“It doesn’t work like that. You have to guess the number of jelly beans in her jar. If you get the wrong number, you don’t get anything. If you get the right number, you get to kiss her.”
“So, we need to figure out how many jelly beans are in her jar,” he says simply. He looks at me. “Did you see the jar?”
I nod. “It’s a pickle jar.” I hold out my hands to show him the size. “The big kind.”
“So we need a jar that size, and we need to fill it with jelly beans and then count them. At least then you can get close, right?”
I scrub a hand down my face. “This is stupid. I’ll never get it. Every guess costs a dollar.” I reach into my pocket and pull out my wallet. It’s nearly empty.
“You’re just going to let somebody else kiss her?”
“If I’m not there, I won’t see it.” I shrug my shoulders, trying to hide the fact that I feel as if I’m being gutted.
He stares at me. He doesn’t say anything. “If it were Emily, I’d buy every f**king pickle and every damn jelly bean in the state of New York. There’s no way my girl would kiss some asshole.”
“You’re right,” I say. “We need to go to the store.” Hope swells inside me. Do I have a chance? I won’t know until I try, I guess.
Logan and I go shopping, and after we get all our supplies, he looks at me and says, “I hope you like pickles, dude, because we’re going to have to eat this whole jar so we can fill it with jelly beans.”
I look at the jar. “I don’t like pickles that much. You?”
Logan pops the top while we walk back to the dorm and starts eating. This is what friendship is all about. He crunches each bite over and over until he swallows, and then he reaches for a second one and passes it to me, taking another for himself. He stops a stranger on the street. “You want a pickle?” he asks. The stranger sidesteps him. “What?” he asks. “You act like it’s every day somebody offers you a free pickle.”
The man keeps going. “Dude, I think he thought you mean a pickle.” I make air quotes when I say the word pickle.
“How could I mean a pickle when I’m standing here holding a jar of pickles?” he asks.
I shrug. “You didn’t look like his type anyway.”
“I’m too pretty for him, right?” he asks. Logan’s all tatted up, on top of being huge.
“That has to be it.”
By the time we get to the dorm, all but two pickles are gone, and we’ve left a trail of people eating pickles in our wake.
I burp into my closed fist. “I’ll never eat another pickle again.”
Logan dumps the last two in the bushes outside the dorm. “I can’t eat another one, man,” he says, belching.
He washes out the jar and dries it, and then we start dumping jelly beans into the empty container. Bag after bag goes in. When it’s full, I look at Logan and say, “How many is that?”
“You weren’t counting?” he asks.
“Was I supposed to?”
“Shit,” he says. Then he dumps them onto the bed, and we start to count.
I’m going to win this contest if it’s the last thing I ever do. “If I buy twenty numbers, ten before and after our count, do you think I’ll be safe? I only have twenty dollars left after the pickles.”
He points to my phone. “You have FaceTime on that thing?” he asks.
I nod and pass it to him. He opens it up and props it on the desk in front of him. It rings, and finally, Logan’s oldest brother, Paul, answers. He stares at the screen until he recognizes Logan.
“What the f**k do you want?” he asks. “And whose phone are you calling from?” He’s signing while he talks out loud.
Logan laughs and pulls me into the frame. “It’s Sean’s.”
“What up, Sean?” Paul asks.
I wave.
“You got any cash?” Logan asks.
Paul’s eyes narrow. “Why?”
“Sean needs to buy a kiss from his girl.”
Paul’s brow rises. “You paying for sex now, dude?” he asks. He holds up his hands when I start to protest. “Not that I think that’s a bad idea or anything. Man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.”
I laugh. I can’t help it. “I can’t ask you for money, man. Don’t worry about it. Logan shouldn’t have called you.”
But Logan rushes on. “So, you got any money?” he asks.
Paul heaves a sigh and empties his pockets. I see a few dollars float around. He yells toward the back of his apartment. “Sam! Matt!” Both brothers walk into the room.
“You bellowed?” Matt says.
“Asswipe there needs some cash so he can buy a hooker.” He points toward me.
“She’s not a hooker,” I protest.
But Logan’s laughing like hell by now. And Matt and Sam look amused, too.
“Cash?” Logan asks.
“Some,” Paul says.
“Can you bring it?”
“Where?”
“To school. To the kissing booth. In the quad.”
Paul heaves a sigh. “I’ll be there.” The phone goes dead.
“Do you think we’ll have enough?” I’m getting anxious now.
“You’ll have more than you thought you did.” Logan claps a hand onto my shoulder and squeezes.
God, I hope this works.
Lacey
I groan loudly as soon as the door closes behind Sean and Logan. “Aghh!” I want to hit something. I want to scream. I want to…kiss Sean. I want to kiss him so bad.
“Spill it,” Friday says as she sits down beside Emily and props her head in her hand. She doesn’t say anything more. She just waits.
“I don’t even know where to start.” My voice cracks, and I hate that it does.
“Start at the ending,” Emily says. “What was happening when we barged in?”
“Nothing,” I grunt. “Not a thing. Just like always.”
“There was something going on. Something more than the usual sexual tension between you two. Did he finally make a move?”
I shake my head. He didn’t. Not really. “He hinted that he might make a move. So, I gave him an opening. That’s all.”“He was taking it,” Friday says. “The opening that is.”
Emily grins. “He wanted to take her opening, all right.” She snorts.
I throw a pillow at her, but she just catches it.
“I thought this kissing thing would make him step up. But I guess he just doesn’t care as much as I thought he did.”
“He cares,” Emily says.
I shake my head. “He doesn’t.”
“He does. He told Logan. Logan told me.”
My belly flutters. “Logan must be hearing things.”
Emily snorts again.
