Thanks again to my reviewers! Please keep them coming... you wouldn't believe how insanely happy I get when I have a new review. Anyway, here are the next couple of chapters.
Chapter 5.
It was hard. It was very, very hard. To be sitting across from one of your closest friends, someone you're used to talking to pretty much non stop when you're together, and to be experiencing that first date awkward silence thing with them, is very hard and very strange. There wasn't even that option of polite get-to-know-each-other conversation. We already knew it all. I've never been so glad to see food arrive in my whole life. And I wasn't even hungry. Oh, the perils of trying to date a friend.
Still, the silence had to break at some point. Which it did. And when it did, it stayed broken. We must have been in that restaurant for five hours. We must have covered every subject there is. We must have learned more about each other in that one evening than every other day we've known each other put together. We were sitting in a secluded booth at the back, so we had privacy. We didn't see a single person we knew. Then again, we weren't really paying attention. There was a point on that date when a herd of stampeding elephants could have come past our table and we wouldn't have noticed. Nobody paid any attention to us. Not on the date, not as we walked home that night. By the time we turned into our street it was gone midnight, an hour past my usual curfew. I didn't care. We reached Abby's house first, and I walked her to the door. I looked around nervously, suddenly wondering things I had never thought about before, like, do any of the kids we baby-sit for up here have binoculars? How seriously do people take that neighbourhood watch thing? Can my family see me from two houses down? Then again, why would they be looking? Abby looked like she was trying not to laugh.
"Kristy," she said teasingly, sounding overly patient, "It's late, it's dark and the outdoor lights aren't on. Nobody can see us, even if they are looking." As if to punctuate this point, she leaned down and gave me a long, slow kiss. I honestly don't have a clue how I got home; my brain never turned itself back on, and my legs were like jelly. But I did.
Before I'd even shut the door, I entered a whole new phase of panic. It was that phase where you are insanely happy (just scored a home run that won the game, just got out of the hospital after being really ill, just got first call for baby-sitting club you set up, just had most terrific first date ever etc), and you can't stop grinning and inadvertently acting like you're drunk, but your brain has kicked in just enough to be screaming 'PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER! You're about to be ripped to shreds by your parents!' Which is absolutely no help whatsoever, because it hasn't kicked in enough to stop you from acting like a complete drip.
"Kristy, is that you?" called my mother from the kitchen. I heard the scraping of a couple of chairs and the movement of people in my general direction. 'Oh, crap,' I thought to myself, looking in the hall mirror, 'they're going to come out here before I've even had a chance to think what to say.' Now, this is what I mean by drippy. I was thinking these things, while standing grinning into a mirror, and NOT EVEN BOTHERING TO WIPE OFF THE TRACE OF LIPSTICK I'D PICKED UP FROM ABBY. How dumb can you get?
"Yes, it's me!" I answered happily, trying desperately to wipe both the grin and the lipstick off of my face. Mum and Watson appeared in the doorway.
"You're home awfully late," said Watson, with just the hint of a frown in his voice, "where were you?"
"Out with Abby," I replied, glad that I at least didn't have to think up a lie on the spot. "We went out to dinner at that new restaurant to see what it was like... sorry," I continued, looking up at them both and trying to look as if I really felt at all sorry, "I thought I'd told you." I could see them both relax.
"Oh, it's okay, if you were just out with Abby," said Mum, and I felt the tiniest twinge of guilt, "it is late, though. Maybe you should go to bed?" Any other time I would have argued. But I felt too good to bother. I said goodnight and went upstairs, got into bed, fell instantly asleep and dreamed about Abby all night long.