Page 4 of Kiss Me, Darling

“Kiss me, Scott. Never stop.”

1

I tallied the days on the wall in my head like a prisoner in a forgotten jail

Scott

Four years later

Ihadn’t kissed Lucy Davis in one hundred and fifty-two days. I kept count. Our last kiss was burned into my memory. We had dinner at home. Italian. We spent hours in the kitchen sipping wine and chopping vegetables. Art Pepper played softly on the speakers. The house smelled of garlic and sex.

Over dinner she told me all about our company—Kaine and Lily Productions— big plans she’d just inked deals for. Her eyes were bright and her cheeks pink with excitement. She saw the future all big and perfect.

And then my phone lit up with a courtesy email. The next day an article would run featuring pictures of twenty year old me. These were the ones I hoped would never surface. The ones I couldn’t track down and buy on my own. Wishes and hopes and dreams couldn’t stop the inevitable.

So I kissed Lucy goodnight with everything I had, knowing I was about to hop a plane and never come back.

It was a stupid plan. I can see that now. I tend to be lured into the darkest spaces of my mind when I feel embarrassed. It’s a default feature of my brain I’ve spent a lot of hours in therapy trying to rewire. But even all that time and money couldn’t stop me from packing my bags and heading home. It felt right. I needed to sort my shit out once and for all. I needed my brothers.

What I also discovered was that I needed to find myself. I thought I knew who I was. I was Scott Kaine: Movie Star. I enjoyed pretending to be other people, reading, and gaming. Apparently that was the elevator pitch I gave myself and not who I actually was. After several weeks leaching off my brothers, spending all day in a hammock and staring at the sky, I realized I didn’t actually know myself at all.

Like, why do I get so embarrassed? And why is my reaction always to run and become an asshole? There was a lot of shit to unpack there and I was pretty sure I finally had the answers. And that meant it was time to put the pieces of my puzzle back together.

I maneuvered them piece by piece, feeling pretty good about the man I was becoming. I knew I was ready to test the waters, to see if Lucy was willing to forgive me and take me back, when my brothers and I were all threatened by a stalker. At first I thought I was the problem. My past mistakes come back to haunt me once and for all. But then I learned my ex, Brighton Sanchez, was much more interested in using old pictures of us to sabotage Kaine and Lily Productions bids. She wasn’t the stalker. I had no choice but to call Lucy and ask her to come to Calusa Key for protection while we figured things out.

She arrived late last night and went straight to sleep. When I woke for my early morning yoga and meditation I was surprised to see her on the deck, bathrobe fluttering in the wind, coffee in her hands. I was drawn right to her like a magnet and couldn’t stop myself from kissing her.

One hundred and fifty-two days.

It was like a first kiss.Ourfirst kiss. I had no say. Instinct and need driven by entirely too much restraint.

For the next week I would live alone in this big house with the woman I ran away from. All morning I watched her as I tallied the days on the wall in my head like a prisoner in a forgotten jail. The guilt was strong, but my desire to fix things was stronger. I think I was making her uncomfortable because after a couple of hours she announced she was going to the grocery store with the two bodyguards assigned to us.

With nothing better to do, I followed my usual routine of showing up at Grams’ house to be helpful.

“Right into the corner as far as it can go,” he instructed. Ben was a typical oldest brother. Steady, responsible, and a bit of a perfectionist. The bookcase he just built from scratch was a work of art.

Sometimes I got a little jealous of the things he could build. They became homes. Treasured pieces in people’s lives. I made movies I could barely watch afterward. It was just too damn hard to see myself on the screen. I could pick out every flaw, name half a dozen other ways I could have brought more to the character.

“Good?” I stepped back from the bookcase and surveyed the placement.

“Perfect. Snack?” He slapped my shoulder once before turning toward the kitchen.

As kids we stood in this same room eating cookies. Now the house had passed from one generation to the next, updated and altered to fit a new couple with a new future. Ben treasured the architecture and his brand new fiancée loved seeing her family home brought back from the brink.

But we all still called it Grams’ house.

Ben slid a bowl of homemade Chex mix my way. “So Lucy is here?”

My other brother, Chris, fell in love with his next-door neighbor and moved in with her, leaving me alone in his house with Lucy. At the beginning of the summer my brothers were single and now they were both essentially married. And yet I was the one in a long term relationship with the perfect woman when all this started.

“She got in last night.”

“Where is she now?”

I shrugged, picking out my favorite parts of the special mix. I liked the ones with all the buttery goodness baked on hard. “Grocery shopping. She said it would help her feel settled.”

“Dinner with everyone tonight? Or do you think she wants to avoid us? I wouldn’t blame her.”

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