A/N: Sometimes when I'm writing my mind goes off on random tangents. I wrote something in the next chapter of MKB that led to this, the story of how Kim finally caught her Mark-shaped fish. Funny thing is, I don't even think that line is going to make it into the final version of that chapter, so this is a stand alone rather than a tag.
He called her kid again.
She was going to punch him next time he said it. He thought he was such a big shot just because he was a college senior and starting line on the hockey team this year, but he forgot that she knew him when he was a scrawny little kid. Of course, she didn't really remember him that way, because she was three or four, but she could at least say that she knew him back then.
The summer was not going according to Kim's plan. Mark Keeler was supposed to come home from UMN on Wednesday, and she was supposed to be standing in her front yard wearing her shortest pair of shorts and talking to the cutest boy in school. Mark would realize how blind he'd been all these years, go mad with jealousy, and punch the other boy in the face (McKenzie, Kim's best friend, conveniently forgot to mention the punching part when they bribed her boyfriend to be the requisite cute boy). The problem was that Mark came home a day early.
Mrs. Keeler had been teaching Kim to decorate cakes, and on Tuesday afternoon that was exactly what they were doing. They were halfway through what was supposed to be a welcome home cake for Mark (being able to make deserts could only be a benefit when trying to catch a boy), when the boy in question came through the door, picked up his five-foot-nothing mom, and spun her around. He knocked over a bowl of flour in the process and it fell near Kim's feet, dusting her in white powder from waist down. The situation could have been salvaged if her flour-covered legs were well-tanned and bare, but she happened to be wearing a chopped off pair of sweatpants and a puppy dog apron. There was no way to get out with dignity.
When he put his mom down, Mrs. Keeler had the nerve to say, "Mark, you remember Kim Wainwright from next door, don't you? She's grown up quite a bit, hasn't she?"
Kim was convinced that Mrs. Keeler was trying to help by pointing out how grown up Kim was, but, really, who didn't know enough about love to know that he was supposed to realize that himself? She'd been waiting nearly ten years for him to look at her and realize that she'd grown up, but now she was robbed of her chance.
A smile covered his face, the same one that made her fall in love with him when she was seven years old, and for a minute she thought that all hope was not lost. Maybe his mom's words weren't so bad after all. He reached out his hand to stroke her cheek and she stopped breathing, but something wasn't right. He wasn't stroking her cheek so much as rubbing it, and that didn't seem very romantic.
"You've got some icing on your cheek, kid," he said. He wiped it off her skin and sucked the edge of his thumb into his mouth to lick the icing away. It wasn't even remotely sexy. If she ever thought about him licking icing off her body (which she would go to her grave swearing that she did not ever think about), it was supposed to be sexy.
When she finally escaped the Keeler's kitchen, she hid in her room and cried for ten minutes. Then she called McKenzie and cried again, because Mark Keeler called her kid and she'd never been so humiliated in her life.
He'd been home for four days, and nothing was any better than that first encounter was. He always seemed to catch her during embarrassing moments, like when her brothers tried to drown her in the pool ("Are you alright, kid?") or when she backed into the mailbox pulling out of her driveway ("Maybe you should go back to drivers ed for a week or two, kid.") Today it was falling out of a chair that her brothers booby-trapped to break when someone sat in it ("Easy there, kid. You already broke the chair's leg, no need to break one of your own.") After the past few days she was ready to decide that she hated him and be done with it. The only way she would ever get him to see her as a woman now was to prance around wearing nothing but his hockey jersey.
Maybe that wasn't such a bad idea… She couldn't get his hockey jersey, of course, but she didn't really need it. All she needed was an empty backyard and a swimsuit.
It took some planning (and some lying, begging, and bribing, too) to pull it off, but she managed to get her house empty for an entire afternoon. It didn't take nearly as much planning (although there was an equal amount of bribing) to make sure the Mark was alone at his house at the same time. Now all she had to do was work up the guts to do something that had so much potential for disaster.
She waited until she was 100% sure that both houses were empty before she took her towel and radio out to the backyard. She needed a way to draw Mark's attention, so she turned the music up loud, spread her towel over the grass, and lay down. She pretended to be relaxing in the sun, but behind her sunglasses her eyes were searching for him. He looked out an upstairs window, and he did a visible double take when he saw Kim. This was the reaction she wanted that first day, not him wiping stupid icing off her cheek.
He came out onto his porch a few minutes later, but she pretended not to notice him. That was critical to her plan. He could not know that she knew he was there.
She didn't just put her towel down in some random place. The spot was strategically chosen because it gave him a clear view from his porch, but a shrub blocked most her view of him. In case this was ever brought up against her, she could conceivably say that she didn't see him there. If she wasn't keeping such a close eye on him, she really might not have seen him.
She made sure he was hanging around for a while before she shifted and turned over, like she had simply been uncomfortable on her back and wanted to move. She couldn't see him while she was on her stomach like this, but she had to be there. She listened for any sound that might indicate he was leaving, but never heard any, so she implemented stage two of the plan: she reached behind her and untied the straps of her bikini top. She didn't want tan lines, after all.
Her face was burning with embarrassment, but the heat was a nice cover for that. The whole point of this was to make her look mature, and blushing wasn't mature at all. She had to lie there for a while anyway, so she had plenty of time for the blush to go away. There was no sound of movement from the Keeler house, so Mark was either doing something else or was actually interested enough to hang around for half an hour and watch her bare back.
When enough time had passed, Kim had to talk herself into stage three. What if they weren't really alone? What if he was horrified and would never look at her again? What if he really was doing something else? He could be reading, or doing a crossword puzzle, or… or… she couldn't even think of anything else, but she was sure there was other stuff he could be doing. He might not even notice that there was a topless woman in the next yard. Or worse, he might notice and say something like, "Hey, kid, you dropped your bathing suit top. You should probably put that back on now."
She shut off her brain and just did it. She only had the one shot, and she wasn't going to let it go. She stretched and rolled onto her back, leaving her top where it was laying on the ground.
There was a crash, an expletive, and then Mark scrambled to hide behind the shrub again. It looked as if he had fallen out of his chair.
She shrieked and sat up, covering her chest, and yelled, "Who's there?"
He slowly stood up so that she could see his face above the branches and started a bumbling excuse. "Kim, I'm so sorry, I—"
She cut him off before he could make up some lie to pretend like he wasn't there the whole time. "What are you doing, you pervert?" she cried. "Have you been watching me? What kind of creep are you?"
She grabbed her top, covered herself with her towel, and stormed back inside. Once the door was locked behind her, she grinned. Mission accomplished.
She chased him for ten years. Now it was his turn to chase her.
A/N: Hmm...first foray into Kim and Mark as youngsters. What think you?