Her Kiss (Griffin)

HER KISS

(Griffin’s
Story)

By
Melanie Marks

Copyright
2014 Melanie Marks

Cover Image ©
iStockphoto.com
/
Geber86

All
Rights Reserved.

CHAPTER 1

As I’m coming out of the university
locker room after my victoriously crushing hockey game, there’s a college
groupie waiting for me. She’s hot—and yeah … in college. I’m still in
high school, so that’s always pretty cool to me—college fans. Not cool
enough to sign my autograph where she wants though, ’cause I have a
girlfriend—and I want to keep her.

I blink and divert my eyes, which
is not the easiest thing in the world. I mean, I’m a guy. You show us
stuff—we look. (And mentally say thanks.)

Covering my eyes with my arm for
good measure (my lips twitching up at the corners, I’m sure) I draw in my
breath and think of woodpeckers.

“Sorry, I’ll get in trouble if I
touch you there.” I enlighten her with a grin, though she probably gets it
already (since she’s a girl), “My girlfriend gave me rules—no signing
body parts.”

College Chick does a pouty
face—but the flirting kind. She leans in close to me, like she’s hoping
I’m a cheater—which I’m not.

“I’m a really big fan, Griffin
Piper,” she purrs, drawing closer, practically snuggling into my neck. “Is your
girlfriend even
around?
”

Oh man.

“Um—yeah, somewhere,” I lie.

I step away from her. I’m really
not tempted or anything. But she’s a fan, so I don’t want to insult her. I just
need her to go away. Quick. Since she’s obviously not one to take no for an
answer—and I’m not one that likes to give it.

“Hey, I’ve got to go talk to that
reporter,” I tell her.
That’s
not a
lie.
Just a handy diversion.

 
“Here, I’ll break a rule for you.” Really quick, I sign a
body part. But I don’t think my girlfriend will mind—it’s just the
chick’s hand.

Before Groupie Girl can protest, I
trot over to the reporter, Ms.
Lewinsky,
pretty sure I
know what she’s going to ask—since every girl reporter does.

It’s okay, though. I don’t mind the
question.

CHAPTER 2

Since my school—Jefferson
High—won the state hockey championship, I get a lot of reporters asking
me questions. Believe it or not, the question I get asked most (that’s not
hockey related, I mean) is how did me and my girlfriend, Heaven, get together.
I swear. That’s the major one—well, when it’s a girl reporter. I get the
question from our girl school reporters too—though they already know the
story. Everyone at my school knows it. It’s just, I guess they like it. Since I
was known at our school as “
The
Grief-Master”
then I winded up dating the sweetest girl in our whole school,
Ally Grange. (AKA: Heaven) (Well,
my
heaven.)

The question:
How did you, The Grief-Master, end up dating Ally Grange?

My answer:
I have no clue
.

I really don’t.

I guess what helped out was: I
helped her once—back in middle school. She dropped her armload of books.
It was me and my friends fault, though—that she dropped them. We were
messing around in the school hall—and then this tiny, cute girl comes
around the corner with a pile of books. But yeah, we were being rough. We
accidently jostled her. And she jumped. And her books went flying.

I swear
,
her big pretty eyes looked terrified. I guess because we were so big … and she
was so small. And me and my friends on the hockey team, we had this reputation
at school as troublemakers—and she looked as though she believed the
rumors. Which most of them were true, I guess, but still, we didn’t go around
hitting girls.
Maybe hitting
on
them.
But even then, not ones like Ally. Ally
wasn’t the hit-on type. She was the cute type.
So
cute.
But she was also the
type that we normally overlooked, ’cause we knew she wasn’t going to go for us.
Some girls
do
. They go for us in a
big, easy way—even back in middle school. We just went for that. We were
lazy, I guess. Plus, all we wanted was some action—not a commitment. If that
was even brought up—a commitment—we ran. Or laughed. I’m not proud
of that, I’m just sayin’. We weren’t looking for girlfriends. We were looking
for girls. And we weren’t that picky. They just had to be hot. Other than that,
it helped if they didn’t go to our school—so they didn’t get their hearts
broken or make a big scene when we didn’t eat lunch with them in the school
cafeteria. But we made it clear—well, tried—well,
I
tried—to make it clear we
weren’t guys to set your heart on. We could get it pounding, sure. But if you
actually gave it to us—your heart—we’d break it. Not on purpose.
Well,
mine
wasn’t on purpose.
But I wasn’t into that—anything serious. I just wanted a good
time—on the rink, with girls, in life in general. It was all pretty much
the same to me—go for the score and move on.

