Things Best Friends Don’t Do

Chapter 2: Replaying the Kisssode

A tiny, involuntary sigh escaped my lips, and in that moment of surrender, his tongue swept delicately, tentatively, against my bottom lip.

And I knew.

I knew how he tasted.

He tasted of the cherry cola he’d been drinking, a hint of mint, and something else. Something that was just… him. A flavor that was warm, and clean, and intoxicatingly male. It was a taste that felt both shockingly new and terrifyingly familiar, like a memory I didn’t know I had.

Best friends shouldn't know this. They shouldn’t know the exact texture of each other’s lips. They shouldn’t know the way a simple touch could ignite a firestorm in your veins.

“Two… one…”

The spell broke. Jace pulled back, but only an inch. His honey-colored eyes were dark, dilated, and filled with a stunned confusion that mirrored my own. His breath was warm on my face. My lips tingled, feeling swollen and overly sensitive. They felt branded.

The room erupted in a cacophony of whoops and catcalls, but the sound was distant, muffled, as if coming from underwater. I stared at Jace, and he stared back, and in that silent, loaded moment, I knew.

I knew that a dare, spat out with malice in a crowded living room, hadn't just broken the rules of a stupid game.

It had broken everything.

***

The escape was a blur. A clumsy, frantic scramble for purchase in a world that had suddenly turned to liquid. One moment I was locked in Jace’s gaze, the universe condensed into the two feet of charged air between us, and the next, I was pivoting on my heel, a mumbled excuse dying on my lips. I didn’t grab my soda or say goodbye to the few acquaintances who might have noticed my presence. I just grabbed my denim jacket from the hook by the door, my movements jerky and uncoordinated, and plunged into the cool night air.

The front door clicked shut behind me, cutting off the party’s thumping bass like a switch. Silence descended, vast and ringing in my ears. The late October air was crisp, smelling of damp leaves and distant woodsmoke, a welcome shock to my system after the stuffy, beer-scented heat of the house. I wrapped my arms around myself, the rough denim a poor substitute for the warmth that had flooded my body only moments before.

My Converse-clad feet found the familiar rhythm on the cracked pavement, carrying me away from the bright lights of Jace’s house, down the tree-lined street toward my own. The walk was usually a comfort, a short, meditative journey. Tonight, it was a torment. Every step was a beat in a frantic drum solo playing in my chest.

*What just happened?*

The question looped, over and over, a broken record in my mind.

By the time I fumbled with my own front door key, my hands were trembling. I slipped inside, the house dark and blessedly quiet. My parents were out for the weekend, a fact I had been grateful for earlier and was now profoundly thankful for. I couldn't face their questions, not with the ghost of Jace’s lips still tingling on mine.

I didn’t bother turning on the lights. I navigated the familiar landscape of my home by memory, my hand trailing along the wall up the staircase until I reached the sanctuary of my bedroom. I pushed the door open and shut it behind me with a soft click, leaning back against the solid wood as if it were a shield. My jacket slid from my shoulders and pooled at my feet. My breath, which I hadn’t realized I was holding, came out in a ragged, shuddering gasp.

And then the replay began. Not as a choice, but as an involuntary, all-consuming sensory assault.

I slid down the door until I was sitting on the floor, my worn quilt and the soft glow of the fairy lights strung around my window the only witnesses to my meltdown. I brought my fingertips up to my mouth, pressing them lightly against my lips. They still felt… different. Changed. Branded by a touch they were never supposed to know.

It started with the details my panicked mind had tried to erase. The crowd's jeering countdown had faded into a low hum, a backdrop to the symphony of the moment itself. I replayed the way Jace had moved toward me, not with the swagger of a guy accepting a dare, but with a strange, solemn reluctance. His eyes. God, his eyes. I had expected them to be amused, maybe a little apologetic. But they had been dark, intense, and when his gaze had dropped to my mouth, a flicker of something raw and unguarded had passed through them. Something that had stolen the air from my lungs before he’d even touched me.

Then, his hand. I could still feel the phantom pressure of it cupping my jaw. His fingers were calloused from years of gripping a football, but his touch had been unbelievably gentle. His thumb had stroked my cheekbone, a small, soothing motion, a silent message in the midst of a very public spectacle. *I’m here. It’s okay.* It was the kind of comforting gesture he’d made a thousand times before—when I’d scraped my knee in third grade, when I’d bombed my chemistry midterm, when my first pet goldfish died. But this time, that familiar touch felt electric, illicit. It was an anchor in a sea of cruelty, yes, but it was also the spark that lit the fuse.

And the kiss itself…

My mind spun it out in high-definition, slow-motion detail. The first contact was soft, hesitant. A question. He wasn’t performing for Stacy or the crowd. In that moment, it felt like he was performing only for me. I remembered the slight, almost imperceptible tilt of his head, the way his lips molded to mine as if they’d been carved from the same stone.

My analytical, nerdy brain, the one that aced physics exams, tried to dissect it. *Angle of incidence. Pressure distribution. Coefficient of friction.* But the poet in my soul, the one who dog-eared pages of Keats and Dickinson, screamed over the science. It was warmth. It was softness. It was the shocking realization that my best friend, my constant, my platonic North Star, tasted like cherry cola and a promise I never knew I wanted him to make.

*Best friends shouldn't know how you taste.* The phrase landed in my brain with the force of a physical blow.

They shouldn't know the surprising softness of your lips. They shouldn't know the way a tiny, involuntary sigh from you can make them deepen the kiss just a fraction. They shouldn't know that the clean, woodsy scent of their cologne, a smell I’d always associated with brotherly hugs and shared car rides, could suddenly become the most intoxicating, dangerous fragrance in the world.

My hands came up to cover my burning face. This was so much worse than a dare. A dare was impersonal. A dare was a joke. This… this hadn't felt like a joke. The way he’d hesitated before pulling back, the stunned, wide-eyed look we’d shared as the world rushed back in—it was a shared shock. He had felt it too. I was sure of it. That dark, swirling question in his eyes was a mirror of the one now tearing me apart.

For seventeen years, Jace Carter had been a fixed point in my universe. Our friendship was a law of physics, immutable and constant. It was built on a foundation of shared history, inside jokes, and unconditional support. Tonight, with a ten-second dare, Stacy Miller hadn't just dared me to kiss him. She had dared us to test that foundation.

And I had just discovered it was riddled with cracks.

Or maybe, and this was the most terrifying thought of all, the cracks had always been there. Maybe every time he’d slung an arm around my shoulders, every time our eyes had met across a crowded cafeteria, every time his laughter had warmed a cold corner of my soul, it wasn't just friendship. Maybe it was something else, something I had meticulously filed away under ‘platonic’ because any other label was too scary, too complicated, too fraught with the possibility of heartbreak.

I crawled across my floor to my bed, pulling the thick, worn quilt over my head, creating a dark, muffled cocoon. But there was no hiding. The memory was imprinted on the inside of my eyelids. The feeling was seared into my skin. The taste of him was a secret I now had to keep, a flavor that lingered on my tongue, threatening to poison the purest thing in my life.

I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to the bone, that I couldn't face him tomorrow. I couldn't walk into school and pretend that my entire world hadn't just been irrevocably, terrifyingly, and perhaps wonderfully, upended.

Avoidance. It was a coward’s strategy, but right now, it was the only one I had.