Page 93 of Just One Kiss

“One of us should be awake tomorrow,” she said.

“Are you having trouble sleeping?”

She inched up on the nearly flat pillow and nodded. “I wake up every time they come in.”

“Darn nurses,” he said, hoping to lighten the heaviness between them.

Her mouth quirked up in the slightest smile.

He went back to flipping through the channels, loathing cable television and longing for Netflix or Hulu.

Infomercial. Infomercial. A dubbed-in-English foreign Kung Fu movie (that, let’s be honest, he would’ve watched if Carly were still sleeping).

She gasped. “No way.”

His thumb hovered over the button on the remote as the familiar image of old Converse sneakers walking across a run-down baseball diamond rolled across the screen.

His eyes darted to hers.

She looked at him and smiled. “What are the odds?”

“All we need is the popcorn.”

With the sound off, he could only imagine the song that played under this particular scene. He remembered it well because he’d looked it up as a kid and added it to the playlist on his iPod.

The room went quiet as a posse of baseball players, decked out in real baseball uniforms, rode their bikes onto the shabby field. How many times had they watchedThe Sandlotin Carly’s living room as kids?

They’d spent so many years loving each other without even realizing it.

Carly giggled, then whispered the exact insult Porter yelled across the field.

Josh responded with the insult hurled back by the ball-playing bully.

“You play ball like a GIRL!” Carly hissed, then they both erupted in laughter.

They finished out the scene, then the screen blackened and a commercial came on. It felt good to joke around with her, and he wished every drop of tension between them would disappear.

He glanced at her, photographing her smile in his mind. He’d missed it.

She found his eyes and it faded, gone as quickly as it came, as if she’d only just remembered she didn’t like him, as if there was no way she was letting go of her anger toward him.

Two steps forward, three steps back.

She looked away.

The light from the TV flickered.

The hum of the machines surrounding Jaden’s bed was the only disruption to the silence in the room.

“I’m really sorry, Carly,” he whispered. “For not being here.”

Slowly, her eyes found his.

He wanted to confide in her. To tell her it messed him up to be back here, to see his parents still stuck in this same holding pattern he’d lived in for so many years. He wanted to tell her he was terrified of something happening to Jaden—to her—something he couldn’t control. He wanted to tell her all the real reasons he’d left sixteen years ago, to make her understand why he had to go.

He wanted to, but he didn’t. He wouldn’t make any excuses for breaking that promise. He’d put his feelings above it, and he knew that was really what stood between them now.

And when Carly rolled over and laid back down, he was pretty sure he’d never get a second chance.

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