Page 52 of Just One Kiss

She looked at him.

“Will you go out with me?”

“What?”

“I was waiting to ask until I could take you out for real.” His face turned shy, and even in that moment she knew things would be different between them, whether she agreed to go out with him or not.

“Like on a date?”

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and shrugged. “Yeah.”

“Me and you?”

“Is that so hard to imagine?” He met her gaze.

“Kind of,” she said.

His face fell.

“I mean, what about your reputation? People might think you’ve turned soft.”

“I don’t really care what people think.” His grin turned lazy, and her heart sputtered.

She searched for a snappy comeback, but her mind had gone blank.

“But I know you do,” he said.

She studied him for a long moment. He’d grown over the summer and now stood at least six inches taller than her. He’d been working out for football, transforming his body from little-boy scrawny to post-adolescent ripped. She knew his workouts were less about football and more about getting strong enough to protect his mom from his dad’s angry outbursts—a fact she found both heartbreaking and admirable.

He rarely talked about it, but every now and then, he’d let it slip that he was planning to get her out of there, as if she was the only one who needed saving. As if his father reserved his anger only for her.

But he didn’t know she’d caught a glimpse of an inch of skin just above his belt in the hallway last week when he reached for a book on the top shelf of his locker. He didn’t know she saw the deep purple bruise—a bruise that should’ve been easy to hide.

Did he think she’d forgotten the nights he showed up on her back porch, asking to sleep in her dad’s old garden shed so no one would find out the truth about his own father?

It had been years now since that started, but she would never, ever forget. How many times had she noticed him wincing when he moved wrong, accidentally irritating whatever injury had been inflicted upon him? He didn’t talk about it, but she knew the truth.

She saw that boy even still, every time she looked in his eyes.

“I think we could be really great together,” he said.

She couldn’t stop the slow smile from creeping across her face. “Okay.”

His eyes widened. “Yeah?”

She nodded. “Why not?”

Josh grinned. “Awesome. We’ll do it Friday.” His face went pale. “I mean, we’llgo outFriday.”

Her face flushed. “I knew what you meant.”

He picked her up on Friday in that old black Mustang and drove her to Capri, a restaurant with menus that weren’t made out of paper. He opened doors for her and bravely held her hand as they left dinner, something that hadn’t seemed as easy as she would’ve expected for someone who seemed as experienced as him. After they ate, they went for a walk on the boardwalk, and he didn’t let go of her hand once.

“I don’t know how I feel about this, Josh,” she finally said.

“About what?”

She stopped walking, a full moon spilling light onto the boardwalk, and faced him. “I don’t want things to change between us. We’ve been friends for so long. This is . . . different.” Would she miss their easy-going conversations? Would he still confide in her when things were bad at home? Would he still tease her when she was upset over a B?

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