Author's Notes: Hi guys :D I know I'm late to update. I actually had this chapter completed last Tuesday (I think it was Tuesday) but for some odd reason I did not feel like updating this yet o.O Honestly, I didn't want to update today but I got over the pesky feeling and updated obviously :D I didn't want to keep you guys waiting any longer, also.

Soo...the last chapter ended with Ash's question...What does he mean?...

Read on and enjoy ;)

Also...this chapter is the continuation of Ash and Dawn's date.

Staying on the Mission

I snapped my head up and tried to gauge what he'd meant by this. I couldn't tell, because he wouldn't meet my gaze. Which was probably a good thing. I could feel myself flushing as my heart pounded.

I was attracted to Ash. Not as much as I was attracted to Gary, of course. That would never happen. But Ash had been so sweet and so fun, teaching me how to drive. Tangling with me as we switched places in the truck didn't hurt either. Or carrying me on his back.

Did he mean, Why does it have to be Gary instead of me? And if he did…

Good God, what was the matter with me? Ash didn't like me that way. He just hated Gary. He wanted to know why I was so stuck on Gary, of all people.

And I didn't like Ash that way, either. Not really. Flirting with him was fun, but that's all it was, and I was getting carried away. I needed to remember I was on a mission. I would tell him the whole truth about the mission. I owed him that much, since he'd agreed to help me by faking a relationship with me.

I munched on a fry and thought about Gary sashaying his way through the school lunchroom last spring, Leaf on one arm, and Giselle on the other. Everyone turned to watch as he passed. People called out to him from the tables. All he needed was the paparazzi behind him.

I said simply, "Gary lights up the room."

Ash still wouldn't look at me. He took another fry. "I can see why you'd want to watch him, listen to him. Not why you'd want to get together with him. He lights up the room so bright that you would just be sitting there blinking, blinded." He stuffed the fry in his mouth and immediately went for more. But from the bottom this time. He either needed to do something with his hands or he wanted to be challenged, as always.

"I've always wanted to be with him," I said. "Yeah, logically I can see the drawbacks, but I don't think you or anyone could argue me out of it. I need to find out for myself, because I've wanted this for so long."

"Always," Ash muttered, tossing up a bit of fry and catching it in his mouth.

"Almost always. Actually, I can remember the very day it started." The mud field in front of us dissolved into a sun-splashed view of the lake through shady branches. The roar of monster trucks faded, replaced by the birds chirping, and my mother's voice. "It was before Mom died. We were all really little. But I remember it so clearly. Your whole family was at my house for a cookout in the summer. I was with Mom and your mom up on the deck. I'd wanted to play with you boys, but my Mom wouldn't let me.

"Your mom said I was such a lovely little girl, so ladylike and polite. That's what pricked my ears up, of course: the praise. But I kept playing like I wasn't listening. Then your mom said I didn't always have to stay home. I was welcome to come over to your house to play whenever Green came over. Now I was really paying attention, and holding my breath to see what Mom would say. All I'd dreamed about my whole little life was playing with you guys."

"Why?"

I snapped out of my daydream. I'd almost forgotten Ash was sitting there.

He put one hand on my knee, watching me, and didn't even turn to look when Richawn purposefully spun his tires, coating one side of the pink truck in mud. "Why did you want to play with us?" Ash asked. "At that age, we were basically squirting each other in the face with water guns."

"Compare this to sitting in my room by myself, dressing and undressing Barbies."

"Oh." He nodded.

"Anyway, of course I was disappointed, as always. My mom said your mom was so nice to offer, but she didn't want me playing with four boys very often. I'd grow up to be a tomboy."

"What's wrong with being a tomboy?"

"I think it's fine until a certain age. When you're young, being a tomboy may even give you a certain advantage. You can always beat girls like Leaf and Giselle, and ohmygod, Misty in Little League Softball. You can catch four fish in the Girl Scout fishing rodeo while they're still refusing to bait their hooks because worms are icky."

"Misty will actually bait her own hook," Ash defended her.

I didn't want to hear it. I talked right over him. "After a certain age, people don't know what to make of a tomboy, and you don't fit in. You end up feeling empty and lost."

Those frown lines appeared between his brows. He moved the plate of fries behind the bench, slid over until his leg touched my leg, and put his hand on my knee again.

Strange how his touch made it easier for me to talk. I went on, "Just as Mom was telling your mom no, Gary came up the stairs crying. You and the other boys had dared him to stick bread between his toes and put his foot in the water. A fish mouthed him and he freaked out."

"Er-" Ash started.

I waved him off, because this was the most important detail. "My mom took his chin in her hand, turned his face toward me, and said 'Just look at those eyes. He's going to be a heartbreaker.'" I found myself smiling at the memory. But when I turned to Ash and saw the look on his face, I stopped smiling.

