Fifteenth Summer - By Michelle Dalton Page 0,74

an elated smile. “I talked to my parents. Both of ’em.”

“Well, what did you say?”

“I asked them to step it up at the bookstore,” he said. “Because it was their choice to buy Dog Ear, not mine. That I was doing all this stuff to keep the store afloat for them, but that it wasn’t making me very happy. In fact, I told them, I’ve given up a lot for Dog Ear. And I was pretty okay with that until . . . well, until I lost you.”

Josh looked so earnest and serious, I had to touch him, just to make sure this was really happening. I reached over and rested my fingertips lightly on the back of his hand.

Josh heaved a shuddering sigh and closed his eyes.

“What did they say?” I asked him.

Josh gave a little laugh.

“You were right,” he said, looking at me shyly. “They had no idea. And they were pretty mad at me for keeping it a secret all this time. Then my mom promised to do more practical stuff, though she might need a little training.”

My smile felt tremulous.

“Does this training,” I broached, “have to happen within, say, the next twenty days?”

Josh leaned in, his face so close to mine that it made me feel dizzy in the best way.

“Not a chance,” he breathed.

I closed my eyes and felt his arms wrap around me, so tightly that I gasped. And then he was kissing me. It was the perfect kiss—full of apology and relief and passion.

In an instant I felt like I’d rewound the past two days and landed right back in that moment when my cell phone had rung and I’d just known how I felt about Josh. I was feeling it all again.

It turned out I wasn’t the only one.

“Chelsea,” Josh murmured when the kiss finally ended. “Can you forgive me for being an idiot?”

“Well, you were being an honorable idiot,” I whispered with a little laugh.

“Is that a yes?” Josh asked, twining a lock of my hair around his finger.

I grinned and leaned in until my forehead was touching his. I rested my hands on the back of his neck and whispered, “Yes.”

“Good, because you know what?” Josh said.

“What?”

“I’m in love with you, Chelsea. I think I have been since the first time I ever saw you, when you tried to rescue that book from my X-Acto knife.”

Tears sprang to my eyes, but they couldn’t have felt more different from the ones I’d been crying for the past two days.

“What a coincidence,” I said. “That’s when I fell in love with you, too.”

Josh covered my mouth with his. We didn’t say anything else—nothing else needed to be said—for a long, long time.

When you see the boy you love through a crowd, he can look completely familiar and be a complete surprise, all at once.

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Josh’s face. I knew that his left eye got a little more squinty than the right one when he smiled. And that his chin was square, rather than pointed, if you really looked at it. I’d watched the sun turn his hair the color of milky caramel over the course of the summer. It had also gotten long enough to actually look tousled. I knew that the back of Josh’s neck flushed when he got overheated after rowing or, say, rushing over to my house a week earlier to tell me that he loved me.

But when I spotted him in the middle of a throng of people at the Blueberry Dreams Festival, I didn’t recognize him for an instant. Was that him? Was that boy, so tan and tall and gorgeous, Josh? My Josh?

Suddenly he saw me, and I could swear I saw him blink too—before he smiled an incredulous, giddy smile.

We wove our way through the people crowding the Bluepointe town square. Every adult seemed to be sipping a tall, purple cocktail, and every little kid was sweating inside a puffy blueberry costume. Everybody in between, like me, wore face paint, their cheeks dotted with berries. Or they had on funny blueberry beanies, with tufts of green leaves on the crowns instead of propellers.

Josh and I had just seen each other that morning at the beach, but we hugged as if it had been days.

“You look really pretty,” Josh said, putting a hand on my still-damp-from-the-shower hair.

“So do you,” I said. I laughed before kissing him lightly on the lips. “Should we do a walk around?”

The square was