Chapter 13
First Kiss
Record keeping in the refugee camps was not consistent. In some instances detailed accounts were kept and in others, deaths and births went unrecorded. A black market eventually flourished, not just for anyone wanting to start life over with a new identity, but for anything the refugees could want and afford. Camp officials made an effort to keep the dealings to a minimum but realized that under the circumstances they would never be able to stop it entirely.
-Bartell, History of the Second Cylon War
.
The girl's name was Carrie Warner and she was three years older than Kara, three years, four months and twelve days to be exact. Kara would always remember that later when she and Karl were living in Caprica City and she was using Carrie's ID because Carrie didn't need it any more.
She saw Carrie on her first day in the refugee camp, that cold, windy late winter day the soldiers dropped them off. A day when no amount of pegging down the big admin tent could keep out the frigid air and the hastily constructed dormitories where the orphaned boys and girls lived seemed to leak the cold air like a sieve.
Carrie was sitting barefoot on the floor near one of the heaters. She was polishing her toenails a bright green. Her fingernails were bright blue. The natural color of her hair was light brown. That was easy enough to see because three or four inches of it had grown out. The rest of her hair hung down past her shoulders and had one time been dyed jet-black with streaks of red, not auburn or even carrot-colored like real hair, but scarlet, like blood.
It was one of the weirdest looks Kara had ever seen. Carrie had six earrings going up the outside of each ear, a small diamond stud in the side of her nose, and a little silver safety pin through one eyebrow. Her brown eyes, which were her prettiest feature, were ringed around with dark eyeliner that made Kara think of a raccoon.
Kara saw her around the dormitory for several days until she and Karl found the unoccupied tent and moved into it. The next time she saw Carrie Warner was a month later when they were both assigned to cleanup detail in one of the women's showers in the camp's D-Sector.
Cleanup detail in the showers wasn't a duty. It was a punishment. The fiberglass building had been put up over a low concrete platform raised just enough to get it off the pipes. There were twenty small showers on one side and eighteen on the other. The showers were in use all the time except for the hour each afternoon when they were shut down, one side at a time, for cleaning. The water was never hot, but it wasn't cold either.
There were no doors or curtains on the showers, just small fiberglass partitions between them. Kara learned early that you didn't look at anyone else and if someone looked at you, you ignored it.
Along both end walls were large, deep sinks where clothes could be washed. Kara told Karl he could wash his own clothes. It was enough of a chore to wash her own. When they lived at the stone house, she hadn't minded throwing his clothes into the washer with hers, but doing laundry by hand was different. He finally told her that sometimes he just showered with his clothes on, soaping and then rinsing them before he took them off and finished his own shower. She rolled her eyes. Guys. They were always looking for a shortcut when it came to chores.
At least there was a place inside their tent where they could string a clothesline. Something was always hanging there to dry. She learned never to put anything outside unless she planned to sit and watch it. Anything left outside got stolen, even underwear that was nearly worn out.
One day a woman washing at the next sink told her that once a month a charity group brought used clothing to the camp. She told Kara to watch for the flyers put up in the mess tent. A lot of time the used clothes included underwear. The woman told her that all the donated clothes had been laundered and were clean. Kara didn't think she would ever be able to wear someone's used underwear, but eventually when hers was in tatters, she changed her mind.
"What'd you do to get assigned to cleanup detail?" Carrie asked as she sprayed cleaner and wiped one of the partitions.
"Got caught outside the camp perimeter," Kara answered her. "For the second time. The first time they let me off with a warning. I've been out there in the woods lots of times. What about you?"
"Stealing cigarettes from one of those old ho-bags in the admin tent. She totally gives me the creeps. She's always coming on to good-looking guys like she's Miss Caprica or something. Three, four months ago there was a guy came in looking for his kids. He was hot. I'd have done him myself if I'd gotten the chance. Anyway, something happened and the Marines threw him out. A few minutes later I see her leave, too. She comes back about an hour later with that I-just-been-well-and-truly-frakked look on her face, gets something out of the admin tent and leaves again. All I can say is that guy must have been totally desperate to do her. And lately there's a government guy comes up every week to check out the camp. Name's Leban, Leoban, something like that. He's hot, too. She's always after him like a little bitch in heat."
"Does he like her?"
