John, just in time to bear the brunt of the rock. Kerry hadn’t thrown it nearly as hard as the practice one, and I realized he’d been trying to scare Tara into reacting faster.

“Very good!” he called out. “Hey, I have another idea. Can you make a dirt wave? Something like a ripple that moves across the ground?”

“I don’t know. I never tried.” Her brow furrowed. “Like I said, I’m just a gardener. I work mainly with plants and trees.”

“You’re more than just a gardener, Tara,” John told her. “You’re an earth goddess.”

Without seeming to think about it, Kerry grabbed my hand and tugged me with him across the clearing. I had to trot to keep up, but it made me smile.

“If you can control the ground, can you control water, too?” he asked her.

“Some.” Tara seemed uncomfortable. “I can channel it where I want it, but I can’t create it.”

“How much have you ever tried to move?”

“Just enough to water something. A few gallons, maybe?”

“Did that strain you?”

“Not at all.” she said.

“Can you turn the snow into water?”

“I don’t know. I—”

“I never tried?” He tilted his head. “Why not? No, never mind. I’ve noticed that about the Sanctuary. There isn’t much creative thinking about using powers. Me and Gemma have been talking about that. We’re gonna come up with ways for her to use her power differently. Offensively. You should think about using your power differently, too, John.”

“Me? What else can I do with my power?”

“You can teleport wherever and whenever you want. You can smell a lie as easy as I smell the Diabolical. You have a better reaction time than most other classes. I bet you could even learn to make weapons. What else can you do with your power? Anything .”

“You’re good for us, Kerry.” Tara grinned. “You’re helping us think outside the box about ourselves. It’s liberating, in a way.”

“My warden is a guide, but he’s learned other class-specific skills.” Kerry shrugged. “Like, he can heal a little and manifest small weapons. He says it’s because he has an open mind, but Mr. Snyder told me that, as a neph ages, it gets easier for him to pick up other skills.”

“Someone like Clem must know just about as much as you can, then,” I said. “You ever hear the saying, ‘Beware the old man in a field where others die young’?”

“No, but that’s a good one.” He smiled down at me in a way that made my heart flutter.

We worked in the clearing for about an hour. Tara was able to turn the snow into water and back again. While it was in its liquid state, she learned she could form it, almost like play dough, into a shape. She tried picking it up in a sphere. It dripped a little, but she did it, levitating it several feet with ease before turning it back into snow.

Kerry’s earth-wave idea worked, too. It looked like a giant snake sliding under a rug. Tara worked on making the wave larger and larger until she could control one about eight feet wide and just as high. By then, she was tired, and we decided to head back to the campsite.

Tara and John went ahead of us, and Kerry held my hand as we ambled along.

“Thanks, Kerry,” I said.

“For what?”

“Showing us a door when all we could see was a window.”

“I’ll have to think about that one for a while before I understand it.”

“Oh, I think you understand me.” I bumped his hip with mine. “You’re just too embarrassed to accept it as praise and say thank you, Lab Rat.”

“Will you stop calling me that?”

“Sure, Goo—” I started to say, but he cut me off.

“Not that , either!”

He stopped walking and looked down at me. I could feel his tall frame radiating tension.

Uh-oh. Is he angry? He doesn’t get mad at me very often, but— My thoughts derailed as his eyes dipped to my lips. Is he thinking of— No, of course not.

Then his hands came up to cup my face in his palms. I grabbed the front of his jacket and held on. He slowly bent his head and kissed my temple.

Nope. Definitely not angry.

“Kerry?” My voice came out as a squeak.

He chuckled and his lips glided down my cheek. I shivered as goosebumps erupted all over my skin.

“Am I scaring you, Short and Sweet?” His deep voice only encouraged the goosebumps.

“A little,” I admitted.

But I’ve been dreaming of this for weeks .

We’d held hands and hugged and cuddled up together, but he hadn’t kissed me other than on my knuckles. Now I realized how intimate this was - and he hadn’t even gotten to my lips yet! - and understood why it had taken him so long to work up to this.

