Kiss Cam [Teaser/Published October 2016]

CHAPTER THIRTEEN | KINKY

KISSMAS GOES ON to be our best Christmas vlog yet. Viewers rave about the ingenuity, commenters sign up to join the Jasiper ship, and our Christmas special makes the front page of the VlogIt website—and it's only the fourth day.

After kissing lip balms off each other's mouths, we treated a peppermint stick like spaghetti noodles (a bad idea that hurt our teeth and made our mouths sting from the mint—we gave up before our lips even touched), and watched How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and kissed every time the word "Christmas" was said (fourteen times, to be exact). So today, the fourth day of Kissmas, we're giving each other hickeys—shaped like Christmas trees.

I have a few concerns about the fourth day of Kissmas, and they go something like this:

1. The most appropriate place to make a hickey (that isn't totally lame) is on one's neck.

2. My dad has saved his vacation time for Christmas, and he's off starting tomorrow.

3. There's a possibility he could see it.

4. Wearing scarves and turtlenecks every day is pretty fishy.

5. Concealer melts off.

There's only one way of putting this: I'm screwed.

I was hoping I could get away with wearing ugly Christmas sweaters with turtlenecks underneath—because 'tis the season, but I have one turtleneck, and since I don't get off school until next Tuesday I've concluded it'd look pretty suspicious—hence numbers two through four on my list. My other option was concealer, but I've found from having two past boyfriends and observant parents that concealer is useless.

Pros of having busy parents:

1. You get free rein of the house 99.9 percent of the time.

2. You can get away with being around friends all day long.

Cons of having busy parents:

1. Since they don't see you daily, they try to make up for things by being snoopy, asking questions, and staring at you for extended periods of time.

With that in mind, I tried to convince Jasper that hickeys weren't going to happen, but he blew me off, saying, "You already agreed, Juniper. No take-backs." Even explaining the situation didn't help. In fact, it made him more excited about the video. It was as though the idea of me doing the walk of shame and trying to hide the bruise was going to be the best part of the fourth day of Kissmas.

If I thought what we did looked like shooting amateur porn before, I really hadn't taken into consideration the possibility of shooting a hickey-giving video. The lights have never seemed so bright, Jasper's bed so sexual, and the camera so cheap. What is about to take place on said bed under lights bright enough to make me sweat and before a video camera that will broadcast those events to the entire VlogIt community is anything but innocent. Lips and tongue and shiny, bruised skin . . . I can see it now—a screen cap of our video used as a porn site advert.

Maybe I'm being dramatic, maybe I'm nervous, and maybe Lenny isn't looking at me from Jasper's desk with all-knowing eyes and a toothy grin. The lucky idiot gets to cop out after introducing the fourth day of Kissmas and saying something witty we can tag on at the end of the video. I hold his eye for a moment from the safety of Jasper's doorway and shake my head at him.

Lucky idiot.

He simply winks at me and then raises his eyebrows.

Jasper appears behind me, having left his room to freshen up or something as I came up the stairs. As he slides past me to enter his room, I notice he's changed his shirt. He wears a simple button-up with the first few buttons undone to expose the entirety of his long neck. He takes my hands once he's facing me and breathes on my hands, doing what he always does when I've been out in the cold. My hands are already thawed, but he keeps his lips on my fingers, blowing steadily on them and looking at me with big brown eyes. I meet his eyes with the same amount of flirtation—jokingly, of course—and greet him with a sassy smile. His lips tug up into a smile as well, and he drops my hands.