Food, Cats, and Being Lazy

Chapter Fifteen

My lips were still tingling. I sat back down on the steps and stayed there with my fingers pressed against them. I had been kissed. For a moment, I let myself pretend that it wasn’t Vincent. It didn’t matter. Someone kissed me. He put his lips on mine and didn’t even seem repulsed. So I focused on that part for a while.

But the other part was kind of too huge of a problem to ignore. I had betrayed Paige. I didn’t meant to do it. But I did. I could have stopped him. Instead, I closed my eyes and let him kiss me. I didn’t even get mad at him. I just stood there and didn’t say anything. I let him kiss me. I liked kissing him. Should I say something to him? Was this something we should talk about? Should I tell my sister about what happened?

I stayed on the front steps for a while before the front door opened again and Vincent stepped out. He looked down at me like he wasn’t expecting me to still be there. Or maybe he was just hoping that I had gone inside. His eyes were glassy and red. I was about to open my mouth to say something, but he quickly rushed passed me and said, “I’ll see you later.” I heard his car door shut and he zoomed out of the driveway.

I finally decided that it was probably a good time to get up and go back inside. I walked into the house and looked toward the living room. My mom was talking to all her friends about the new summer scents, and they were passing around cubes of wax to sniff. I headed up the stairs with my heart pounding like drums in my chest. I was afraid that Paige was going to burst out of her room and scream at me for kissing her boyfriend. But when I reached the hallway she never came out.

I could hear her crying in her room when I closed my bedroom door. I sat down on my bed and wondered what happened to them. Did they break up? Was it my fault? I laid back on my mattress and waited for her to storm into my room. But she never did. The cries eventually died off and I fell asleep to a rerun of the Barefoot Contessa.

When I woke up the next morning, I felt sick. I was still too worried about Paige attacking me, but she didn’t leave her room. I went downstairs to eat breakfast and my parents were too busy to notice she hadn’t shown up. It was the one thing we were still supposed to do as a family since we only had dinner together on special occasions. But my dad usually only had coffee and toast and my mom was busy going over her sales from the party. Philip never noticed anyone. He was too busy playing his game.

Paige didn’t leave her room all day. I only heard her leave once to go to the bathroom and once more to go to the kitchen. Then she went back to her room and cried some more. I knew it was my sisterly duty to ask her how she was doing and try to comfort her. But I couldn’t face her knowing that my lips were still tingling from where her boyfriend kissed me. I felt really guilty about it.

I never thought of Vincent as anything other than my sister’s boyfriend. Maybe once or twice I played around with the idea that he could be my friend. But never anything more than that. That’s one of the reasons he was so easy to talk to. Now my thoughts about him were just really confusing. Did he like me? How long had this been going on? Did I like him back? Was this my fault?

I didn’t think I ever gave Vincent the impression that I liked him. He was cute, yes, and I knew that. He knew that. Paige knew that. But I never pointed it out. I never stared at him. I never did embarrassing things like I did with Collin. I didn’t panic when he talked to me and come up with stupid stories about how he might actually like me. Someone doesn’t go from sister’s boyfriend and occasional friend to secret crush overnight.

But then I remembered that I accidentally called him “perfect” when he was taking pictures of my family. But I saw his face after I said that and it didn’t look like he’d had some revelation that I thought he was a god or anything. He just kind of seemed to find the whole situation amusing.

He didn’t call or come by all day on Sunday. On Monday morning, I was so nervous getting ready for school that I was shaking as I brushed my hair out. I was expecting Paige to get a ride with me and my mom or one of her friends. But when I was eating breakfast she trotted into the kitchen looking as perfect as always, grabbed a Pop-Tart from the box on the counter, and then rushed out the front door as if her weekend hadn’t been anything less than spectacular. I looked out the window to see who she was leaving with. It kind of irritated me to see Vincent’s little gray car waiting on the curb. I didn’t like how she hopped in beside him and kissed his cheek like everything was just dandy.

It wasn’t that I was jealous. I was just angry. Vincent didn’t like me and he never would. It was just how I thought Lauren was my friend or how I thought Collin might like me. Or how I thought Anton liked me just because he asked me to a party. Now I had one more thing to add to that list. Vincent kissed me. My first kiss went to someone who didn’t even like me. How like my life.

If anything, Vincent’s kiss made everything worse. I was already hurt enough as it was, but his betray cut deeper than the others. Lauren was never really my friend. Collin barely knew I existed. I didn’t know Anton outside of math class. But I knew Vincent. He knew me. He had a nickname for me. We watched Superstar together. I let him play with my cat. We had memories. He tried to comfort me when I was upset. He said he was my friend. He hurt me more than the others because I actually respected him.

I didn’t want him to know how badly he hurt me. I wanted him to think I didn’t care about what he had done. No, I wanted him to know I was mad. I didn’t want him to know it hurt. Just that it made me angry. I only saw him at school once. I was going to the stairwell at lunch and passed him and Paige and all their friends in the atrium.

Paige seemed perfectly normal. She was smiling and laughing as if she hadn’t spent the entire weekend crying in her room. Vincent was different. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, staring at the tile mural on the floor. He noticed me when I stepped into the hall. His eyes met mine. I wanted to pretend I didn’t care, but I couldn’t do that to Paige. So I glared at him, hiked my backpack up onto my shoulders, and stomped off to my spot.

The both of them pretended everything was normal. He dropped Paige off after school and she went right back to her room to cry. But other than that nothing had really changed. They were always together. Still dating. And Paige treated me like she always did. If she had known about that kiss, she would have killed me. If he hadn’t told her, I wasn’t going to.