Read Online Almost Kings by Max Doty - Free Book Online Page A

I parted them slightly as if I were about to ask her a question. The bed creaked, and her weight shifted forward as the wet of her lips pressed against mine. Under the taste of Vodka, I sensed one that was uniquely hers, and I reached for it with my tongue. She didn’t push me away. Instead, her tongue found mine.
    She leaned back, and I opened my eyes to find her smiling wide at me. She laughed. Not in a mean way, I thought, but from some combination of happiness and relief. She didn’t get up to go back to the bed with the other girls. Her hand didn’t leave my side.
     

12.
     
    The next morning, Kallea and I rode next to each other on the van ride home. I was hung over, but I didn’t feel bad: Kallea wanted me. The giddy knowledge of it made my body light, as if the world were smaller now and its gravity weaker. We didn’t hold hands and hadn’t talked about what happened yet. Instead, we smiled nervously and rested our bodies against each other as we caught up on sleep.
    Back at the school bus ramp, we said goodbye to the rest of the team and walked together to the side of the gym to retrieve our bikes and head home. As I entered my lock’s combination, I saw that Kallea hadn’t started on hers yet.
    “Kallea,” I said. “When we kissed—”
    “What was that exactly?” she asked.
    “I don’t know.”
    I slipped the lock into my backpack and walked closer to her. She was bundled in her big winter coat again, but he hands were bare and red with the cold.
    “You really think Emily is hotter than me?”
    “I just wanted to see if you’d flinch,” I said.
    “Did I?”
    “Yeah.”
    “So—” she said, smiling.
    “So?”
    “So now what?”
    I took another step toward her. If I leaned forward, I could kiss her now. How different would it feel sober, out in the cold. Would her lips still be warm? What would her breath taste like without the vodka?
    But I didn’t want to do it like that. I wanted to do it right next time—on her doorstep, or in candlelight. Not leaning over a bike, hung-over in the cold.
    “Hang out after school tomorrow?” I asked. “Like, food and a movie?”
    “Deal. Points for originality.”
    “Don’t you know? I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy.”
    I pulled back my bike and started to walk away, then turned back to see her pulling off her lock with trembling hands.
    “Here,” I said as I pulled off my gloves and gave them to her. She smiled and put them on.
     
    Back at home, I found Truck and Lizzie still asleep in our room. The late night and early morning hadn’t hit me until then. Now a wave of tiredness swelled up over me, and I crawled into bed without bothering to take my clothes off.
    For the first time since I was a kid, I felt safe, like I’d wake up to the sound of my family making waffles in the kitchen, my mom laughing at some ranch story of my dad’s, the floorboards softly creaking under her footsteps.
    I woke to the sound of Truck and Lizzie talking quietly in bed. The blankets had fallen to the floor sometime in the last few hours, and they lay together on the bare bed. She wore one of his big white t-shirts, and he had his head pressed against her stomach as if listening to it.
    “It’s saying, ‘Let me out! Let me out!’” whispered Truck, and Lizzie hit him playfully on the shoulder.
    “It?” she asked. “Do you think it’s a boy or a girl?”
    My brother rolled over so that he was looking up at the ceiling.
    “I don’t know.”
    She looked down at him and stroked his hair.
    “I think it would be cool to have a girl,” she said. “God knows we don’t need another Wheeler man running around.”
    “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It’s just—” She looked over at me, and I wondered if she could tell I was awake. I concentrated on steady breaths, in and out every other second, like sleeping people do. “—I don’t know. There’s just so many guys in your family. A girl would be different, you know?”
    “Yeah.”
    She