Page 17 of Cocoa Kisses
“Great. You can go hunt down Jeff Brume and find out why I haven’t heard back from him confirming the switch to LED lights on the Christmas tree.”
“On it,” he says. “But I’m stealing one of these as payment.” He snatches a blondie and saunters out of the kitchen.
I smile. Levi can help as much as he wants, but I’m already working up a long list of things to do that will have him hanging out everywhere but here. Our talk was a good start, but it’s going to take more time than that to get back to where we used to be, Levi-and-Taylor who had no idea what the other one’s Christmas-flavored kisses tasted like.
I’m going to have to work off this curse of knowledge. Then everything will be fine.
Chapter Six
Levi
Taylortotallyliedtome.
We’re more okay now than if I hadn’t gone in to talk to her about game night but not as okay as if we had never kissed. Twice.
Which is stupid. And kind of my fault. I want to say that I’d take both of them back if I’d known it was going to cause a strain between us. But I can’t. That would be a lie.
I’m not sorry.
But Taylor is still in her regret era; she’s making sure everything she gives me to do keeps me out of the café.
It’s been two days of this, and that’s enough.
I’d have wandered over to her parents’ place on Sunday and invited myself to dinner, except her car never makes an appearance in the driveway. I’m ready to borrow my dad’s car and go knock on her apartment door, but my mom decides we’re doing a family viewing ofWhite Christmaswhen I’m about to ask for the keys.
We did a family movie every Sunday growing up, and she was so excited to have me there for one that I didn’t have the heart to disappoint her.
But it’s Monday afternoon now, and after spending the whole morning helping Mom reorganize her laundry room, I have no guilt about heading over to the café after lunch. I’ve already figured out this is their slow time, and Sara is happy for me to hitch a ride with her.
“Did you get to talk to Dean yesterday?” I ask. She’d mentioned that Sundays were when they got a chance to FaceTime.
“Yeah.” But she doesn’t sound happy about it.
“Not that it’s my business, but is something wrong?”
She shoots me a tight smile and apologetic look as she pulls out of the neighborhood. “No. Yes. But it makes me sound like a crazy woman, so let’s go with no.”
“If it helps, I’ve thought you were a loony tune since I was in seventh grade, so you can tell me without it changing my opinion of you at all.”
She laughs. “The Ty Holden Incident. You deserved every ounce of that manure.”
I grin. She’d been a sophomore, on a date—almost—with the boy she’d been crushing on for a year. Ty wasn’t that into her. He’d asked her out because it was an easy yes, which Taylor and I knew because his brother in our grade told us. But Taylor didn’t want to tell Sara because she didn’t want her to feel humiliated.
Naturally, we’d decided we’d humiliate Ty instead. “Still some of our best work,” I tell Sara.
It had involved waiting for him to come pick her up, then me stumbling out of the front door as he knocked to spew vomit all over him. We’d made a vinegar and canned dog food smoothie and microwaved it so it had that fresh-from-my-stomach warmth. Then Taylor had followed me out of the house shrieking like a maniac to keep him from noticing the “vomit” was actually being poured from a cup tucked inside my jacket. I enjoyed the memory of the warm spew hitting his chest. And crotch. And Air Jordans.
Turned out, Ty was a sympathetic puker: the smell and my retching noises made him throw up over the porch railing into Mrs. Bixby’s lantana bush. Ty had left reeking of Alpo and too much Old Spice. We’d have gotten away with it too if we’d remembered to rinse out the blender. I honestly think it was using Mrs. Bixby’s Vitamix that got us in real trouble, and we had to spend the next morning fertilizing her flower beds.Naturalfertilizer that Dr. Bixby drove us to a friend’s farm to shovel from his cow pasture into bins and bring back.
Still smelled better than Ty Holden had when he left.
“You still don’t think you owe us a thank you?” I teased. Ty Holden now ran the only “gentlemen’s club” in Roanoke. As my mom says every time it comes up—and vomit stories always come up, pun intended—“not that you could find a gentleman in there if your life depended on it.”
“He called me E. Coli for the rest of high school,” she says. The first time she’d caught wind of his nickname for her, she’d come home and hollered at Taylor and me for almost twenty minutes straight until Mrs. Bixby took her to the salon for a manicure as a bribe to calm her down.
“Only makes my point,” I say.
“Fair,” she says, smiling. “You’re right.”
