Free If I Lose Her by Greg Joseph Daily

me.”
     “Well, they
say that absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
     “I’m already
too fond of you,” she said and I laughed. “You’ll write me right?”
     “Of course.”
  
      

Eleven
     
     
     School was
out for the summer and we were officially seniors.
     Even though
I was not leaving until the morning for Minnesota with my mother, Jo and I
decided to say our goodbyes the night before so that we weren’t rushed.
     I pulled up
to her front door and gave a quick beep on the horn letting her know that I was
there. A gentle breeze blew the smell of someone’s freshly mowed lawn through
my open window, and I could feel the cool air rustle the hairs on my arm,
giving me goose bumps.
     She had
curled her hair and pulled it up into a bun. A single curl hung down across her
glasses. Under her arm was the little black purse with a silver clasp that she
always used on special nights out, and she was carrying a medium sized box
wrapped with a red bow.
     I got out of
the car and opened her door.
     She walked
up to me, smiled and scrunched her nose for just a second, which was her way of
saying ‘Hey you’, and it got me every-single time. 
     I let out a
single soft whistle between my teeth.
     “Wow, you
look…nice. You heading somewhere special?” I said in my best flirty tone.
     She put her
hand on my cheek. “Oh, I don’t know. You wanna take me somewhere special?”
     I swallowed.
Then I smiled.
     “I’ll take
you any-where I can,” I said, to which she responded with a short perk of the
eyebrows and a smile that was much more Aphrodite than sweet schoolgirl. Then
she got in the car.
     I took a
deep breath and shook my head as I walked around the car.
     Now, Jo was
an attractive girl, but she wasn’t exactly front-of-the-magazine when it came
to fashion or trends like her sister was, which meant that most of her best
features, like her legs, were hidden away behind tattered jeans and vintage tee
shirts, but tonight she was wearing a white blouse, a pair of open toed, black
heels and a black-pleated skirt that ended just above her knees that drew no
small amount of attention to her legs.
     I tried to
focus on the drive downtown, but I couldn’t stop looking at her ankles, slender
legs, sexy knees. Then she caught me.
     “That’s a
nice skirt,” I said trying to hide my roaming eyes.
     She smiled
and put her hand on the back of mine.
     “You like it?
Susan said she wouldn’t let me leave the house without me letting her do my
hair and makeup, and I figured, why not? It can’t hurt letting her do me up
once right? My mistake was telling her that, because next thing you know, half
her closet is on my bed and I’m trying on my fifteenth pair of shoes.”
     Then Jo
started playing with the hair on the back of my neck. She didn’t know it at the
time, but this seriously turned me on, and I mean all the way on.
      I have to
focus on something else.
     “Well, you can
definitely pull off a skirt like that better than she can.”
     “Really? I
don’t think so.” Then she stopped playing with my hair and turned to look out
the window.
     This wasn’t
the shy push off she was good at when we were flirting or playing around with
each other. This was something deeper. 
     “Jo. Hey,
look at me.”
     She turned
and looked at me with a huge question in her eyes.
     “Don’t you
realize? You’re beautiful.”
     She turned
away.
     I don’t know
for sure because she kept looking out the side window, away from me, but I am
pretty sure she was crying. She wiped her cheek once or twice then reached for
a tissue in her purse, which she tried to conceal in the palm of her hand.
     “So, where
are we going?” She asked after a minute of silence.
     I wanted to
say more but decided that it wasn’t the right time. Instead, I made a mental
note to start telling her more often how beautiful she was.
     “Well, I
thought somewhere like the Brown Palace would be nice, but I didn’t