Why wasn’t I kissing him? Why wasn’t I kissing him?
“Not funny,” I grumbled. I kicked the covers off and quickly shimmied into a big sweater so he didn’t see much of my body. “Is the shower here okay?”
“It’s…umm… Well it works enough.”
I stepped into the bathroom and saw what he meant. It didn’t look like it had been redecorated since 1972. There was even wood panelling, with added spiderweb decorations in between the gaps of each panel. The shower was one of those small heads that dangles over the bath and it was covered in reddish rust. I sighed, and turned it on – waiting for the water to heat up, and using the sound of running water to cover the noise of me peeing in case Kyle could hear. After a vaguely unsatisfactory shower, I dressed best I could in the tiny bathroom and emerged to find him still reading.
“Who you learning about today?” I flopped down on my unmade bed. It was odd how comfortable I felt with him, even with all the kissing/no kissing yesterday. He just had this air of easiness, like a soluble heartburn tablet he could dissolve into the oxygen surrounding any social environment…or something.
He held up the cover of his book so I could see for myself.
“Al Pacino?”
“What’s wrong with Al Pacino?” he asked, his eyes still on the page.
“It’s just quite a leap from Van Gogh, that’s all.”
I hadn’t brought anything to read in the rush to leave the previous morning, so I just lay back down and watched him, wanting to kiss him whenever he turned a page.
But not kissing him.
“Why do you like biographies so much?” I asked, deliberately interrupting him to get attention.
He put his book down.
“I like reading about people who’ve had interesting lives. Who’ve done something that wasn’t expected…” He thought about it. “Who’ve broken the mould.”
I stretched my foot up in the air, stretching the back of my thigh out. It was all cramped from the previous day’s hike.
“Wouldn’t you rather live an interesting life yourself than read about someone else’s?”
His sad face came out again.
“I told you. I’m not like that. My life is just…blah.”
I flopped my leg down and glared at him.
“You say it like you have no choice in the matter, like you’re not in control of what you can do with your life.”
“I know, I get that. I try… But as I said, I end up just doing exactly what’s expected of me regardless.”
Like kissing Melody…
I felt a small surge of anger. So what if he was stuck in this whole perfect predictable storyline, why was he whinging about it? It was better than my storyline. Screwed-up girl with alcoholic mother has screwed up life because she can’t psychologically process her alcoholic mother… At least I had the strength to know I could try and change that inevitability…maybe.
“You must’ve done one thing that isn’t obvious. You must’ve done one thing that was just for you, because you wanted to do it, not because it was expected of you.”
He picked up his book again, and started half-reading.
“I did,” he said, practically into the book. “Yesterday. I kissed you.”
The sides of my eyes stung as his words launched tears into them.
“… And look how that turned out.”
He stared determinedly at his book, and I didn’t know what to say or think or do. I just stayed still, on the bed, desperately processing, but none of it helping. I felt guilty, and confused, and all the adjectives you use in shit poetry you write in your diary when you’re twelve and sad about something stupid at school. What did he expect to happen? Did he think he could just kiss me and then there’d be no consequences? When I live so far away, and I could so obviously and easily fall in love with him – if I ever got to understand who he truly was.
Finally, he looked up. “Sorry,” he said, and I could tell he meant it. “That wasn’t fair.”
“No. It wasn’t.”
“I guess we’ve not really talked about yesterday, have we?”
“No.” My voice was small.
“And I can tell you don’t want to talk about it…” I went to protest but he held his hand up, making him lose his place in the book. “No, don’t worry. I can see it all over your body language.”
I let out a deep breath.
“How long till we have to check out?”
Kyle glanced at the time on his phone. “An hour. Then it’s a bit of a drive back to camp.”
Camp. Claustrophobic little camp. With no privacy, and no time, and no space, and my mum there to cloud my brain from thinking about anything else. I’d almost forgotten about it.
I really didn’t want to go back. I wanted to stay here, with him. Even though I wasn’t kissing him or touching him or doing all the things I really wanted to do and I didn’t know why.
I tried to smile. “Plenty of time then.”
He looked up. “Time for what?”
“For you to tell me who you are.”
The tarmac slipped by under us – the road empty apart from Kyle’s jeep.
“I still don’t get what you mean,” he said. “Who I am?” He adjusted his rear-view mirror.
“You were saying yesterday, you do things people expect of you. That means, if you think about it, that I don’t really know who you are at all. And, considering you’ve seen me a) cry, b) projectile vomit, and c) you know just how ill my mum is, it seems only fair I get to know stuff.”
“I told you, there’s nothing to know!”
I rolled my eyes. “So, what? You’re just a jock with a brain? That’s all there is?”
He barely nodded, but his hands gripped tighter on the wheel.
“You must have beliefs, you must have passions!”
“I dunno. Be a good person?”
“Everyone wants to be a good person. Unless they’re, like, the evil stepmother in a Disney movie.”
“I TOLD YOU, I’m just really normal…boring, like everyone else.” If he gripped any tighter, the steering wheel would come off in his fists.
I opened his glovebox and rifled around.
“What are you doing?” he asked, trying to keep his eyes on the road.
“Snooping.”
It was pretty neat, considering what most people’s gloveboxes are like.
“So, you’re tidy,” I concluded. “That’s something… That’s a personality quirk.”
“Yeah, a boring one. When have tidy people been any fun?”
“They’re very useful. You should see the state of my bedroom back home. I’m a pig! Honestly, you definitely wouldn’t have kissed me if you’d ever seen it.”
We fell silent at my attempt at a joke. Kyle looked genuinely stunned.
“British?” I tried to explain. “We make jokes about uncomfortable topics to feel less awkward about them?”
And, thankfully, Kyle did start genuinely laughing.
“But this is why I like you,” he said, and his words melted further parts of me. He likes you! He keeps saying he likes you! “It makes sense that you’re messy. You’re creative, you’re passionate! All the best people are messy.”
“I’m not so sure about that. My friend Evie, back home, is all kinds of awesome, but she’s like the neatest person ever… Anyway, being neat and tidy is still a thing, it’s still a thing that makes you you.”
“It makes me boring.”
“God, shut up, will you? Why are you so insecure?” I carried on digging. At the back, was one of those old-fashioned CD cases. I hadn’t noticed before that the jeep only had a CD player, it must’ve been as old as he said it was. I unzipped it and started flipping through, commenting aloud. “Rap, rap – English people don’t really listen to rap…” I said, although maybe that was just my suburban hometown. I always used to call home a leave-the-lost-glove-on-the-wall town. You know? My town is the sort of place where people pick up a lost glove in the snow, dust it off, and leave it hanging in an easy-to-see spot in case the owner tried to retrace their steps and find it. When I went to London for the day once, an art trip to Brixton, right in the middle of winter, I saw, like three lost gloves trodden into the snow… I flipped through more CDs. “A-ha!” I said, just as Kyle spotted what I’d found and went to grab it. “The very best of Andrew Lloyd Webber?!”