Free Diary of a Crush: Sealed With a Kiss by Sarra Manning Page A

tugged the photo out of my hand, stuffed it in his jeans pocket and stomped towards the door, while I just stood there opening and shutting my mouth and wondering what the hell had just happened. I was still trying to process it, when I heard the front door slam. And even though I didn’t have any shoes on, I suddenly had this gut feeling that something big and weird and potentially serious had happened so I ran down the stairs and out into the street in my bare feet because he couldn’t leave just like that. And of course it had to be pelting down with rain. It just had to.
    Dylan was a tiny but clearly bad-tempered little stick figure in the distance as I ran after him, the wet pavement stinging the soles of my feet. I was going to have to have a hardcore pedicure this weekend.
    ‘Dylan! Hey! Hey!’ I couldn’t run and call out; I was no good at multitasking my oxygen supply so I concentrated on running as fast as I could.
    Turns out I can run pretty fast. Who knew? It did help that Dylan had reached the bus-stop at the top of the road. He was peering at the timetable when I eventually caught up with him and practically collapsed onto the bench. I slumped there for a minute trying not to hyperventilate then Dylan folded his arms and regarded me stonily.
    ‘I don’t know what that was back there,’ I panted, pushing wet rat’s-tails of hair out of my eyes. ‘If I crossed a line, I’m sorry.’
    Dylan was doing a good impersonation of someone chewing on a wasp. He kept flaring his nostrils, which just made his cheekbones hollow out so his face looked like a death mask.
    ‘I know that sometimes I don’t quit when I should and I’m not even going to ask about the picture, but will you please just come back with me because I hate it when you get like this and we need to sort stuff out before it gets all grrrr and then we’re not speaking and…’
    ‘Give me one good reason why I should come back with you,’ Dylan said flatly. Hadn’t he heard a single word I’d been saying?
    I threw him a pleading look, which totally underwhelmed him. But he did move nearer to me though it could have been because the rain was sheeting down like it does in pop videos and he wanted to get under cover. He shook out the collar of his leather jacket and looked down at the bottom of his jeans, which were soaked, just like mine. Plus my feet couldn’t decide whether they were numb with cold or burning in pain.
    Maybe a combination of the two.
    I reached out a hand and placed it on Dylan’s arm. ‘Hey,’ I said softly. ‘This isn’t the end of the world. We had an argument, don’t make it into something that it isn’t just ’cause you’re angry about other things that you don’t want to talk to me about.’
    ‘And there she goes again.’ Dylan’s mouth twisted into a smile entirely lacking humour and I threw my hands up in defeat.
    ‘Fine, whatever,’ I bit out. ‘Go on, disappear then if you’re going to be like that.’
    I got up and although all my muscles seemed to go into screaming spasms as I put my weight on what felt like the bleeding and battered soles of my poor feet, I was determined not to let it show.
    Dylan was all stiff-backed like a furious cat as I inwardly shuddered at the painful walk back to the flat in the rain.
    ‘See you then,’ I said, like I didn’t care, when I did care. I cared a whole lot and I didn’t know if we were just having a fight and we’d make up so we could go to America and probably have more fights. Or if he’d just dumped me for something I didn’t even know I’d done.
    It was only 100 metres back up the road but it seemed like 500 miles. I also had a sudden sinking feeling akin to the
Titanic
hitting the iceberg when I realised I hadn’t picked up my keys before I left and that I’d have to sit on the doorstep until one of the others got home.
    It felt like someone was jabbing gazillions of red-hot pokers, sharp knives and other pointy implements into the soles of