I want to break something.
I need to feel something.
But most importantly and most immediately, I need a drink.
“This stupid town is small enough for me to rage-walk to O’Donnell’s anyways,” I mutter out loud to myself as I storm off into the night.
It’s gorgeous out too, which only pisses me off even more. The smell of salt brine, the warm summer air, the glow of a three-quarter moon illuminating the trees.
It should be romantic. A night like this is for young love and forgetting about the future in favor of the now. A night like this is for stolen first kisses.
Because a night like this is when a game of flashlight tag turned into something more - a first kiss, heated, stolen, forbidden, quick and light across my lips and leaving me breathless. And a week after that night, on another night much like this one, is when I confronted him about it. After a week of feeling like I had a wonderful hidden secret but also scared to death of what it meant.
“You can’t just kiss me like that.”
He grins, the moon flashing off his teeth and the whites of his eyes. “Sure I can.”
“I- you-” I have no words, lost when those eyes look into mine, that cool look on his face.
“You shouldn’t have kissed me.”
“Why not.”
“Cause.”
The weekly Saturday night game of flashlight tag plays out across half a block of back yards, my siblings and a dozen other neighborhood kids from the neighborhood howling and giggling in the late summer night. Silas is “it”, but I know full-well we’re playing an entirely different game, hidden here together behind Ms. Hempstead’s garage.
I’ve got my back to the dark blue clapboard siding, my hair pulled back in a ponytail and my pulse skipping like crazy in my chest. Silas leans close, one hand on the garage wall behind me.
“Cause you didn’t like it?”
“No.”
He grins. “No you didn’t like it or no-”
“No, I mean, yes, I liked it.”
I freeze, caught in my own words before I frown.
“That’s- that’s not what I meant.”
Silas just wags his brows at me as he steps closer.
“Don’t you have other people to go find in this game?” I say quietly.
“Nope.” He swallows. “Found the only one I need to.”
I feel that thrill shiver through me. The forbidden, reckless thrill that’s started to come up in the last year or so whenever I’m around him.
“My dad-”
“Would kill me if he knew I’d kissed you.”
I blink. “That doesn’t scare you?”
“No.”
It does, I can see that even at a young age. Jacob Hammond is… formidable, even to cocky, fearless kids like Silas Hart.
“Rowan?”
He shakes his head. “I can manage your brother.”
“Manage?”
He nods. “Yeah, like, make him cool with it all.”
“What do you mean, ‘it all’?” I swallow thickly, blinking quickly. “It was just one kiss.”
My first kiss. My only kiss I’ll never be able to forget.
He moves closer. “Because, Slimy,” He grins at me, so damn cocky, so fearless.
“I’m not JUST gonna kiss you once.”
I swallow thickly. “What?”
I can feel the electricity run through me, the crackling of it snapping through my synapses.
“I said,” his hand slides to mine, fingers entwining as he pulls me against him, “I’m not gonna be able to stop kissing you.”
And then he does it again, and after that it’s all over.
After that he never does stop kissing me.
Until he does.
Forever.
The second I get to O’Donnell’s I regret my decision to come here. I still want a drink, but I want nothing to do with the crowd in there that I can see and hear through the half-frosted window. There’s a game on, and I know damn well I’m going to see at least five people I probably know.
Nope.
Instead, old habits take over, and I head around to the back door. I slip inside, ignoring the loud music and cheering from the bar up front as I dart down the back hallway to Rowan’s tiny office.
The door shuts behind me. I move to slump into the chair at his desk, and I grin as I pull open the bottom drawer.
Knew it.
My brother is exactly the kind of guy who’d keep a bottle of scotch in his desk drawer at work. I make a face at the half-empty bottle of cheap looking stuff. It’s not ideal, but it’ll do the trick right now.
Fucking Blaine.
There’s a tumbler on Rowan’s desk that I wipe out with the edge of my shirt, pouring a healthy splash before bringing it to my lips. The amber liquid burns, making my eyes water and my throat ache, but it’s a soothing fire.