Free Kiss in the Dark by Lauren Henderson Page A

feeling the solid, muscular heft of his chest rise and fall, his arms as tight around me as mine are around him …
    “Jase?” I whisper. “Jase?”
    No answer. I’m sure that in his text he said to meet outside the barn, and I pad up to the wall, touching it, feeling for the loose planks, making sure I’m in the right place.
    Sure enough, one of the planks comes away in my hands as soon as I try to move it. I look inside the pitch-black interior and whisper:
    “Jase?” My voice is absorbed instantly into the darkness. Not a single echo. It’s soaked up as if I’d never breathed a word.
    I’m about five minutes late, but that doesn’t mean anything. Jase certainly won’t have come and gone already.
    Maybe his dad’s kicking up a fuss, and Jase needs to wait till he’s gone to bed, or passed out. Maybe something else has come up that’s delayed him. I lean against the wall of the barn, and wait.
    That’s the really annoying thing. You say you can’t bear to wait, you feel like you’ll burst if you have to hold out a moment longer to see your boyfriend. But then he isn’t there, and you have to do what you thought you could never manage: you have to wait for him, even though it’s agony and you want to scratch your arms up with whatever nails you have left just to get a bit of the frustration out.
    I didn’t bring my phone. I didn’t think I’d need it: all I needed to know was that I had a rendezvous with Jase at ten-thirty. Now, of course, I’m kicking myself black and blue for not having my phone on me.
    Did he get here early? I think, my brain racing. Did he get here so early that he thought he’d wait for me inside, go up to the loft, and maybe fall asleep on the blankets?
    I know it’s incredibly unlikely, especially as the planks are leaning in place against the hole in the barn wall, but the waiting is driving me mad. I slide the plank farther aside and crawl in through the hole, feeling in my pocket for the tiny torch attached to my key ring, pulling it out, and clicking it on. It throws out a beam only a few inches wide, barely enough to see my hand in front of my face, and if I hadn’t been to the barn before, if I didn’t know my way around, it wouldn’t be any use at all.
    As it is, it gets me across the barn without crashing into the tractor, and up the ladder. I know Jase isn’t up in the loft, curled up in a warm nest of hay, wrapped in blankets, fast asleep, waiting for me to curl up next to him so he can throw an arm over me while we cuddle together. I know it’s a total fantasy.
    And of course it is. He’s not there. There’s no one in this barn but me.
    Eventually, I emerge. The night air is cold after the shelter of the barn, and still Jase is nowhere to be seen. I squat down miserably to wait some more, my ears pricked to hear any movement, any footfalls that could possibly, conceivably, be Jase running across the grass to keep our appointment.
    It’s past eleven by my watch when I stop being upset that he’s not here and start to be scared for him.
    What if he’s having a fight with his dad? I think, rising to my feet. What if something really bad’s happening at their cottage?
    I know it’s not a good idea. I should go back to Aunt Gwen’s instead, climb up to my room, check my phone and see if Jase has been trying to get in touch. But as soon as the image pops into my head of Jase and his dad, fighting, as I saw them once before by the lake when Jase was trying to protect me, I can’t leave it alone.
    I can hear the yelling from the Barnes cottage as I approach, and my feelings are incredibly mixed. I’d recognize Jase’s voice anywhere, so I know that’s him, shouting at his dad, and although I hate that they’re fighting, I’m also hugely, stupidly relieved that it was this that kept Jase from coming out to meet me. Not that he doesn’t care about me, or that he met someone else.
    I know it’s probably ridiculous to have these insecurities, and that