“Scaring you like that day in the pool?” His mouth hovered above my jaw, and his lips grazed my skin with each word. “Or scaring you like the day we met?”

“Uh,” was the best I could do. My thoughts had scattered like dandelion seeds and my heart tried to jump out of my throat.

“I’m gonna guess the pool. You’re all wide-eyed and shaking like you were then. I think you wanted to kiss me that day. Maybe even as much as I wanted to kiss you.” His hands trembled a little. “Like I want to kiss you now. Is that okay?”

“Uh-huh.” I nodded, too, to make it extra clear that I was onboard.

I closed my eyes as his mouth met mine, his touch gentle and slow. When he moved his lips, I mimicked him, not really knowing what to do, but figuring I was going in the right direction when a deep rumble vibrated through his chest.

My tiger’s purring , I mused, half in a dream.

Or at least I was until I heard a soft thud. My eyes flew open to see chunks of white raining down on us.

The side of Kerry’s head was plastered with snow and his eyes filled with murder. I was too dazed at first to understand what had happened, but I followed his line of sight and saw Jax tossing a snowball up and down. Gigi stood next to him, her hands up to protest her innocence, but she needn’t have bothered. The mischief in Jax’s eyes told the whole story.

“Jax!” Kerry roared as he released me.

“What?” Jax grinned unrepentantly. “Look at how red Tomato is! It’s obvious she needs to cool down. I was just trying to help.”

Kerry ran at Jax, who took off in a flurry of snow. Still woozy, I staggered over to where Gigi stood looking down at her phone.

“I did try to stop him,” she laughed, “but you know how Jax gets when he has that look in his eyes.”

“Kerry kissed me.”

“So I saw. Your eyes are still spinning.”

I was stunned and not exactly sure where I was or what I was supposed to be doing. It felt as if I were standing on the edge of a sheer cliff, teetering in the wind. The adrenaline rush was heady, but the fear was paralyzing.

Gigi gasped and covered her mouth with one hand.

“Oh my goodness, was that the first time? I am so sorry Jax interrupted! I am going to kill that boy!”

“Gigi,” I whispered, “I love him.”

“Well, yeah . I’ve known that for months.”

“I’m scared.”

“Of Kerry ? I know I was doubtful at first, but he would never hurt you, Gemma. I’m convinced of it.”

“No, not of him.” I pressed my hands against my chest. “It’s this feeling inside me. It’s so … much, I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes!”

She wrapped an arm around my shoulders and hugged me.

“Your sweet Kerry feels the same way about you. Imagine how hard it must be for him to understand that he’s falling in love.”

“He is ?” My jaw dropped.

“Are you serious?” She pulled back and held out her phone.

Puzzled, I looked down at it and saw she’d snapped a photo of Kerry and me kissing just now.

“You… You took a picture of us?”

“It is adorable how tender he is with you. Look at how he’s holding your face! Yes, my friend, he loves you. How could you question it?”

I blinked. Sure, I’d hoped that he was feeling the same way about me, but he’d never said—

Does he need to? I asked myself. Does he need to say it when each look, each touch, each action, proves how he feels?

I smiled. No, he didn’t. He showed me he loved me when he kissed my knuckles or held my hand or threw himself between me and danger, even if the danger was only a rude loudmouth in the hallway. I didn’t need the words because he was saying them every time he called me angel.

“Share that with me, will you?” I asked Gigi. “I want to set it up as his contact on my phone.”

“With that romantic song you use as his ringtone? Girl, you got it bad!” she teased me and looped an arm around my waist. “I know you tease him with Lab Rat, but I think of him as Alley Cat. He’s scarred and tough and the dumbest things get his back up, but scratch him behind the ears and he’s all yours.”

I snorted, and we giggled our way back to camp.

#

Kerry

“I said I was sorry!” Jax squealed. “I didn’t know it was your first time trying to kiss her.”