"Are you kidding? Like he's got to be polite to her, but he looks like he's trying to keep from puking on her feet. While she's primping like a little whore for him, I'd steal a couple of cigarettes. This time I got greedy. I took the whole pack. Dumb. She caught me before I got out of the tent."
"Why don't you just buy some?"
"No more cubits. I traded my last cubits for some makeup and fingernail polish. I could get a whole pack of smokes if I was willing to give some creep a blowjob, but I'm not that desperate, yet."
Kara made note of the term blowjob. She thought she knew what it meant, but she'd have to ask Karl to be sure.
"Cigarettes are nasty. My real dad smoked."
"You know I hate that term real dad. It makes it sound like you had a fake dad, too. What you mean is biological father." Carrie said.
"Okay, my biological father wasn't married to my mother. I had another father who was married to my mother."
"What happened to them?"
"They're all dead. What about you?"
"The same. When the Cylons bombed Antioch. My sister and my brother, too. Nobody left but me. If I hadn't sneaked out of the house that night to meet my boyfriend in the park, I'd be dead, too. A bomb hit our apartment building. Nothing left but a big crater."
"I have a brother," Kara said. "I don't know what I'd do without him."
"Lucky you. How old? Is he cute?"
Kara thought about that for a minute. If she were looking at Karl as somebody she had just met, what would she say?
Finally she answered. "Yeah, he's real cute. And he's real nice, too. He's fifteen...in a couple of months."
"My brother would have been almost eighteen by now if he'd lived. He was a year older than me."
"What was his name?"
"Stephan. He was cute, too."
"Less talk and more cleaning," said the woman who was in charge of the shower cleanup detail. "You haven't got all day to get this done."
Carrie rolled her eyes and mouthed the word bitch. Kara grinned.
"I want to meet your cute brother," Carrie whispered. "My boyfriend dumped me for some skanky blond slut over in B-Sector. I'm about tired of going without in this dump."
"Going without what?" Kara whispered back.
"Are you for real? Going without what?"
Carrie laughed so hard that the woman in charge came over and made Carrie go to the other end of the row of showers. Kara could hear her still laughing.
That evening when she repeated the conversation to Karl, and he told her what Carrie was going without, Kara didn't think it was funny at all.
"You're not seriously thinking about doing that with her, are you?"
"I don't know. What did you say she looked like again?"
"Like a real dog."
"I like dogs," Karl said and grinned. "Does she roll over and beg?"
"No, but she bites. And she hasn't had her rabies shots either."
"Are you jealous?" Karl asked.
Trying not to laugh she threw her pillow at him. "Oh, frak you."
He caught it and threw it back. They ended up smacking each other with their pillows just like a couple of silly kids, until they were both laughing so hard that they were too weak to keep it up and collapsed, still laughing, on their cots.
She couldn't remember how long it had been since they had done something fun like that.
...
Despite the threat of getting caught and punished by being put on shower detail again, she couldn't stop going into the woods that bordered the camp on the west side. She averaged shower detail about once every third week. Not only that, she had to listen to a lecture on the dangers of the woods. She never bothered to tell anyone that she knew all about the woods and that she had her slingshot. She was going to get the lecture no matter what.
She didn't see Carrie again on shower detail. She must have found another source of cigarettes or else she'd given them up or maybe she had…yuck, Kara wasn't going to think about that. Karl had told her that blowjob meant exactly what she thought it did.
In the early spring and completely by accident she found the special place in the woods. There was a bend in the stream where she went to get the smooth pebbles for her slingshot. She wasn't killing game anymore, but she still practiced with the slingshot, shooting a row of pinecones off a tree trunk as fast as she could get a pebble loaded. It was a way to pass the long, boring days.
She'd already shot some rats outside hers and Karl's tent, one of the downsides of being close to the sector's rubbish heap. Karl told her that one of the guys said there was a time in the early days of the camp when people were so hungry they had cooked and eaten the rats. Kara didn't believe it. Nobody could be hungry enough to eat a rat.
One day she walked down the creek path farther than she ever had before and found an ancient fallen tree to line the pinecones up on. It was taller than the one she was used to, the top side of the trunk almost reaching her shoulder. She put the cones on top, shot them off, and then walked between the trunk and the face of a tall rock cliff to retrieve the cones and do it again.
There was a low opening in the rock face that was hidden by the trunk. She saw light on the other side and squeezed through. It opened onto a small, enclosed glade that looked like it had once been used for some kind of ceremony. In the middle of the glade there was a rectangular stone about ten feet long, four feet wide and three and a half feet high. Around it in several semi-circles were smaller flat-topped stones that might have been used as seats.
