I should have kissed her. Or done something to make this feel more final. It’s all too fragile, and we’ve had too many close calls. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight, but we had to get home somehow. Maybe she feels the same way because her silver Civic tails my car like we’re in a bad spy movie, and every time we hit a red light, I glance at the mirror to find her grinning at me.
Part of me wants to go right over to her house when I get home, but a bigger part of me wants to race inside so I can change clothes (and, if I’m really being honest, put on deodorant). The brakes screech when I park, and I take the stairs two at a time.
“HEY, I’M GOING TO HOPE’S. I’M JUST CHANGING CLOTHES. I’LL SEE Y’ALL LATER,” I yell.
This was necessary as both Pam and Mimi are sitting in the living room pretending not to wait for me.
“You are not off the hook!” yells Mimi as I dash past them a second time (now, with clothes!).
“Okay!” Everything is exclamation points today.
I slam the door. Hope is waiting on her front porch.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.”
Oh, wow, this is really happening. She pulls out her house key, and I realize her dad’s car is absent from the driveway. She unlocks the door. We go into her house and stand in her living room, which is something I’ve done about a billion times before. Everything is the same, and everything is totally upside down.
“So, that was an interesting voicemail you left me.”
Right. That. I don’t know why I’m so nervous. I know what she wrote on the paper. I know she held my hand in front of Ashley’s house just as tight as I held hers. But I still feel like I’m walking into a minefield and one wrong word and BOOM. Everything we might get to be will disappear in a cloud of smoke.
“I—”
She crosses her arms.
“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”
“If you recall, I was the one that did this last time. And I got shot down.”
I wince. “I recall. Sorry about that.”
“No, hey, I’m just messing with you. Do your spiel.” She drops her voice to a stage whisper. “If it makes you feel any better, my answer is going to be yes.”
It does. “Okay, here goes. I want you.”
Her eyes go wide. Oh, crap.
“I mean, to be my girlfriend. But other things, too.” I don’t not want her that way. “I want to see you every day, and kiss you every day, and I want us to know each other forever and build whatever life we dream up.”
Hope’s smirk has disappeared, and she looks like she might cry. “I want all those things, too,” she whispers.
There’s this moment when we’re staring at each other, and it feels like the moment after a hurricane when everything has subsided and you know you’re going to be okay.
She takes a step closer. “I’ve always wanted to know what it would be like to kiss you.”
“Me, too.” Wait. “We have kissed.”
“Not like this.”
She wraps one hand around my neck and pulls my face toward hers. She kisses me and the trees explode with flowers, tulips shooting up out of the ground like one of those time-lapse videos. Everything is more alive and turning/growing/reaching for her like she’s the sun. It is all so much bigger than labels and categories and convenient little boxes, and it almost sweeps me away. When we finally pull apart, she looks as dazed as I feel.
“Nope. Definitely not like that,” I say. “Not like this, either.”
This time I’m kissing her, and it doesn’t feel like flowers or magic. It feels like a storm. Bodies crushing against each other. Hands tangled in hair. Feelings so big they feel like explosions. We aren’t dazed this time. We are gasping for air.
And now the floodgates have been broken on kissing, the moratorium has been lifted, and we give each other every kiss we’ve been dreaming about for the past five years. Kissing. Laughing. Laughing. Kissing. We roll around in the blissful newness of it all. Sometimes I tic, but we’re both way too busy to notice.
Hope takes a break from the kissing and lays her head in my lap so she’s looking up at me. “Why couldn’t we have done this before?”
“Right? We have lost out on years of kissing. Years.”
Hope snorts. “Thanks a lot, past Spencer and Hope.”
We’re laughing, and then her face goes kind of serious. “I wasn’t ready before.”
I put my arm around her as my way of saying, Anything you want to tell me right now will be okay.
“There were times when I thought I was, but I don’t know. I think we would have ruined it.”
I think about what it would have been like to get together with Hope when I still practically worshipped her. “I think you’re right.”
“I needed a lot of time after Janie. I’m sorry if I hurt you, but that was what I needed. I just, I had to grieve on my own time line.”
“You never have to apologize for that. I’m sorry for trying too hard and pushing you.”
“You don’t have to apologize, either. I know what you were trying to do, and I kind of love you for it.”
Love. She definitely just said “love.” We both turn red and find the wallpaper to be fascinating.
“Hey, want to see something in my room?”
“Okay.” I turn even redder, which I didn’t think was possible.
I follow her upstairs.
“Check it out,” she says.
Her room looks the same—the empty walls, the overflowing bookshelf, the desk with the . . . Oh. There is a map over her desk. A small one, but that’s how the best things start. I walk closer and touch it with hesitant fingers.
“Brazil, huh?”
She shrugs shyly. “I’ve been planning trips again. Ugh, but it would be a whole lot easier if I hadn’t thrown away all that stuff after, um, you know.”
Ohmygosh, it’s finally the right time!
“Wait here!”
I can only imagine the series of expressions she’s making as I sprint out of her room, but I don’t even care. This is so going to be worth it.
I run inside my house. “HEY, I’M JUST GETTING SOMETHING OUT OF THE ATTIC. CAN’T TALK.”
The attic is dark and spiderweb-y. It’s been a long time since anyone’s been up here. The plastic container is sitting right where I left it, though. I try to brush some of the dust off, but it’s kind of a lost cause. Oh, well.
I pick it up and run back downstairs. “GOING BACK TO HOPE’S. SEE Y’ALL LATER.”
“You are still not off the hook!” yells Mimi.
“Noted!”
And then I’m tearing across the yard and through Hope’s front door, clattering up the stairs to her bedroom, setting the box on her desk.
“Open it.” I can hardly contain my excitement. This must be what it feels like to be Santa or that guy who gives out gold medals for wrestling at the Olympics.
Hope appears . . . skeptical. She carefully lifts the plastic lid and then wipes her hands on her jeans before reaching inside. The maps and drawings are still there, perfect, protected, though I had to piece together some of them with tape.
She unfolds a map, slowly, silently. It’s Haiti, and her eyebrows draw together in the middle. “But—” She pulls out another piece of paper, long and winding, with pieces of Scotch tape holding together all the places she wanted to visit. She claps a hand over her mouth. There are tears streaming down her cheeks, and her face is going all splotchy, and her nose is running, and she is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.
“So, when you were—”
“Yes.”
“But why didn’t you—”
I shrug. “I didn’t want to make things worse.”
She’s crying and she shakes her head, and then she’s laughing.
“What?”
“I was throwing away my dreams, and you were literally picking them up.”
I smile. “I guess I was.”
She doesn’t so much hug me as fall into me. I catch her. Hold her. Wrapped up in the magic of second chances and being together.
A TAXONOMY OF HOPE’S SMILES