“I mean…”
“I know what you meant,” Emily says, smiling. “Logan can be pretty intuitive about some things. And he feels certain that Sean wants you. Bad. And Sean said as much.”
Friday bites her lip, then adds, “I probably shouldn’t tell you this, but…”
“What?” I ask.
“You know how he got a new tattoo last week?” she asks.
I didn’t know so I don’t answer. “What did he get?” I ask instead.
She inhales, weighing her decision to tell me. Then she blurts out, “It’s a honeybee.”
“Oh shit,” I say.
“What?” Emily asks. “What did I miss?”
“He calls me honey when he’s being all sweet.”
Friday nods.
“I blew it when I told him I just want to be friends.”
“Logan says boyfriends are friends that get to make girls come.” Emily snickers. She gets this dreamy look on her face and sighs. “Over and over and over.”
“What if I blew my chance forever?” I ask. Tears sting my eyes.
“Oh, don’t cry,” Friday says. “You’ll mess up your makeup.”
“You look hot, by the way,” Emily says.
“Thanks,” I murmur.
I adjust the top of my dress. I never show this much cleavage. “I better get down to the booth. The sale will only last an hour, and then the kiss happens.”
Emily frowns. “What happens when you have to kiss some strange guy?” she asks.
“Then I guess I get to kiss some strange guy.” I shrug. I can’t get out of it now. “I’d hoped that Sean would, you know… But he didn’t.”
“You’ve got yourself in quite a predicament,” Emily says.
I flop down in a chair. “Tell me about it.”
“Why did you want to be just friends?” Friday asks. “I don’t think you ever told me. It’s pretty damn obvious you have feelings for him.”
“I was afraid,” I admit. “I can’t live without him. He’s my best friend. What if we start dating and then it all falls apart? I will lose him forever.” I shake my head. “I just can’t let that happen.” I wince. “I may have made a mistake giving him that piece of paper, but I’m going to chance it. If I don’t, I’ll never know. I love him. I just need for him to love me back.”
“What mistake?” Emily asks.
“What piece of paper?” Friday asks right after.
I shake my head. “It doesn’t matter. He’ll either show up or he won’t.”
I slide on my sandals and pick up my jar of jelly beans. It’s big and heavy, but I don’t have to walk too far. “You guys want to come?” I ask.
Friday snorts this time. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”
We walk up to the booth, and I set up my display. Emily and Friday help me take pledges for a solid hour. People write their names and guesses on a piece of paper, and Friday sorts through them as they turn them in, tossing out the ones that aren’t even close. We keep the two closest to the actual number, both over and under. There will only be one winner, but it’s whoever comes the closest that will get to kiss me.
I see Sean in the crowd. He’s walking with Logan and three of his brothers. There’s a wide path around them. They are some fearsome-looking boys, that’s for sure. They’re also head-turners in every sense of the word. But none of the Reed boys are as handsome as Sean. His brown eyes meet mine, and he looks away. He pulls his baseball cap down low, shielding his eyes in shadow so I can’t even see them.
Logan hands me a ten-dollar bill and ten guesses.
“Oh, I don’t think so,” Emily breathes.
He winks at her, and she crosses her arms under her breasts. He crooks a finger at her, and she shakes her head. She signs something to him really quickly. He laughs out loud and signs back. All the tension leaves her body, and she deflates.
“I’m not going to kiss you,” I tell Logan. “Give him his money back.” I motion toward Emily.
But she just sorts through his entries and keeps one out to the side. I take it from her. It’s close. It’s really close.
“Emily,” I warn.
She smiles at me. I have no idea what’s going on.
Logan’s brothers all have guesses, too, and each of them hands me a stack of tickets. Emily and Friday sort through them and pull another one out, discarding the one that belonged to Logan. Thank God. Emily would kill me if I kissed her boyfriend. I wouldn’t be able to do it. I just wouldn’t.
So far, Logan’s brother Matt is the closest, but I can’t tell him that.
Friday and Emily keep taking the money as I talk with the men who stop to buy tickets. When the hour is up, my heart is racing and my pits are sweating. Logan hands me a tissue and points to my brow. I blot it dry.
On the hour, the bell rings and the announcer calls me to the stage. “And now for the results of the kissing contest,” the announcer says. He looks at Friday who has the winning ticket in her hand. “Do we have a winner?”
She nods and walks across the stage. She stops and takes a bow when she gets catcalls and whistles. She’s very Katy Perry-pretty with her tattoos, vintage dress, and old-fashioned hairstyle. She puts the winning ticket in the announcer’s extended hand.
“And the winner is,” he sings. He waits, opening the folded piece of paper slowly, drawing out the suspense. I can barely hear him over my own heartbeat, which is thumping like crazy. Is it too late to back out? Shit. I don’t want to do this. “The winner is the person who guessed twelve hundred and forty-eight!”
The crowd is silent, and all the participants look to one another. But then I hear a thump, thump, thump, thump as someone comes up the stairs onto the platform. I see the baseball cap before I see the rest of him, and I hope to God that’s Sean’s cap. But Sean didn’t even buy a ticket. Not a single one.
Yet it’s his brown gaze that meets mine. It’s his baseball cap, and they are his tattoos. They’re his broad shoulders and his long strides that eat up the distance between us.
He turns his hat backward and looks down at me. He stops with less than an inch to spare between us. “Congratulations,” I squeak out. “You didn’t even buy a ticket. How did you…?”
“I bought one hundred and forty-two tickets, dummy,” he says.
My heart trips a beat. “You did?” All he had to buy was one. I put the winning number on the piece of paper I gave him.
He nods, and he takes my face in his hands. His thumbs draw little circles on my cheeks as his fingers thread into the hair at my temples.