Page 70 of Here We Go Again
Rosemary reaches up for a tissue and blows her nose. “Yes, Logan. The kiss. I can’t just shove it aside like you apparently can.”
The cardboard tissue box collapses between Logan’s clenched hands. “I haven’t shoved it aside. I’ve been thinking about it all day.” The hotel room becomes stifling quiet. “Did the kiss, uh… mean something to you?”
Rosemary squeezes her eyes shut, takes four deep breaths, andforces the words out. “Kisses always mean something to me. Yesterday’s kiss meant something to me, and our kiss eighteen years ago meant something to me.”
Logan slowly lowers herself to the bed beside Rosemary, both hands still choking the tissue box. “But you kissed Jake McCandie right afterward. Eighteen years ago, I mean.”
Rosemary can’t believe Logan even remembers that. “Of course I did! I was fourteen, and it was 2005, and I had just kissed my female best friend, who made a joke about it andran awayafterward. I was having a… a gay panic. I kissed Jake because I thought…” Another four breaths. “Because I thought it might make me forget how much I liked kissing you.”
The hotel room becomes quiet again. The only noise is the compression of the cardboard in Logan’s hands. “Someone was coming,” Logan grumbles down at the carnage in her lap.
“What?”
“I didn’t run away because I didn’t like the kiss. Someone was coming. Jennifer, I would guess, since that’s when the rumors started going around that I was a lesbian.” Her tone is bitter now. “And the only way I could prove their taunts didn’t hurt me was by coming out before I was ready. By reclaiming the word they used to try to hurt me.”
Someone was coming. In Rosemary’s teenage brain, it had been so much easier to believe Logan only kissed her to prove a point. That’s what her insecurity told her. That’s why she stopped talking to Logan after that. That’s why she spent years in a relationship with a boy who didn’t understand her, to protect her from the rumors that hurt Logan and to protect her from her own true feelings. That’s why it took her so long to understand what her heart really wanted.
Logan detaches one hand from the tissue box and places it carefully on Rosemary’s leg. Just above her knee. In the place where her dress has slid up to reveal bare skin. “I liked the kiss, too,” she confesses, her voice barely above a whisper. “It… it meant something to me.”
Rosemary doesn’t know what to do with that information. Sure, it happened when they were kids, but Logan is also here now, with her hand on Rosemary’s thigh. Her long, tan fingers against pale skin. Theheatof her. Logan’s skin has always run hot, like she’s summertime personified. But Logan is made for summers. For sleeping in and staying out late to stare at the stars. For endless days with nothing to do—days where doinganythingbecomes possible. Logan is sunshine and adventure and freedom and the month of July.
Rosemary is September. A new planner and sharpened pencils and outfits laid out on her bed the night before. Raised hands and right answers.
They never made sense as friends, and they don’t make sense together, but here they are. On this road trip together. With Logan’s hand on her leg. Once, in sixth grade, Logan convinced her to climb out on a fallen oak tree above the river, and Rosemary feels like she’s balanced unsteadily on that tree branch right now.
“Did the kiss in Albuquerque mean something to you?” she ventures. She might fall off this tree branch. Or she might fly.
Logan springs off the bed and paces fitfully for a second, before she marches over to the hotel desk where a now-cold box of pizza sits, the leftovers from their earlier dinner. She flips open the box, stares down at the slices like maybe they’ll save her from her own feelings in this moment.
Then, without turning around to face Rosemary again, Logan tells the box of pizza, “It meant everything to me.”
LOGAN
As she often does in emotionally vulnerable moments, Logan shoves an entire slice of pizza into her mouth.
The pizza is cold and congealed, but at least it buys her some time after her catastrophic confession. She can feel Rosemary’s eyes on her as she chews, and all she wants to do is go back over to thatbed. She wants to grab Rosemary by the shocking curve of her hips and taste that pink mouth again. She wants to claim that tongue, to consume her. She wants to kiss Rosemary like she’s making up for twenty years of not kissing her, ever since that night in the garden when a kiss woke up parts of Logan she didn’t know existed.
Thankfully, pizza is a great boner killer, and it stops her from doing anything impulsive.
She can’t kiss Rosemary with food in her mouth—can’t touch her with greasy fingers—and Rosemary would never kiss her after eating sausage, anyway. That, combined with the inevitable cheese farts and heartburn from the tomato sauce, and it’s a perfect sex shield.
The pizza also prevents her fromsayingother silly, reckless things. Like about how Rosemary broke her fourteen-year-old heart.
Pizza is the best! All hail pizza.
“Well, shit,” Hale says when the pizza-induced silence has gone on for too long. And there’s something so charming about that single swear word in Rosemary’s prim mouth that Logan almost sticks her greasy fingers all over her anyway. “I didn’t think you were going to say that.”
Logan swallows a painful hunk of crust. “I didn’t think I was going to say that, either.”
Rosemary smiles and looks down at her hands in her lap. She’s so earnest, so genuine, so unafraid of showing how much she cares. Her fingers twist a simple gold bracelet around her right wrist. Her pale lashes flutter against her blushing cheeks and fuck it. There’s not enough pizza in the world.
Logan steps closer to the bed and stands in front of Rosemary’s legs. She towers over her, so Rosemary has to crane her neck to look up.
“Can I kiss you again?” she asks quietly. They’re close enough for quiet.
“Not with pizza sauce on your face.”
Logan doesn’t break eye contact with Rosemary as she swipes the corner of her mouth with her thumb. “How about now?”
