Page 8 of The Kiss Keeper
Her kiss keeper had disappeared.
She pressed her fingers to her still-tingling lips and leaned against the side of the cabin.
It happened. It really happened. She’d kissed her…
Nat gasped, and panic shot through her body.
They’d kissed—but not at the well.
Were they cursed?
Did that kiss even count? Had they blown their chance at finding true love? Was her kiss keeper destined to a life singing soprano?
She sighed, then stared up at the starry night sky.
Only time would tell.
1
Natalie—Present Day—Denver
“Maybe you’re cursed, Nat.”
Natalie shot up from where she was organizing a stack of sketchbooks on the floor and knocked over a coffee can, jam-packed with her students’ paintbrushes.
“Why would you say that?” she asked, looking up at her friend, Tera, one of the first-grade teachers at the school where she’d gotten hired on as the temporary art teacher last fall.
Tera ran her fingertips along the rows of pastels—all counted and ready to be stored away until the children returned to school in the fall.
“I thought it was a pain to pack up my classroom at the end of the school year. But Sweet Jesus! Look at all this! This is like the definition of insanity!” she remarked, attempting to pick up a plastic tub teeming with markers.
Nat gathered the loose brushes from the floor. “You do remember that I have to teach every child in the school. From kindergarten to fifth grade, they all get to see my smiling face?”
Tera flipped through a towering mass of drawings. “And God love ya for it, Miss Callahan! I can barely handle my twenty-four.”
“Lucky for you, I love my job,” Nat answered with a chuckle, staring out at the little tables and stools dotting the sun-dappled space.
Tera sauntered over to the other side of the classroom and held up a lump of clay that was either a mug or a sculpture of a bowel movement. With third-grade boys, it honestly could have been either.
“This is art?” she asked with a playful expression.
“Mistakes and imperfections are part of the process,” Natalie answered, tapping the little sign on her desk with her grandma Woolwich’s motto painted in curly lettering.
“Well, we’re not making the mistake of missing out on the staff party. Come on, art teacher! The custodian is making her world-famous lime sherbet and Sprite punch. It’s about to get crazy up in this elementary school.”
Nat held up a finger. “Hold on! Let me put these paintbrushes away first.”
She grabbed the can and surveyed the empty classroom. All the supplies were neatly lined up along the counter that ran the length of the art room. She placed the paintbrushes—the last item to be packed up—into a plastic tub with the rest of the painting materials and lovingly touched the tips of the brushes as thoughts of her grandma Woolwich came to mind.
An accomplished painter and sculptor, her grandmother had fostered her love of art from an early age. She’d spent summer after summer at her grandmother’s side, watching the woman transform a snow-white canvas into a rocky Maine coastline with a few strokes of a brush or take a lump of clay and work it into an intricate vase.
Over those lazy summer days, she’d learned that, in the pursuit of art, beauty could be found everywhere. And no matter how many times she’d observed her grandma Bev at work, witnessing the transformation of a blank slate becoming a vivid masterpiece left her spellbound. And when it was her time to choose an area of study in college, the artists’ path was her only choice.
Natalie placed the lid on the supply bin and sighed. Maybe her luck had changed. After a string of working a slew of temporary positions in Kansas, Utah, Texas, and now Colorado as a long-term elementary art substitute teacher, filling in for instructors on leaves of absence, maybe this school would be the one where she’d get to stay and put down roots. She’d heard whispers that the former art teacher wasn’t going to return after her maternity leave. Unfortunately, nothing had been announced officially.
But it wasn’t just the hope of steady employment in the field she loved that had her smiling a little more brightly than usual.
Her lackluster love life was looking up, too.
