Read Online The New Guy by Amy Spalding - Free Book Online

possible, I feel as if Daisy and Peanut are giving me that look too.
    “How did you decide which one of you got to be calledMom?” Alex looks back and forth between them. “If that’s okay to ask.”
    “Of course it’s okay.” Darcy waves off the other possibility with her whole arm.
    “We tried to think of all the mother options,” Mom says. “Mom, Mother, Maman—as if we were French? I don’t know. Right before Jules was born, I think we’d finally settled on Mom and Mama, except that neither one of us wanted to be Mama.”
    “We kept thinking,
Who’ll want to say
mama
when they’re an adult?
” Darcy says. “We could barely say it to each other, and we were solidly in the throes of new parenthood. So I decided if everyone else in my life who mattered just called me Darcy, why not my daughter? It felt fine.”
    “And then I got to be Mom!” Mom says. “Which was a huge relief by then.”
    “That’s nice,” Alex says, which from someone else might be a dismissal, but I can tell from the warmth of his voice and how he’s smiling that he really thinks it is nice, as nice as I know that it is.
    “Can we take the dogs into the backyard?” I ask. I don’t need permission to go with my own dogs to my own backyard, but I do think they’ll take the hint.
    “Of course,” Darcy says. “We bought a new Frisbee, if you’d like to try it out.”
    “Yeah,” Alex says with a surge of enthusiasm. So we get the new Frisbee and an old tennis ball, and we head to thebackyard. Mom and Darcy have stayed inside, and I try not to just stare at Alex. This must be it, though, the moment things really
happen
. I might be inexperienced, but I feel how my nerves seem to rise up through my skin in Alex’s direction.
    “We’re alone,” Alex says, and I stare at him, and he bursts into laughter. “I don’t know why I said that like a creep.”
    “It’s okay,” I say. “I know you’re not a creep.”
    It’s as if now neither one of us knows what to do with this moment. I decide to make the moment mine. I turn a little, and even though we’re not standing exactly facing each other, it seems close enough. I gently rest my hand on his side, even though I’ve never just reached out and touched a boy before. He feels solid and warm and so real beneath my hand. Something in his expression shifts, and while Alex is always smiling, this smile is different. This smile is new, and it’s somehow focused right on me.
    Peanut barks, and I manage not to yell at him. Alex grabs the Frisbee and races down the length of the backyard before throwing it in my direction. I have no idea where he’s gotten the idea that I’m athletically inclined, but I do manage to catch it. The dogs leap around in glee, so I fling the plastic disc toward Alex, but not
really
, so that Peanut’s able to leap up and catch it in his mouth. Alex thinks he can just take the Frisbee back from Peanut, but I don’t say anything so I can watch a fifteen-pound dog and a full-grown boy battle it out.
    Peanut wins, of course.
    We keep playing until the dogs are lying, panting, on thegrass. I’m not sure if I can just pick up again where we were, but then Alex is right next to me.
    Then we move at the same time, and though this is only my second kiss since Pete Jablowski, it doesn’t matter—every cell in me knows what to do. Everything’s in sync, how I have to rise up on my toes just a little, and Alex leans over the tiniest amount. My hands suddenly aren’t at my sides but meeting each other around his neck. Alex’s have slid around my waist, skimming lines that feel drawn onto me permanently.
    And the kissing. The kissing! Our lips have parted, finding new and newer ways to overlap. He’s still sugary and salty from the Bacon 182. I’m convinced we’re breathing through each other, that we’re all the oxygen we could possibly need.
    “That was so good,” I say once the kissing’s ended. And then I try to figure out how to reverse time