Second Kiss Read Online Free

motion of his yo-yo with deep concentration. I couldn’t believe I had just said the word bra in front of Jess. There were about five words in my vocabulary that I absolutely would not say in front of him, and bra was at the top of the list.

    The thick silence between Jess and I was nauseating, and I cringed at the thought of how terrible this day had turned out. I grunted quietly as I kicked an empty Coke can toward the fence. Jess stiffly looked toward the can and then down at my foot. He couldn’t even look at me in the eyes. I turned my glare toward him without moving my head. My face was molded into a deep scowl in order to outwardly show my contempt toward him and the entire situation. We slowly made eye contact and without any warning at all Jess’s eyes began to crinkle as his face lit up.
    “What’s so funny?” I was still scowling as Jess began to laugh softly. “This day is so stupid,” I said with a slight stomp in my foot.
    We didn’t say another word to each other as we made our way across the final yards of the big field.
    On the opposite end was a barbed-wire fence that separated the field from our neighborhood. A small hole was put in the fence, probably years ago by some rebellious teenage boys, and over time the hole had grown to be big enough to crawl through. Jess held up the loose fencing wire for me to crawl through. I made my way through carefully-though I had done it so many times by that point that I could probably do it blindfolded-and waited for Jess to toss me our backpacks before climbing through himself. The other side of the opening introduced a whole new playground. Massive walls of concrete blocks lay in ruins where construction of a small storage unit had started once until the owner went bankrupt, leaving a maze of cinder blocks for Jess and me to play on.
    We called it our concrete jungle.

    Most of the block walls were low enough for us to see overthough I had to be on my tiptoes. But some walls were high enough that we could climb them and see over the trees and roof tops of the surrounding houses. The lot itself was about the size of a tennis court, but it seemed a lot bigger with the maze of block walls. Jess and I were pretty much the only people who ever went there, though every once in a while we found an old cigarette butt or an empty pop can, indicating that someone else had trespassed there while we were in school or fast asleep.
    I tossed both Jess’s backpack and my own on a pile of blocks and headed over to the first high wall. I sensed Jess’s hesitation to follow me. Lately he had been having these strange ideas that he was too old to climb the blocks. I usually told him to get real and come on. But today I didn’t push him.
    I pulled a peanut butter granola bar out of my pocket that I had snagged on my way out of my house that morning. I plopped down on the blocks and swung my legs against the wall as I chewed into my snack. This particular wall was probably a good ten feet off the ground, but the blocks were thick, and I wasn’t scared of heights. I was two bites into my granola bar when Jess climbed the blocks and sat next to me, swinging his legs to my rhythm-still playing with his yo-yo.
    “You want to know a secret?” Jess said, watching his yo-yo go up and down.
    “Of course I want to know a secret,” I replied without hesitation-who didn’t want to know a secret?
    “Remember last Wednesday when I couldn’t walk home with you because I went home with a kid from my class to work on a group project?”
    “Yes,” I mumbled-that was a miserable thing for him to do.

    “Well, we were in the kid’s bedroom working on the project-there were about four of us guys-and he pulled up some pictures on his laptop.” Jess didn’t have to say what kind of pictures they were. I could tell from his posture and the way he bit his lip that they weren’t pictures of outer space or famous athletes. I had never actually seen pornography, but I had heard it joked