Since You've Been Gone (25 page)

“This is a really nice house,” Dawn said, her voice dropping to a whisper as she stepped inside, her expression looking much like I had a feeling mine had when I’d seen it for the first time. Since my car had been buried behind everyone who had parked in our driveway, Dawn had driven us all to Frank’s in her convertible, her driving making me very glad that Frank lived so close to me.

“Thanks,” Frank said easily, leading the way inside. “Collins!” he yelled, just as he slid around the corner in his socks.

“Hello,” Collins said, a wink somewhere in his voice, smiling at me, stretching out the word more than usual, and giving it a few more
o
’s.

“Um, hi,” I said, giving him a smile. “What’s up?”

He looked behind me, saw Dawn and her shirt that read
Captain Pizza—A great COLONEL of an idea!
and brightened. “Did we order pizza?”

“No,” Dawn said, looking down at her shirt. “I’m off the clock. I’m Dawn.”

“Matthew Collins,” he said. “Matthew with two
t
’s and Collins with two
l
’s. But call me Collins. Although,” he said, raising an eyebrow, “let me be Frank.” He cleared his throat and gave me an earnest, serious look. “Emily,” he said, his voice both softer and deeper. “Is there anything—
anything
—I can do to help you? As soon as I finish saving the planet, I promise to get right on it.”

“Collins,” Frank said, walking past him and into the kitchen, but not before I saw that there were two dull red spots on his cheeks. “Will you stop it?  That joke was old back in middle school.”

“I’m just being Frank with them,” he said, giving me an actual wink this time. “Want something to drink?” he asked as he followed Frank into the kitchen and pulled open the fridge, clearly as comfortable in Frank’s house as Sloane had once been in mine.

“Sure,” Dawn said, heading over to join him in the kitchen. As I watched her walk closer to him, I couldn’t help but wish I’d had some way to warn her about Collins, and the fact that he’d probably be hitting on her relentlessly within seconds. But to my surprise, he just stood back respectfully to let her get a clearer view of the fridge, and didn’t ask her if it hurt when she fell from heaven.

“Emily?” Frank called to me from the kitchen area, and I realized a moment too late that I was the only one still standing by the front door.

“Yeah,” I said quickly, walking across the floor to join the
group in the kitchen. Everyone was standing around the big island in the center that looked like it was made of granite or slate—some dark mineral, at any rate. There was a bag of tortilla chips on the counter that Collins opened as Frank grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge, and then handed one to Dawn.

“So,” Collins said, rubbing his hands together and looking at me. “I was thinking about your list.”

I stared at him in surprise, then looked over at Frank. The list hadn’t been a secret, exactly, but I was just a little taken aback that Frank would have told Collins about it.

“What?” Collins said, picking up on this. “Porter will
not
stop talking about it. And I decided to help.”

“What list?” Dawn asked, looking from Collins to me.

“The list from Sloane,” Collins said, like he’d been involved with this from the beginning.

“Who’s Sloane?” Dawn asked.

“Sloane’s my best friend,” I explained.

“The one who’s camping in Paris?” she asked, and I gave her a quick nod, not meeting Frank’s eye, even though I could sense he was looking at me.

“Anyway,” Collins said. “I had a solution, so—”

“Which number?” I asked, really a little baffled as to what Collins could have come up with.

“Yeah, Matthew,” Frank said, and his voice sounded measured, but I could also hear the irritation behind it. “Which number?”

“Hey.”

I turned around, surprised, and saw a guy behind me, coming from the direction of the TV area—I supposed it wasn’t really a room if there weren’t any doors. I hadn’t realized anyone else was there and I suddenly worried this perfect stranger had heard us talking about Sloane’s list. He had close-cropped blond hair, and was wearing a T-shirt that read
Briarville Varsity Soccer
. Briarville was a boarding school an hour upstate, but while I’d heard of it, I’d never met anyone who went there.

“Perfect,” Collins said, clapping his hands together. “We can get this going.”

I felt myself frown. “Get what—” I started, when Collins interrupted, opening the fridge again.

“Want something to drink?” he asked the guy. “Water? Red Bull?”

“Agua,” the guy said, coming to stand with us in the kitchen. “Thanks.”

“Hey,” Dawn said to him, crunching some chips and swallowing quickly. “I’m Dawn.”

“ ’Sup,” the guy said. “I’m—”

“
Shh!
” Collins yelled, so loudly that we all stopped and looked at him. He frowned at the guy. “What did we talk about?”  The guy just raised his eyebrows, and Collins grinned at me, gesturing to the guy with a flourish, like he was presenting him on a game show. “So he’s here for the first thing on your list. Enjoy.”

