When Gracie is humiliated after following her best friend's brother to college and finds he's moved on without her, she grows closer to his rival--the captain of his basketball team--the infamous Kalen Rush, and suddenly Gracie wonders just what len...
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I remembered the day my best friend's brother took my first kiss like it was yesterday.
His honey blonde hair just barely brushed the tops of his eyes that glittered like millions of fractals of light off the cerulean pond in his backyard that we used to dare each other to go skinny-dipping in long before we had grown out of the 'cooties' stage.
We were sitting on a particularly scratchy patch of fluffy grass on the bank of that very same pond, swatting at dragonflies and gnats in the sweltering humidity of sunset on a brilliant late-July evening when it happened.
Colby Hart reached out with deft fingers and wrapped them around my head, fulfilling my wish.
"I just want to know what it feels like, just once, before you move off to college. Please?"
He hadn't responded with words.
No—instead, his lips answered for him where his voice had failed.
The crickets chirped to the orchestral beat drumming in my chest as summer rain dropped in a sprinkling mist which then followed the lead of Colby's lips upon mine, transforming the drizzle into a proper rainstorm, but we didn't seem to notice.
Not as his skin was firm and slick like wet velvet sliding across my own, our hands tangling all up in each other like it would be the end of the world to ever part.
It was that scene playing on a loop in my mind as I tried to make sense of what I was seeing before me, standing at the threshold to Colby's door in the basketball house on campus where he'd told me to meet him before heading back to my dorm for orientation.
It was that very same kiss that was stuck on repeat in my head like a scratch on a movie disc, Colby's warm hands trailing up and down my flushed skin while rain pelted down on top of us while we smiled into each other's embrace of desire until he pulled back, the glistening droplets of water clinging to the charcoal length of his perfect eyelashes—
"Shit, Gracie, what are you doing here so early? You didn't knock?"
"I—I did knock."
Colby was too busy to hear my response.
"Uh, is this your little sister or something?"
I could barely make out the girl's features through the tears swimming in my eyes.
He'd told me to wait for him, right? I wasn't going crazy?
"I got a full ride to UCM, you should come too, it'll be fun to have you and Franny around like old times."
"Gracie? You okay? Shit, I'm sorry you had to see that."
Colby's voice of the past still floated in my ears, haunting me with the mockery of the promises he'd made me.
The girl had kissed him on the mouth in goodbye, just like he'd kissed me not thirteen months earlier.
"No, it's fine. I just came by early because you said you wanted to meet up and your friends pointed the way to your door. I didn't mean to interrupt. I actually really need to get to orientation, though. Good seeing you."
