Page 17 of Just One Kiss

And they couldn’t have been more different. Carly was on the straight and narrow. She went to church every week and actually believed what the preacher said. She sang in the choir. She ran for student council representative and worked on the school newspaper.

And on Friday nights, she was in bed no later than eleven.

She was steady and dependable, and maybe that was why he was so drawn to her. That or her big brown eyes—they always seemed to read exactly what he was thinking, and he never had to say a word.

He knew they were different. He sensed that he wasn’t good enough for her, but that didn’t stop him from wanting her.

Unlike Carly, Josh made poor choices. He had a temper and spent a lot of time in detention. His grades were mediocre, and he was never home by eleven on Friday nights.

But for whatever reason, Carly wouldn’t let Josh go.

As they got older, their relationship changed, of course. He didn’t know if that was natural or just the way things were for the two of them.

She was an academic. He was barely making C’s. She spent her free time at the library. He’d discovered the numbing properties of alcohol.

They ran in different circles, yet somehow, they still stayed connected.

Many nights, he’d sneak out, walking through backyards and darkness to her house, and she almost always met him on her back porch.

On the surface, they weren’t friends. Nobody would’ve believed they talked at all anymore, but the fact was, Carly Collins was the only person in the world Josh trusted.

So when she showed up outside his house one afternoon, in broad daylight, he wondered if this was his chance to pay her back for all the hours she’d sat at his side while he didn’t talk, just so he knew he wasn’t alone.

Josh had been sitting in the living room, flipping through channels on the television, when he looked up and saw Carly standing on the sidewalk outside their house, her cotton-candy-blue bike with the white banana seat and pink-tasseled handlebars at her side. She met his eyes, and he could see instantly something was wrong. She waved him out, then disappeared, but he knew exactly where to find her.

He hollered to his mom that he was leaving and bolted out the back door without waiting for a response. He plodded up over the sand dunes and found her on the beach sitting on their log—the place they sometimes went when her dad was home at night.

She sat with her back to him.

And she was crying.

Josh approached carefully, aware that he didn’t know what to say when girls cried. Heck, he hardly knew what to say when they weren’t crying.

But this wasn’t just a girl. This was Carly. And whether he wanted to admit it or not, she’d stolen his heart the day they first met on the playground in third grade.

In all the years he’d known her, he’d never seen her cry. Not when she got hit in the face during dodgeball. Not when their choir teacher humiliated her in front of the entire class. Not even when she fell off her bike and skinned her leg so badly her dad took her to the emergency room for stitches.

She was without a doubt the strongest person he knew, so as he sat down next to her and saw her tear-stained face, his heart plummeted.

He reached out and took her hand, hopelessly aware of how soft her skin was. Tears streamed down her face, and as he drank in the sight of her, he could see she was trying not to cry.

Josh would do anything to protect her—anything.

Gus had made his feelings about Josh plain—he wasn’t a fan. What if she’d finally agreed with her dad that he was bad news? What if she was about to tell him they couldn’t be friends anymore—not even friends who only saw each other under the cover of darkness? How would he survive?

“What’s wrong?” he asked quietly, afraid to disturb the peace of the silence between them.

She pulled her hand from his and wrapped her arms around herself just as a slight wind kicked up, loosening a strand of hair from the tie that held it back.

For a brief moment, he imagined pulling the hairband out and running his hands through her long, wavy hair, pushing it away from her face, and finally—after all these months—kissing her the way he’d been thinking about doing.

“My mom left,” Carly said, her voice hitching in her throat. “She’s just . . . gone.”

He hated that he felt relief in that moment. It was thoughtless and selfish, but if he lost her, he knew he would never recover. “Your mom?”

How was that possible? Her mom was practically a staple in Harbor Pointe. She owned the flower shop. She doted on her daughters. She was even their room mother all the way through the sixth grade.

“I guess she didn’t want us anymore,” Carly said. “I didn’t know where else to go.” She buried her face in her hands and Josh felt his fingertips tingle, as if he was being led to respond but not sure he knew how.

---