The place smelled of pine needles and damp vegetation, the smell of the woods. Kara felt like she was in the presence of something ancient, some long-ago people who had created this place and then vanished. It felt sacred.
She walked around the large rock, the altar as she was now thinking of it. There were symbols carved into it, twelve symbols, six per the two long sides and some other strange symbols on each end, but they were so weathered that she couldn't tell what they were. This was definitely an ancient place.
The glade became, for her, a place of peace and solitude where she could go to get away from the constant noise and smell of the camp, a place where she could think about her father and her mother, about Sassy and Flyboy. She brought small things there and left them on the altar. A piece of broken glass in the shape of a wing, a little toy plane that had been thrown on the rubbish heap but still looked good, a single bullet from her mother's pistol, a bird's egg the blue-gray color of her mother's eyes.
She never told anyone, not even Karl, about the special place. It was hers alone. Besides, Karl wasn't interested in leaving the camp anymore. He'd met some other guys his age and they'd started hanging out together, playing soccer a lot and talking to girls.
Once she'd seen him walking through the camp with Carrie Warner. She wondered if Carrie was still going without. She didn't ask Karl and he didn't volunteer any information. They were still best friends, but they had drifted apart. It wasn't like it had been back at the little stone house when all they had was each other. Sometimes they went their separate ways in the morning and didn't see each other again until the evening.
She didn't much care right now anyway. She had her special secret place to go.
That's why she was so angry, so outraged when she went there one afternoon in the autumn, two months past her fourteenth birthday, and found a man sitting on the altar. Even worse, as she came up quietly behind him in the clearing, he raised a pistol to his temple.
She watched in horror as he lowered the pistol, sat there for a minute, and then raised it again.
"What the frak do you think you're doing?" she shouted at him.
He jumped and lowered the gun and looked around at her.
For one brief, heart-stopping moment she thought he was her father. But he wasn't. He was younger than her father and his hair was black not dark brown. But he was good-looking like her father, or he would have been if his face weren't so drawn and he weren't so sad looking. Maybe it was the white shirt, too, that made her think of her father. Only he didn't have on the navy uniform trousers. He was wearing jeans.
Without thinking about her own safety, she marched up to the altar stone.
"Get the frak off there! You want to do that to yourself, you go do it somewhere else."
She thought about the mess Zarek's men had made when they shot Singer, the blood and brains on the wall behind him. And this guy was getting ready to do that to her altar, all over the things she had put there for her mother and father.
Her voice was shrill with her outrage. "This is my place! Those are my things! Get down from there!"
He sat for what seemed like forever, cross-legged, staring at her, the pistol still in his hand but down on the stone now, pointed away from them, and then something like a twisted smile appeared on his face.
"It figures. The person who finds me getting ready to blow my brains out doesn't care whether I do it or not, just that I don't do it on her stuff. So where do you want me to do it?"
"Anywhere in the woods but here. This place is special."
He kept looking at her. "That's why I was going to do it here. It is special. Some would say sacred. Maybe the gods will have mercy on my soul."
"I don't give a frak if the gods have mercy on your soul or not. Just get the frak out of here."
"Man, you've got a smart mouth."
His words hit her like a blow. "My father told me that one time. He's dead," she said quietly and looked away. "He was a pilot. Somebody shot him."
"Is he why you put the little plane here?"
"Yeah."
"What's your name?"
"Kara. What's yours?"
"Hugh Connelly."
"So why are you going to shoot yourself? It's not like you've got it any worse than the rest of us."
"Why am I going to shoot myself? Oh, let's see. I lost my wife and my parents when Sovana was bombed and yesterday my little boy died. He's been sick since we got here. He was only two years old. I've lost everybody I ever loved. Everybody who ever loved me."
"So that makes you different from the rest of us how?"
Her anger at him was gone. She was beginning to feel sorry for him. He was a father who had lost his son. She was a daughter who had lost her father. She climbed up on the altar and sat down cross-legged beside him.
"Sitting up here beside a crazy man with a gun doesn't scare you?"
"I've been around guns all my life." She looked down at the pistol. "Besides, the only way you're going to shoot yourself or me with that is if you take the safety off."
He almost laughed. "I can't even do this right. So how have you been around guns all your life?"