"That sounds like a bad thing," he grumbled.

"People mean it as a good thing," I said, suddenly not as sure of this as I'd been for the last twelve years. But I couldn't really expect him to understand. Talking about Gary around Ash was like throwing Evian on a fire. "And then Mom said, 'Dawn, just wait until you're sixteen.' She was stuck on the sixteenth birthday. We made a scrapbook with pictures of all my baby events, and spaces for when I would turn six, eight, ten, and twelve, and a super-mondo sequined space for when I turned sixteen. She wanted me to have exactly what she'd had, a great sixteenth birthday, exactly what any teenage girl would want. Her parents gave her a special grown-up ring, and she wore a groovy dress that's hanging in my closet."

We'd moved away from talking about Gary. Predictably, Ash took a deeper breath and relaxed against the bench. "Are you going to wear the dress on your birthday?"

"Are you kidding? It was the seventies. White polyester, baby. Highly flammable. Burn baby burn, disco inferno. Unsafe. Uncool."

"I'll bet it's pretty. You could wear it wakeboarding on your birthday, during the Crappy Festival show." He was back to his old self.

I chuckled. "Unfortunately, you and I are the only two people in the world who would think that was funny."

"What does that have to do with Gary?"

I squirmed a little under the gaze of the intense brown eyes. I felt his disapproval even though I hadn't told him he should disapprove yet. But he was helping me with Gary, and I'd committed to telling him the whole story. "Mom died not long after that. I took it as a free ticket to Disney word. Yay, Mom wasn't around to stop me! I got to play with boys! Only I felt guilty about being the least bit happy she was gone, even when this was the one good thing about it. And I felt guilty I didn't tell Dad or Joy that Mom wouldn't have wanted me over at your house. It went against her wishes for me. I promised myself I'd clean up by the time I was sixteen. And if I could finally convince Gary to ask me out by my sixteenth birthday, I would know I'd turned out okay after all."

Ash nodded. "Because you think your mother picked Gary out for you."

"No, not exactly-"

"Like an arranged marriage," Ash interrupted. "That's very 2005."

"No, not like that. Mom knew what was best for me, and if she were still around, she would have taught me how to get it. She's not around, so I have to figure this out for myself. I'm transforming myself from an ugly duckling into a beautiful swan. There's much preening to be done. It's actually pretty time-consuming. I have to run my beak down every single feather to distribute the oil evenly and make myself waterproof."

"Dawn-"

"And I've almost perfected my Leaf/Giselle imitation. At least, I thought I had, until the mud riding started."

"You think going out with Gary will turn you into Leaf?"

"Sort of. If I get into a relationship with Gary, everyone would treat me differently. Everyone loves Gary. If Gary chose me, they'd think they'd always overlooked something special in me. Then maybe I could become that girl. I know you hate Gary, but you understand why everyone loves him, right?"

I took Ash's stony silence as a yes.

"Girlfriend/boyfriend love is totally different from brotherly love. But the effect would be the same. Like standing in his aura. Haven't you every wondered what it would be like if Gary loved and valued you as a person?"

"I'd known Armageddon was coming. I'd brace myself for the locusts."

"I'm serious. If he just looked at you the right way, that alone could probably carry you through for a month. But if he loved you…"

Ash shifted on the bench. I thought he was standing up to stalk away, disgusted. Instead, he placed his arm around my shoulders. Lightly, his finger stroked valentines on my arm, which gave me shivers all over again.

"Every word out of Gary's mouth is meant to hurt me," he said. "And it's always been like that. Paul says Gary changed after I was born. When I was a baby and Mom wasn't looking, Gary threw blocks at my crib."

I almost laughed. The idea was so ridiculous. It was even more ridiculous for Ash to be angry about something like that when he was sixteen years old.

I managed not to laugh. I believed him. I knew Gary.

"But that's you," I said. "I'm sorry he treats you that way, but I'm the one who's going to get together with him, and he doesn't treat me that way."

"He will," Ash said. "If you ever let him get close to you, he will." The valentines he traced on my arm had turned into shapes with lots of sharp points, like in comic books when the superhero punches the villain. Ker-POW!

The tractor arrived then to pull the pink truck out of the mud. Ash took his hands off me – which I regretted more than I should have. He leaned forward to watch and make sure the driver didn't attach the chain to the loose side of the front bumper.

"Why does it have to be Misty?" I asked.

"It just does," he said without taking his eyes off the truck.

"You might feel better if you talked about it."

"I doubt it."

"What do you like so much about her?"

