Page 4 of The Hardest Fall

Another awkward silence stole our words as I stared at her and she stared at my chest until someone pushed on the door and made her lose her balance.

A head peered through the partly open door. “Ah, sorry, dude! Didn’t know this was occupied.” He pushed the door open a few more inches to look around inside. “We’ll come in after you two are done.” After giving me a thumbs up, he slowly disappeared.

As soon as the door closed, my brunette—scratch that, the brunette let out a deep breath and focused her gaze on me. She appeared steadier, but based on the way she was tugging on her shirt—which had Smile for me written on it in big bold letters—I wouldn’t have bet money on it. Curious as hell, I waited for her to continue.

“You know what, I already made a mess, so at this point, asking this won’t—no, can’t make things any worse.”

Already intrigued by her, I gestured with my hand for her to go on. “I’m all ears.”

As I tried my best to hide my smile, she took another deep breath. “I need to kiss you,” she blurted out quickly. Closing her eyes, she groaned. “That wasn’t the best way to break it to you. Let me try again.”

I raised my brow. “You need to kiss me.”

“Need to, have to—I mean they’re all the same thing, right?” A quick nod. “I mean, I don’t want to kiss you, not really. I didn’t choose you.”

“You didn’t choose me.”

“Nope, I didn’t. It’s not that you’re not good-looking—you definitely are, in a rugged sort of way, which would work for me. I’d kiss you if I had to, but you weren’t my first choice.”

“You’re doing wonders for my ego. Keep going.”

“Okay, I’m thinking that really wasn’t the best way to go about this. Let me start over and see how that goes. My roommate, Lindsay, kind of dragged-slash-forced me to come here tonight, to the party I mean. She thinks I’m not living the ‘college experience’ to the fullest. We came, met her friends—it’s my first year, and I’m meeting new people, so that’s good, right?” Without waiting for me to give an answer, she took a deep breath and kept going. “Nope, not good. Her friends realized I’m not adventurous at all because I don’t tend to talk very much when I’m in a big group and prefer to just stay back. I like to take things in at first, observe, you know? I don’t like to have too many eyeballs on me. Anyway, you don’t care about that, so blah blah blah, more talk, more cringing on my part.”

She shut her eyes and shook her head. I just stood there, watching her, listening to her, waiting for her to finish her story. I couldn’t really have moved even if I wanted to; she was…it was all too…captivating—that’s the word I was looking for. She was all over the place and yet she was captivating as hell, a fresh breath of air, for some reason.

“Then they bet—kind of dared me that I couldn’t kiss a random guy. I said sure I could just so they’d stop talking about me, because what are they gonna do? Expect me to follow through on that? Are we in kindergarten? Pffttt. And, okay, fine, I was a little offended, but they were kind of right. I’m not adventurous or spontaneous. Not into kissing random guys, either. I’ve never done it, but I figured it’s easy enough. Anyway, they said I wouldn’t have the balls to kiss the guy they wanted me to kiss, because apparently that’s also a thing in college—daring, betting, kissing random people…”

“Wow,” I said before she could go on, and she lifted her eyes to me. It was my lame attempt to make sure she took a breath before she passed out. “There seem to be a lot of things about college I didn’t know about, and I’m not even a freshman anymore. I’ve never kissed a random girl before either—didn’t even know it was a requirement.” I actually had, but she didn’t need to know that. I got kissed by random girls sometimes, especially after a good game when everyone’s adrenaline was running high, but I never had the urge to go kiss a random girl just because. Maybe I just hadn’t seen the right random girl because at that moment I could see the appeal.

“See!” she exclaimed, her body relaxing a bit more. “That’s what I said. Anyway, we’re coming to the painful part, so I’ll just push forward. My roommate, Lindsay, grabbed this poor guy who was walking past with his buddies and told me to kiss him, so I did, just a quick peck—that’s nothing, right? I didn’t even touch the guy, just leaned up and pressed my lips against his. It was pretty anticlimactic, actually, and since I’ve had a little bit of beer…” She lifted three fingers, presumably indicating the number of beers she’d had, then tucked her hair behind her right ear. I studied her lips—all this talk about kissing, and she had those beautiful shiny pink lips… “I didn’t even feel a thing,” she continued. “No butterflies. No nothing. The guy didn’t look all that upset about it since he tried for a second, longer kiss.”