summer with Ridley sounds perfect. Except how does that work? How do we keep our families from finding out that long? How do I figure out how to—
“Can I get another one of those?” he asks, catching me off guard.
“Another what?” He taps his cheek, and I twist my lips, trying to hold in a laugh. “You’re shameless.”
I lean in to give him an overexaggerated kiss on the cheek, but he turns his head at the last second, pressing his lips to mine with an innocence that make me giggle. He shuts his eyes then, and I shut mine, and the kiss turns into something different.
“Sneaky,” I say when we break apart, before diving back in for another quick kiss. A cold gust of air rushes by, and I hunch down a little in my jacket. I’m glad Vera made me bring it.
He grabs my hands, and god, I wish I hadn’t forgotten my gloves on my bed—they’ve gone numb from the cold, and I would’ve really liked to feel this.
“You’re frozen!” he yelps, jumping off the curb and pulling me up. “Come on, let’s get you inside somewhere.” He does this little step move, and his board flips right up into his hands.
“So, that was awesome.” I’ve never known anyone who really knew how to skate. A couple of my friends have longboards, sure, but that’s just to get around, not really for fun.
He crinkles his forehead. “All I did was pick it up.”
“Pretty sure you just worked some kind of skater magic and it flew into your hand. Do you do any other tricks?”
“Tricks?”
“Like, can you jump on stuff and slide across it?”
“Yes.” He laughs. “I can jump on stuff and slide across it.” He says it in a way that tells me these moves have actual names, but not in a way that makes me feel bad for not knowing them.
I tuck my jacket tighter around me. “Show me.”
“You’re freezing.”
“I can be cold for another minute or two. Show me.”
“Yeah?” he asks, like he’s shocked I want to know more about something that so clearly matters to him.
“Yeah,” I say, dropping onto one of the long marble ledges that run the length of the park. “Show me what you got.”
He slides his board forward and runs after it, picking up speed when he hops on and shoves off harder and faster than I ever could. His wheels tear across the asphalt, dipping and racing with every thrust of his foot as he jumps and flips the board in the air. If my ride was music, then his is a symphony, and I don’t want it to stop.
I clap—I can’t help it—and he spins the board around to face me with a whizzing sound. He shakes his head like I’m ridiculous and sends the board forward again, racing toward me.
I tuck my feet up to avoid a collision, but he just sticks his tongue out and lands a jump on the marble wall beside me, the middle of the board skidding down its length like he’s surfing. He flips the board off and lands on it without missing a beat, turning wide in the direction of the steps to slide down the rail onto the sidewalk below.
I stand up. I can just barely see the top of his head over the wall. He skates around and back up, doing the flippy thing again before coming to a stop right in front of me. He’s a little bit out of breath, his cheeks pink from exertion and the cold, and he looks at me through his hair, waiting.
I want to be cool. But I also want to totally fangirl. I settle on “That was friggin’ amazing.”
And his face breaks into a grin so wide and beautiful that I want to turn it into a song and play it forever. He flips the board back into his hand, grabbing it with one and then reaching out with his other. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”