I thought back to the list, and the first one, which was—

I drew in a shocked breath. I had a feeling I’d just turned bright red.

Kiss a stranger.

“Wait,” I said faintly, looking at the guy. He wasn’t bad-looking or anything, but that didn’t mean I wanted to kiss him. Especially not here, in front of Collins and Dawn and Frank.

Collins smiled wide at me, and gave me another wink, this one bigger than before. “You’re welcome,” he said.

“Wait,” Frank said, looking from the guy and back to me, then glaring at Collins, sounding more annoyed than I’d ever heard him. “Matt, I told you not to do this the first time you suggested it. But you go ahead and bring some random guy here to—”

“Hey,” the guy said, lowering his water bottle, looking offended.

“What’s going on?” Dawn whispered loudly to Frank.

“No,” I said, taking a step away.  Then, worried I might have insulted the guy, I said quickly, “Sorry. No offense. I’m just not . . . I mean . . .” I ran out of words and took a tortilla chip, just to have something to do with my hands.

“What?” Collins asked. “It’s perfect. You don’t know him, he doesn’t know you. So get to it.” He raised his eyebrows at us. “Chop-chop.”

“Collins,” Frank said, keeping his eyes on me, “if Emily doesn’t want to do it—”

“Do what?” Dawn asked, crunching down on another chip, looking baffled but entertained, like this was a movie she’d walked into late.

“Kiss him,” Collins said. Dawn looked surprised, but then she gave the guy a not-so-subtle once-over and shot me an approving thumbs-up. “It’s on the list Emily’s friend sent, the first one is ‘Kiss a stranger,’ so—”

“No,” I said quickly, holding up my hands. There was no need to keep discussing this, because it was not going to happen. Ever. “I’m sorry. Um, thanks for the effort, but I’m not just going to go around kissing random—”

“You know,” the guy said, setting down his water, starting to look annoyed, “my name’s—”

“
Shh!
” Collins and Dawn yelled at him.

“No,” I said again, shaking my head hard. “I don’t even know him, and—”

“But isn’t that the point?” It was Dawn who asked this. She turned to me, her eyebrows raised. “I mean, it wasn’t ‘Kiss someone you’ve already met,’ right?”

Collins raised an eyebrow. I opened my mouth and then closed it again when I didn’t have anything to say to this. It was true. It was also one of the main reasons I worried I’d never complete the list. And here a stranger was, being presented to me to kiss. I thought back to the night I hadn’t hugged Jamie Roarke, and how frustrated I’d been with myself, how I was still mad at myself for chickening out on horseback riding.  And
I really did need to get moving on the list, if I ever wanted to figure out where Sloane was. Would I get a better opportunity than this to kiss a stranger?

“Fine,” I said, before I knew I’d made a decision. Frank looked over at me sharply, like he was surprised, but then looked back down at his water bottle, like he was suddenly very interested in where it had been sourced from.

“Cool,” the guy said with a shrug. He took a purposeful step over to me, and without meaning to, I crushed the chip in my hand with a loud
crunch
.

“Um,” I said, dropping the pieces onto the counter and brushing the crumbs off my hands. “Maybe we could go somewhere less . . . public?”

“There’s a pantry,” Collins said, nodding past the refrigerator, toward what looked like a narrow hallway.

“Okay,” I said, mostly just to try and talk myself into this. Was I really going to do this? Furthermore, had I
volunteered
to do this? “Let’s go.”

“You could go outside,” Frank called as I forced myself to cross the kitchen on legs that suddenly felt wobbly, pointedly avoiding looking at Dawn, who was shooting me an excited smile. “It’s kind of tight in there.”

“That’s a good thing, Porter,” I heard Collins say, but I just concentrated on looking straight ahead, suddenly worried about my breath.

Frank was right—the pantry was not particularly big. A
light went on automatically when I opened the door, and I could see that down the two steps, there were shelves of food on all sides, and in the middle, just enough room for two people. But that was about it.

I made myself put one foot in front of the other, walking down the steps to stand in the center of the room, surrounded by spices I could smell faintly and boxes of pasta and bags of rice and flour and sugar.

The guy followed, closing the door behind him and coming to stand in front of me. In the open-plan kitchen, I hadn’t realized just how big he was. But now that we were in this tiny enclosed space together, it was very apparent. He had broad shoulders and big hands, and the already small space suddenly felt even more compressed. My heart was pounding, but I tried to make myself smile at the guy, like this was just normal, like I was always going around kissing people I didn’t know in pantries.

