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

and pull those words back inside of me. “Oh my god. I’m sorry.”
    “Sorry why?” Alex grins down at me. His hands are still on the small of my back, and as long as he keeps making tiny little movements with his fingertips, I’m probably going to release stupider and stupider things from the depths of my brain.
    “That was the dorkiest thing I could say.”
    “You know what I hate?” He leans down and kisses the corner of my mouth. “People who calculate everything that comes out. Who think they’re supposed to be a certain way or like a certain thing, and it’s all some act. I’ve had enough of that.”
    I’m afraid of what other words I might blurt out, so I lean into him and find his mouth with mine. I’m aware it’s my third kiss with Alex, fourth overall, but then, so quickly, I lose count. Some of the kisses are brief, like a spark in the darkness, while some go on slow and deep and dizzying.
    “Should we go in?” Alex leans his forehead against mine, so we’re still close like we’re kissing. My lips actually ache. “I don’t want your moms to be angry.”
    The dogs seem to be over their temporary Frisbee-based exhaustion, so we distract ourselves by throwing the tennis ball for them before heading inside. Mom and Darcy are working on a recipe at the kitchen counter, but they pause to share a knowing look.
    “We’re making biscotti,” Mom says.
    “You two should go out for lunch,” Darcy says. “We have nothing in the house.”
    I know for a fact that it’s not true. We freeze leftovers, and we have sauces and jams preserved in the cabinet, and there is always fresh produce from the farmers’ market. My parents are just encouraging me to be alone with a boy.
    My parents are amazing.
    Even though we could walk to lunch, if I really wanted that, now that we’ve kissed, I want car time with Alex. We act as we did before, but after our lunch at Taco Spot we pile back into the car and kind of right into each other. Normally, I’d be completely against public displays of affection, but I parked farther away than I needed to for this exact reason.
    “You taste like nachos,” I tell him, and he cracks up. We’re still as close as we were when we were kissing, so I feel his laughter warm into my neck. Once, a few months ago, I was walking a dog around my normal Stray Rescue route and saw a couple kissing in their parked car. I tried imagining wanting to kiss someone so much that the public didn’t matter.
    And now I don’t have to try.

    After I get home from dropping Alex off at his house, I’m planning to review all the freshman submissions for the
Crest
. But Sadie texts what I know is not an innocuous So what’s up??, and I find myself typing what’s practically an essay about walking dogs and eating doughnuts and meeting my parents, and I save the kissing for the very end of the story. It takes so long that Sadie sends two follow-up texts (TELL ME EVERYTHING and then You’ve been typing for an hour so maybe you should just CALL ME JULES) in the meanwhile. But I finish the whole thing and hit send, and then I’m holding my phone and thinking about Alex.
    Is it too early to text? No, I’m pretty sure once you’ve kissed someone a bunch of times, you can at least text them. Thanks for walking dogs with me today! feels like a safe start, but I don’t have a chance to see how long he’ll take to respond, if he responds at all, because Sadie’s calling.
    “Oh my god, Jules,” she says before I can even say hello.
    “Is it surprising?” I ask. “Are you surprised?”
    “After seeing how he’s been looking at you for this whole week now?
No.
I just want more details.”
    “I texted you every detail!” I say.
    “I don’t care. Tell me everything again.”
    I can’t blame Sadie. This is definitely the only non-dorky exciting thing that’s ever happened to me.
    “Did you feel like you were kissing in outer space?” Sadie asks after I repeat the whole story.
    “Sadie, I