Page 60 of Fade into You
I hang up. Oh my god, I just hung up on Kayla’s mom.
I immediately dial Kayla’s pager with911and Jessa’s cell phone number.
I call back right away with911again, because this is an emergency on so many levels now. First emergency is, where the fuck is Kayla? Second emergency is, Kayla is fine but now her mom knows she didn’t spend the night at my house. I start scrolling through Jessa’s outgoing calls—one of these is Dade’snumber. Maybe she hooked up with Dade after we left. Even that would be preferable to the rapidly accumulating number of horrific scenarios that are piling up in my head right now. I’m about to call Dade when the phone rings in my hand.
“Kayla?” I answer.
“Bird?”she says. It’s her. Everything is okay. For a moment, anyway.
“Kayla, are you okay?”
“I’m… yeah, I’m—I’m okay,” she mutters as if I’ve just woken her up. “Where are you, where are you calling from?”
“Jessa’s. Jessa’s cell phone. Where areyou?”
“I’m at… I’m—wait, why 911?”
“Oh my god, don’t kill me. I called your house.”
Fifteen minutes later, I’m standing outside Jessa’s house, the taste of warm syrup still in my mouth, and my stomach full of what truly were the most delicious waffles I’ve ever had. If I didn’t know that there was a sister hidden in a bedroom just down the hall, sleeping off her hangover and pain and illness, I would’ve thought I was having breakfast with the damn Brady Bunch.
Jessa’s maintaining a three-foot radius from me while we wait for Kayla to pick me up.
“I’m sorry I’ve got to run—Kayla’s having an emergency I have to help her out with.”
Finally making eye contact with me, she says, “She’s okay, though, right? Like, she made it home all right?”
“Oh, yeah. She’s okay.” I let my arm swing forward to catchher fingers with mine. “Are you okay? I mean, with everything that happened with us last night?”
“Of course. It’s cool,” she says, shrugging. So very cool. “You?”
Could she be using fewer words? Fine. I can use fewer words too. I take her hand and pull her around the side of her garage where no one will see us.
“What are you… Bird, what are you doing?”
I pull her close to me, back us up against the side of the garage, my hands on her waist, fingers threading through the belt loops on her jeans. She turns her head to look toward the street, but I place my hands on her face so she’s looking at me. I kiss her, and as she slowly kisses me back I can taste her coffee and that same sweet syrup that’s on my tongue too.
She moves her hands from my hair to the collar of my jacket, then pulls me closer for just a second before she presses her hand against my chest, gently pushing herself away.
I bring my fingers to my mouth—my lips feel stung from all the kissing last night. “Sorry, I just wanted to tell you how beautiful you look this morning.”
She stares at the ground, puts her hands in her pockets, and drags the toe of her boot through the frost on the grass beneath us. But I can see the tiniest smile peeking through. “You don’t have to say that.”
Before I can say anything else, Kayla’s car horn blasts through the morning quiet, putting an end to this conversation. I step forward and kiss her quick, just one more time. “Talk later?”
As she looks up at me and nods, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so shy and delicate, making me I wish I could freeze thismoment and stretch it out, and give her my whole day—give her all my days.
We arrive at Kayla’s house nearly forty-five minutes after my ill-fated phone call. We walk in with smiles on our faces, a bag full of Burger King breakfast sandwiches, and each with a coffee in hand, mid-conversation, as if nothing out of the ordinary happened this morning and we both woke up at my house and I didn’t hang up on her mom.
Her dad closes his newspaper and sets it down with force—for her dad, thisisthe equivalent of slamming it on the counter. He stands. Her mom starts walking toward us.
“Kayla,” she begins.
Her dad finishes, “Where the heck were you last night?” Again, “heck” might as well be “fuck” in his vocabulary.
“Chill,” Kayla says, rolling her eyes in that way she’s gotten so good at ever since she met Dade. “We were at Bird’s house.”
“You’re lying.” Her mom is standing so close to us, and when her eyes shift to me, I can barely keep it together. “I just got off the phone with Bird’s dad, and he said you girls were not there last night.”