"My mother was a Marine. She taught me. She died back on Picon."
Hugh Connelly seemed to be thinking about what she had said. "I guess I'm not the only one who's lost everybody."
"I have a brother."
"So you aren't totally alone."
"No, I guess I'm lucky. Where'd you get the pistol?"
"You can buy almost anything in the camp if you know the right people and have the cubits."
"Yeah, well next time buy some lessons on how to use it, too."
He snorted. "So much wisdom from one so young. How old are you anyway?"
"Seventeen, almost eighteen," she lied. She looked at least as old as Carrie Warner and Carrie was seventeen. "How old are you?"
"Twenty-five."
"What did you do in Sovana?"
"I taught school. Tenth grade."
"Ugh, wouldn't you just know I had to go and stop a school teacher from shooting himself."
He almost laughed. "I take it you don't like school or is it just teachers?"
She shrugged. "Mostly school. It was okay most of the time. I hated homework. What did you teach in tenth grade?"
"Colonial History. One ancient history class for honors students."
"Well I sure wouldn't have been in that class. How did you find this place?"
"I followed the markers."
"What markers?"
"The marker stones in the woods. The symbols on the long sides of this stone are the original symbols of the Twelve Colonies. I told you I taught ancient history. How did you find it?"
"By accident. I was practicing with my slingshot."
"Are you any good?"
She took a pebble out of her pocket. "See that yellow leaf hanging down over there?"
"Over by the rock face?"
She put the pebble in the slingshot, drew it back and released it. The yellow leaf snapped off and fell. "I'm not quite as good with a moving target, especially if it's small and moving fast, but I do okay. I practice almost every day."
"Wow. Could I get you to shoot me?"
She rolled her eyes. "No, you're going to have to figure out how to do that yourself. There's only one man I'm going to shoot one day and that's the man who killed my father only I'm going to do it with my mother's pistol. I'm going to look him in the eye and I'm going to make sure he knows who I am before I pull the trigger."
"You shouldn't obsess about revenge, Kara. It destroys the soul."
"I'm not obsessing about it. I'm just stating a fact."
The sat in silence for a few minutes and then Connelly got down off the stone. "I'm going to think about this overnight. If I do decide to kill myself, I promise you I won't come back here."
"Yeah, you do that. Think about it some more. My father thought he wanted to kill himself one time, too, after he lost his leg and couldn't fly a Viper anymore, but my mother changed his mind. If she hadn't, I wouldn't be here now. She…she just changed his mind." Kara didn't want to start thinking about what her mother had done to change her father's mind about killing himself. She sure couldn't do that to this guy.
She started to get down from the altar and Connelly reached out his hand to steady her. He didn't take his hand off her arm right away. Now that they were standing she saw that he was tall, like her father. She looked up into his eyes…eyes as blue as the sky at twilight.
Her breath caught and without thinking she looked at his chest. No wings. Nothing except a pocket. He wasn't Prince Olliver.
Something was going on with her, though, something she didn't quite understand. She looked back up at his eyes again. She felt hot and cold at the same time.
"You have the most beautiful green eyes," he said.
"I have my father's eyes." Even her voice sounded funny.
He kept standing there with his hand on her arm. Finally he squeezed it gently and said, "There's an ancient saying that if you save a man's life, you own a piece of his soul. I hope you know you've got a piece of mine, at least overnight. I will think about it. Maybe killing myself is not such a good idea after all. I'll leave you here now with your things, to think about your mother and father. Be careful going back to the camp."
He turned around and left.
She stayed there for a long time leaning against the altar, trying to understand what she was feeling. When she woke up the next morning, she understood what it was. She liked Connelly in a grown-up kind of way, like a boyfriend.
She went back to the secret place every afternoon for weeks hoping he would come back there, too, not to kill himself, but to see her. He never showed up, though.
She started walking around the camp looking for him, but it was huge, divided into more than a dozen sectors, and she knew he could be anywhere. She and Karl were in D-Sector. She decided to be methodical. That's what Karl would do, search the camp sector by sector. She spent her mornings walking through the camp and her afternoons in the woods.
Weeks later as she was on her way back from the secret place, an older boy stepped out from behind a tree into her way. He was big, several inches taller than her, and he was mean-looking.
"Give me the necklace," was all he said.
For several seconds she didn't know what he was talking about.
"The necklace," he repeated and took a step toward her.