When he turned to me, he seemed alarmed, as he had at the tennis court the night before. With wide eyes, he searched my eyes for something – which I probably would have given him, if I'd know what he was looking for.

I asked, "What are you looking for?"

He shook his head and turned back to the mud pit. "I like her because she's so pretty," he said in his bullshit voice.

"That's no fair. I gave you a straight answer about Gary."

The tractor started forward. The chain to the pink truck pulled tighter and tighter and broke. One end of it flew over the tractor, barely missing the driver.

"She's cute," Ash said. "She has a nice ass. I don't know."

Now I understood. Talking about her hurt him too much. It was easier for him to pretend the ADD had kicked in.

After two more chains and a rope, the tractor liberated the pink truck, and Ash bought the driver a doughnut. Ash and I drove through the mud field for another hour and a half, taking turns. Mostly we managed to forget Gary and Misty.

Then we drove into town and hit all the teenage haunts: the arcade parking lot, the bowling alley parking lot, of course the movie theater parking lot. In theory this is exactly what I wanted. I was being seen out with Ash, in Ash's truck. In practice, Ash had purposefully besmirched Gary's pink truck with mud. It was like he wanted to be seen around town in it for that reason.

We rolled home at two minutes before my curfew. I'd figured he'd park the truck at his house, and I'd walk home. I was thrilled that he drove over to my driveway to drop me off. Gary wasn't home yet to see us, but maybe someone in the Ketchums' house would watch across the yard and mention it to Gary later.

And then, as I was turning to Ash to thank him for teaching me to drive and allowing me to foam at the mouth about my mom, he bailed out the driver's side door. He walked around the front of the truck. I think he would have opened my door, a gentlemen on the date, if I hadn't opened it first. It was too strange. I jumped to the ground, forgetting I was wearing my heels again. He caught me just before I pitched over onto the gravel.

"I'll-walk-you-to-the-door," he said slowly and clearly, like talking to someone who didn't speak English. Or didn't go out with boys much, or, like, ever.

He took my hand. We walked toward the lights slanting through the shadows of pine trunks. Tree frogs screamed in the night, and the air was wet. I shivered.

We climbed the steps to the porch. Dad hadn't turned on the overhead light there, thank God. Ash stood close to me in the darkness, over me, expecting something. I expected something, too. I couldn't have stood the disappointment if we'd done all we'd done that day, hugging and giving each other smoldering looks and all, without something to show for it at the end, even if we were just friends. But my head felt too heavy to rise my chin.

"Hey." He put his hand under my chin and gently raised it for me. "If one of us were in love with the other, if it were uneven in some way, that would be bad." He gave me a long look I couldn't really see. The shadows on the porch were too deep. His eyes only glittered a little in the starlight.

I tried to give the look right back to him. "But we're not," I said, and what was that damned high squeakiness in my voice on not? I cleared my throat.

"But we're not," he agreed. "We have nothing to worry about. We can do whatever we feel like."

"Right," I said, and meant it.

The kiss was simple. He bent down and pressed his lips to mine. We stood still except for his pressure on my lips. But inside, every cell in my body turned a back flip to blind.

"Good night, Dawn," he whispered. He bounced back to the pink truck, cranked the engine, drove one hundred feet to his own driveway, waved to me, and went inside his house.

I stood on my porch and stared at his house for a long time, telling myself that I did not like Ash that way because I like Gary and Ash liked Misty and I did not like Ash. It was just that Ash was very smart, and was second only to Gary at making confusing things sound simple and death-defying stunts seem like a good idea.

Author's Notes: Hope you lovely readers enjoyed this chapter :) I guess you found out what Ash meant with his question by Dawn's assumption. Maybe you believed it too or maybe you didn't...it's all what you think :)

Please review and tell me what you think of this chapter :D

Uuh...I'm not sure when I'll update again. It might be a couple of weeks because I have SOLS (very important test that pretty much determine if you pass to the next grade) this whole month. I'm going to attempt to study...but I have nostudy habits (I know it's bad...blah -.-) so we'll just see how it goes. If there is not chapter in two weeks or next week than it went great...if so, it went bad xD

Also, I have made a twitter account for my FF, if you want you can follow me :) it'll be easier to keep up with me their than on fanfiction too. I tend to only get up here when I update, though I should more often because I have tons of messages to reply to x.x.
But anyways, follow me (if you have a twitter) for when to expect updates, some kind of news about my story xD, or just to talk :)

https: / / twitter . com/#!/FF_Angelcutepie

(Remove the spaces)

Wish me luck on these stupid SOLS and I shall see you...sometime xD

- Angel :D

* OH YEAH! HAVE YOU GUYS HEARD THAT DAWN MIGHT BE APPEARING IN POKEMON BLACK AND WHITE? 8DDDDD