(It was middle school though, so
“scoring” with girls wasn’t that high of a priority—and didn’t exactly
mean the same thing as it did later in high school.)

Anyway, (I digress a lot, sorry)
there
Ally was: her books scattered on the ground in the
school hallway at our feet. She looked like she was going to take off
running—just leave her books. Abandon them and run. Run away from
us
, because we were
that
scary to her. I could tell that’s what was swimming around in
her pretty head—
danger,
run
.

I grabbed her—just to stop
her from running away. That’s it. The thing is though: I grabbed her
hand
. I was going for her arm,
but at the last minute, I grabbed her tiny, trembling hand instead. ‘Cause I
knew if I grabbed her arm it would scare her worse.

So, last minute, I grabbed her
hand, then whispered, “Wait.”

Then, still holding her satin soft
hand, I started picking up her books.

I have to tell you, her hand was
really soft.
And nice.
So, I’m not really sure I would
have let it go anyway, but I kept holding on to it so she wouldn’t run. Then,
when I didn’t chuck the books at her or anything, just held them for her, she
looked up at me all starry eyed—and I don’t know, I guess she started
making up a love song right then in her head. (I accidently read it
later—the love song—but it was on accident, I swear.) Not going to
lie though, I was kind of doing the same thing at that moment too, sort
of—writing a love song. I guess. It just wasn’t something I’d actually
write down. Or
think
about writing
down, not in a thousand years. It was more something that made my heart pound
at night, made me yearn for something that I didn’t quite get (as in
understand. But also—literally—didn’t
get
.) It was just a startling, confusing moment. One that made my
breath tangle in my gut, and made my eyes narrow with wonder, like,
“What the—????”

‘Cause my heart
was doing something weird.

Something it had never done before.

Still, in the beginning, when I
picked up her books for her, it wasn’t a romantic gesture—didn’t even
cross my mind. It was our fault she dropped the books, so it was just me being
nice. Not romantic. But THEN I offered to carry the books for her. It’s just
she had looked so scared before, and now she was looking affectionate and like
I was her knight in shining armor—and I liked it. And I didn’t want her
to run away again. I wanted to keep being near her as long as I could.

Plus she had way too many books she
was trying to carry. She’d just drop them again. Then she’d look at the next
guy that picked them up all starry-eyed—and I didn’t want that. Or maybe
the next guy she ran into would be mean to her, like she had been afraid I was
going to be. I didn’t want that either. So I carried her books for her. And
then right after that, she gave me a cookie—and it smelled like her.

I swear. The rest of the day, I
just sniffed that cookie.

CHAPTER 3

The way the cookie thing actually
went was like this: Afterwards—after helping trembling, terrified Ally
with her books—she looked up at me like I was her hero, which kind of
took my breath away. I mean, I wasn’t expecting that from a girl like her, that
sort of look. Usually girls looked at me like I was tempting candy … and they
were hungry for a forbidden treat. One they’d been warned about. Usually girls
like Ally would quickly look away, heed the warnings. But that day she seemed
to forget they existed.

While I was still wrapping my head
around the look—and the way it gave me strange flutters in the pit of my
stomach—I watched her soft blond hair fall over her blushing pretty face
as she reached into her lunch bag. Then baffled, I watched as she pulled out a
huge cookie.

I blinked, not sure what that was
about—the cookie. (Later I learned that’s how Ally shows her
gratitude—through baked goods.)

But at that moment, I just saw her
pull out a cookie. Which was weird because it was early morning—not
lunchtime. Or even close to it. Plus the cookie was huge—bigger than her,
practically. Well, you get what I mean. It was an enormous friggin’ cookie and
she was tiny.

