The Kiss (Addison #1) by Erica M. Christensen Page B

Flight 784 to Willington, Iowa. Our aircraft is under the command of Captain Schlink. He has informed me that our flying time will be approximately five and a half hours…” Well, this is going to be a nice long flight.
    I still can’t believe Carlos is gay, and has been the whole time we’ve been together. I kind of feel bad for sending his dad the picture, but I wanted to hurt him like he hurt me. I guess I should have known, though. He did always have the nicest sense of style. Hell, he picked out my clothes because he said I had no fashion sense. I will say he did a damn good job. Not that a straight man couldn’t do the same thing.
    We were never really intimate either—occasionally we were—but not as often as we should have been. The sex was honestly awful, he never seemed to be into it, but I just thought he sucked in bed and eventually it would get better. His body is what made sex tolerable. I can’t believe I’m just now realizing all of this. It all makes sense now though. I just wish I wouldn’t have fallen in love with him. I mean, I also fell in love with all of the materialistic things he smothered me in, but that’s beside the point. I fell in love with him. He was caring, witty, goofy, and sensitive. He was my best friend and all I had in Florida. I should have just sucked it up and married him. I’d already spent the last couple of years as his cover-up, what’s a few more years?
    Now that I think about it, the majority of my life has been a cover-up. For crying out loud, after my dad left us my mom told people around town that he’d gotten a new job in New York and was sending money to support us. Well, the town found out quickly it was all a façade when they saw her go from being a stay at home mom to working at the grocery store and the town bar. Her lying about it made grade school and middle school hell for me. Those little snot-nosed fucks I went to school with would go around saying my dad left us because I was so ugly and fat. They’d make fun of my clothes because I had to get them from the thrift store, and of course that was before thrift shopping became cool. Thanks, Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, for not coming out with the song “Thrift Shop” about fourteen years earlier. It wasn’t that we were poor or anything, my mom and grandparents just didn’t think it was necessary for me to have expensive name brand clothing because I grew out of them too quickly.
    I got made fun of for getting good grades, for always having my nose stuck in a book, but that was the only escape I had from the cruelties of the little assholes I went to school with. I only had one friend, Stephen Hadan. He wasn’t much better off. He was tall and scrawny, with glasses and slightly crooked bottom teeth. He had fluffy curly brown hair that almost resembled an afro, and of course everyone made fun of him for it.
    In grade school during recess we’d sit by the steps and read books together, or make up our own stories while all of the other kids played kickball and ran around on the playground. Once we hit middle school and no longer had recess, we quickly learned that we needed to sit in the back of the classroom so no one could stick notebook paper fringe in our hair and laugh at us. It was also way easier to hide a book inside of our textbooks—the teacher never really gave a shit anyway. We handed our homework in on time, always got an A, and we were basically invisible to them. The teachers were so caught up in trying to be a ‘ cool’ teacher that they’d basically praise the little douche bags for being ass clowns by turning their head and laughing.
    Every day we’d ride the bus home from school and Stephen would come over. My grandpa would have fresh deer jerky for us to pig out on in the backyard while we talked shit about all of the people we had to put up with every day. Stephen and I both grew up in pretty shitty living situations. His dad didn’t run off like mine did, but his mom and dad