I looked up at him and my heart started beating harder than ever. I tried to tell myself that I could do this. It was almost like, after not kissing Frank only an hour before, I was getting a second chance to try and be brave. I tried to tell myself that this was also just like a stage kiss, only without an audience. Just another kiss that didn’t matter.

“Ready?” the guy asked. He didn’t seem stressed by this at all, and I tried to take comfort in that. If it was no big deal to him, maybe it shouldn’t have been such a big deal to me. I
swallowed hard and licked my lips quickly and took a tiny step toward him—really, all I could take in a space that small.

He gave me a lazy smile and put his hand on my shoulder, and started to lean down to me, just as the lights went out.

I took an instinctual step back, bumped into the shelf behind me, and heard something crash to the ground. I hadn’t realized the lights were on a timer, but it made sense, since they’d gone on automatically. “Sorry,” I said. “Um . . .” It was
dark
in there, since there were no windows and no light coming in anywhere. I didn’t think I could see anything, not my own hand in front of my face, certainly not the guy.

“It’s all right,” he said, from somewhere in the darkness. I took a cautious step forward, and collided with something—him. I stretched my arm out and it hit his chest. Suddenly,  I realized it might be easier this way, not having to see him. “Okay?” he asked.

I nodded, then realized what an idiotic move this was in a pitch-black room and said, “Yes.” I took a quick breath and let it out just as his nose bonked mine. “Sorry,” I said, reaching up and touching his face, trying to get my bearings. “I—” But I didn’t get to say anything more, because a moment later, his lips were on mine.

We stayed that way for a few seconds, and I figured that Sloane’s criteria had been met when the guy took a step closer to me, wrapped his arms around my waist, and started kissing me for real.

And under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t have been something I would have reciprocated. But it had been two months since I’d been kissed. And in the darkness of the pantry, it didn’t seem to matter that I didn’t know his name and wasn’t entirely sure he knew mine. It was like, because I couldn’t see him, or myself, those distinctions didn’t exist in the same way. It also didn’t hurt that he was a really good kisser, and soon I was kissing him back, my pulse racing and my breath catching in my throat, his hands twined in my hair. It was only when his hands slipped under the hem of my shirt, moving towards my sports bra, that I came out of the make-out trance, snapped suddenly back to reality.

I broke away from him and took a step back, pulling down my shirt and feeling my way toward the steps. “Okay then,” I said as I fumbled my way up the stairs in the darkness. I patted the wall until I found the light switch, and as it snapped on, we both flinched, the light seeming extra bright now. It was also disconcerting to suddenly see the guy, a whole person, not just lips and arms. I smoothed down my hair and opened the pantry door, the guy following behind me. “So,” I said, when we were both in the hallway, before we had to join everyone else. I didn’t feel embarrassed, exactly—it was more like I’d had an out-of-body experience in there and now was struggling to catch up. “Um. Thanks?”

“Sure,” the guy said, giving me a quick smile. “That was fun.”

I nodded and hurried back into the kitchen area. Frank was
leaning against the counter, typing on his phone, and Dawn and Collins were now sitting around the breakfast nook, Dawn laughing at something he was saying. “Hey,” Collins called when he saw us. “Success?”

I ignored this question and turned toward Frank, trying not to look directly at him. “Is it okay if I grab a water?”

“Sure,” he said, not looking up from his phone, and I assumed he was texting Lissa. “Help yourself.”

I pulled open the fridge, grabbed a water, and, as I shut the door, caught Dawn’s eye. She raised her eyebrows, and I gave her a tiny nod, and she grinned at me. Mostly so I wouldn’t have to face the guy, or Collins, or watch Frank text his girlfriend, I turned my attention to the fridge door. Unlike the rest of the house, the collection of papers and magnets did not appear to be carefully curated. It looked kind of like our fridge door did—a mess of expired coupons, invitations, and reminders. I noticed an invite, slightly askew, toward the bottom of the fridge.
The Stanwich Architectural Society’s Annual Gala!
it proclaimed in embossed lettering,
Honoring the work of Carol and Steve Porter.
Then it gave the date, about a month from now. Even though it was absolutely none of my business, I was bending down to see where it was being held—the bottom of the invitation blocked by some kind of color-coded calendar—when an alt-pop song started playing in the kitchen. I turned at the sound of it, and saw the guy, pulling his phone out of his pocket and answering it.