I tilted my head, narrowing my eyes
as she held the gigantic thing out to me with her smooth, pretty hand, and I
just wanted to snatch it again. Not the cookie, but her hand. I’d kissed girls
before, lots of them, but I’d never held hands with one, ever. Not until her.
Ally was my first. And she was the first girl that had ever looked at me like
she was—like I was good. I had a reputation as a thug—and I’m not
going to lie, I was no saint.

Girls looked at me a lot of ways. Like
I was appetizing, or tempting their hearts to walk on the
wild-side
.
That sort of stuff.
And really, they were right to do
that—to look at me with trepidation. My dad was an alcoholic, my mom was
mentally unstable—and that wasn’t even the worst of my family lineage.
That stuff was tame compared to the junk in my life counselors told me to keep
hidden from the general public of middle school. What I’m getting at is, I was
seriously messed up—yet this girl was looking at me like I was her hero.
Her knight in shining armor.
The feeling it had running
through me was new. And confusing. But I liked it. I just wasn’t sure about it.
It was kind of like,
“What is going
on???”

‘Cause it sort of seemed like my
friends were right—the ones that had teased me as I helped Ally pick up
her books. They’d kept laughing and saying, “Griffin’s gone soft for the school
girl.”

Kind of seemed like they were
right. It had me mentally scratching my head.

And staring at
her soft hand.

“It’s a snicker doodle,” she told
me when I just stared at her offering. Well, she thought that’s what I was
staring at—the cookie.

Her shy voice snapped me out of my
daze, and I was tempted to take it—you know, what she was
actually
offering—which wasn’t her
hand, but the big, fat cookie with cinnamon sprinkled all over it. It looked
really good. But it was from her lunch bag. Which meant she’d been planning to
eat it herself. So there was that. And also there was the cliché thought
niggling and squirming in my brain about bullies. You know, that they steal
people’s lunches. And until I’d helped her with her books, she’d thought I was
like that—a bully. I knew a lot of girls were under that misimpression.
(Well, misimpression—
to me
.) I
just liked to fight. A lot. It wasn’t to pick on anyone though. I just liked to
fight. Not with girls though, ever.
Of course.
But I
was in middle school, and I had issues, and slamming heads in helped me blow
off steam. I tried to keep the slamming on the hockey rink, though. I really
did. But it didn’t always turn out that way. Which is why I was constantly in
detention—well, that, and I have hilarious thoughts running through my
brain, constantly. Well, hilarious to me, not so much to teachers. I try to
keep the thoughts bottled up, I swear, but man, sometimes I have to share
them—with the class.
At inappropriate moments.
So, yeah.
Detention. Constantly.

Anyway, about the “bully” thing, I
hadn’t really ever worried about the label before. I didn’t care what anyone
thought … but I found I cared what
she
thought. It had me mentally scratching my head again.

Seriously, what was going on?

Instead of taking the cookie from
her, I made a lame joke—you know, about the “snickerdoodle” (which you
have to admit is a pretty funny word). I raised my eyebrows. “You named your
cookie?”

She laughed. Actually laughed. It
was an amazing sound. It made my heart—or stomach—or somewhere deep
inside me swoop.

“It’s the
kind
of cookie—” she started to
explain,
turning the prettiest shade of pink I’d ever seen.

But the explanation—it seemed
to be too many words for her to get out. I mean, to actually say to
me
, the huge scary guy that had
made her drop her books—then held her hand to keep her captive. Also, I’m
sure she figured out I’d just made a stupid joke.

“—
never
mind,” she whispered, taking a flustered breath, though her eyes were still all
starry. “I just want you to have it.”

I couldn’t help smiling at that. I
knew she baked it herself. And well, she wanted me to have it. So, I took it
then.
Because it looked really good.
And smelled like
her.

Now whenever I smell a cinnamony
cookie I think of her—well, then and every other minute of the day. But
Ally’s hands—they always smell like cookies. And her neck smells like
baking cherry pie. Not kidding. I think it’s because she bakes so much.
Or because I’m insane.
Probably that. But either way, the
smell of her drives me wild.