“What do you mean, trying to? I was kissing her, moron!” I tightened my grip on his jacket and shook him.

“I guess you could call that a kiss.”

“Shut up!” As heat skimmed across my cheeks, I shook him harder. “Why are you the way you are?”

Even though I shoulda given him a good hiding, my heart wasn’t in it. All I could think of was ditching him so I could go find Gemma. Kissing her wasn’t nearly as traumatic as I’d worried it would be.

John suddenly popped up next to us. I’d released Jax and sunk into a low crouch before I realized it was him.

“Gigi sent me.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “She said to give him an extra cuff from her, then started to mutter about how he fried her fritters.”

I started to walk back toward the camp, and my boys fell into step with me.

“Heh.” I sneered at Jax. “You’re in trouble now. When we get back to camp, Tennessee is gonna whale on you.”

“Good!” he laughed. “I love when she does. She jiggles in all the right places.”

“Stop right there.” John held up on hand. “Some of us don’t want to be corrupted by your debauched mind.”

“Yeah, right.” Jax rolled his eyes. “You and Tara have been together for what? Nearly a year? Are you saying kissing is as far as you’ve gotten?”

“Is there some kind of timetable here that I don’t know about?” I demanded. “I almost felt like it was too soon for a simple kiss. Is Gemma expecting something I haven’t done yet? Something I don’t even know I’m supposed to be doing? Argh! This whole relationship stuff is harder than I thought it would be!”

I stopped walking and stared at the snow.

She doesn’t seem impatient about it, though, and she’s never asked for more. So maybe it’s okay.

“How many girls have you been with?” Jax asked and sounded serious now.

“Too many. But I never had a relationship with one. And there’s never been anyone I’ve felt like this about.”

“Okay, Relationship tip number… What are we up to? Twenty? Twenty-five?”

“Shut up.”

“You go at the speed you’re both comfortable with. It’s about the two of you, no one else.”

“And you should have seen her face when she came back to camp,” John chimed in. “She was radiant and her eyes were all starstruck.”

“And that was from half a kiss,” Jax threw in. “If you want an incentive to speed things up, imagine finally getting her panties off and—”

The thought bypassed my brain and went straight to my hormones. I turned and flopped face-first into a deep snowbank.

“Can you not ?” I snarled into the snow as he laughed like a hyena. “And don’t disrespect her by saying stuff like that!”

“But, just to be sure, you are interested in getting her panties off at some point, right?” He stopped laughing and it sounded like he’d hunkered down beside me.

“Of course I am!” I kept my hot face in the snow.

“But is getting her panties off the only thing you’re interested in?”

“No!”

“Right. So keep going slowly. You don’t hurry a relationship you want to last. You’re doing everything right. Besides, how are you going to get naked with her when you still have this touching issue?”

I raised my head with a sigh and looked up at them.

“Ignore Jax when he teases you,” John advised. “He likes to wind you up.”

“It’s so easy.” Jax shrugged. “But for real, dude, I’m amazed that you can stand as much contact with her as you do.”

“It’s different with her. I want her hands on me. It helps that she’s small and gentle. And kind. And sweet.”

“ And you love her.” Jax grinned.

“Yeah,” I admitted with a half smile.

“She loves you, too, you know.”

“I wish.” I threw a handful of snow at him.

“She does.” John agreed.

“Impossible.” I knew my voice was harsh and dark, grimmer than it had been in a long time. “No way she could ever love me . And this conversation is over.”

“Don’t drive her away by being stupid,” John warned me.

I growled, but he’d already ’ported out.

I lay there, glaring up at the blue sky, until Jax held out a hand. I squinted at my friend - probably my best friend ever - and hesitated. The look on his face was hopeful, like it was every time he tried some form of contact.

“I really am sorry, K-man.”

I rolled my eyes, but reached out and took his hand. Looking like he might have a heart attack, he pulled me to my feet.