“What the f**k happened between you two?” Logan asks as soon as the door closes.
I shrug. Logan is famous for his shrugs. He should accept mine. But he doesn’t. Instead, he punches me in the shoulder.
Shit, that hurt. “What the fuck?” I ask.
“What happened?” he asks. He looks straight into my eyes.
“Nothing,” I say. I shake my head. “Not a f**king thing.”
“Dude, you had a pillow shoved in your lap, and you were getting off her bed when we walked in. Something happened.” He shoves my shoulder, almost knocking me over. Logan’s a big boy. A little bigger than me, and I’m a big guy. “Not to mention that she looked like she’d just been f**ked.”
I stop and turn to face him. I lay both lands flat on his chest and shove him as hard as I can. “Don’t ever f**king talk about her like that again,” I warn.
Logan takes a few steps back. Then he grins. “It’s about f**king time,” he says. He holds up a hand to high five me.
“Fuck you,” I say instead, and I keep walking toward my dorm. I can’t get there fast enough.
“Did you kiss her?” he asks. He grins at me again, and I feel a smile tugging at my own lips. But it doesn’t last for more than a minute. His joviality isn’t contagious.
“I was about to…. Then you guys busted in,” I admit.
“She wants you, man. She’s got it as bad as you do. Trust me.”
I shake my head. “She doesn’t.”
“She does.” He claps a hand on my shoulder. “She told Emily. Emily told me.” He pauses and then says, “You’re welcome.”
“What did she say?” I ask. I probably don’t want to know.
“She said she wants to have your babies.” He jumps back when I go to punch him, and he laughs.
“Shut up,” I say. “This is serious.”
“Why’s it so serious all of a sudden?” Logan asks. “This shit’s been going on between you two for a long time. Why does it suddenly matter so much?”
“The contest is today. They’re raffling off a kiss from her.” I heave a sigh. “One lucky winner is going to get to kiss the woman I love. In front of everybody.”
“Oh, fuck,” Logan breathes. “That’s shit.”
“I asked her not to go,” I confess.
“So, go buy all the tickets,” he says with a shrug, as though he just solved world poverty or AIDS.
“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 a**hole.”
“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 cl**vage. “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.