She realized that he meant the dog tags. He could see the top of the chain around her neck. The tags themselves were under her t-shirt.
She shook her head and casually put her hand in her pocket. She had the pebble out and the slingshot drawn before he realized what she was doing.
"Step aside," she said. "I'm aiming at your eye. At this distance there's no way I'll miss."
He didn't move as she began to edge around him. What she hadn't counted on was that he wasn't alone.
The other guy came up behind her, got an arm around her neck and started dragging her backward. The pebble went a foot wide of its target. She dropped the slingshot and grabbed at the arm that was now choking her.
"Hold her," the big guy said. The other one clamped a hand over her mouth and dragged her to the ground as the big one began pulling at the button of her jeans.
She ignored his hands for a second, jerked back her leg and kicked him as hard as she could in the jaw. He reeled backward cursing, but it kept his hands off her for the moment. She was struggling too much for breath, though, to keep it up for long. She was unable to believe what was going to happen to her, the thing that Karl hadn't wanted to talk about.
Suddenly a man's voice said. "Let her go! I said…let…her…go! Kara, get up."
The hands on her were gone. Gasping, she struggled to her feet. Hugh Connelly was standing on the path looking crazier than he had the day she had seen him weeks before. He had the gun pointed at the two guys, moving it back and forth between them. She took several fast deep breaths and her dizziness cleared.
"Go back to the camp, Kara. Now!"
She picked up her slingshot. She was okay. She was okay. In a minute she knew she was probably going to fall apart, but right now she was okay.
"Start backing away," she told Connelly. "I'm right behind you." She loaded the slingshot with a pebble. "If either one of them makes a move, you shoot the one on the left. Aim for his chest. I'll take the one on the right. I'll put one through his eye. I'd really love to do that."
She started backing up carefully. Neither of the guys moved. "Come on," she said to Connelly. "Move!"
When they were far enough away, they ran.
Neither spoke again until they got near the perimeter.
"Put the gun away before somebody sees it. Make sure the safety's on." Other than being out of breath from running her voice sounded almost normal.
"How can you be so cool? Those guys were going to rape you."
"Well, they didn't. I'm okay." But she knew she wasn't. Her hands were shaking so badly that she could hardly hold the slingshot. She struggled to get it into her back pocket and finally gave up and carried it. She showed him where the wire fence had been cut, where she always got out and then back in, and they squeezed through.
"Where are you staying?" he asked.
"This way." She started walking concentrating on putting one foot in front of the other.
When they reached her tent, they went inside. Karl was gone as he usually was in the afternoon.
Her legs were getting shaky, too, and she sat down on her cot.
Connelly said. "I'll be back in a minute. Just sit right there."
She had no idea how long he was gone. It could have been five minutes or twenty-five. She just sat, rubbing her hands against her jeans, occasionally taking deep, shuddering breaths, trying to make the shaking stop. When Connelly got back he had a small flask. He held it to her lips and she smelled the alcohol.
"Drink."
She did. It wasn't nearly as good as the Siren's Kiss, but it was what she needed. A few sips later the shaking subsided and the tears finally came. Connelly sat down on the cot beside her and put his arm around her just like Karl did when she cried, but it didn't feel the same. She put her head on his shoulder, too, but that didn't feel the same either.
He turned up the flask. It looked like he drank what was left in it. "I think I need this as bad as you do. I guess you know you can't ever go back into the woods, don't you?"
She nodded and that brought fresh tears.
"I'm sorry, Kara. I know that place means a lot to you, but it's not safe. I've been watching it for weeks, afraid something like this was going to happen, ever since I saw those two guys start hanging around. You know there're reasons you're not supposed to leave the camp's perimeter. That's one of them."
"You've been looking for me?"
"Yeah."
"I've been looking for you."
"Why would you look for a crazy man?"
She shrugged. The tears had stopped. It sounded almost like he was teasing her.
"To see if you were okay."
"Well, I'm not okay, but I'm not ready to kill myself either. I guess you're going to have to hang on to that piece of my soul a while longer."
His arm was still around her and he squeezed her shoulder. She was beginning to get that funny feeling again.
Maybe he was feeling something, too, because he stood up and slipped the flask into the back pocket of his jeans. "If you're all right, I'd better be going."
She stood, too, and they walked closer to the tent flap. They were really close together. She looked up into his blue eyes.
"Thank you. For everything."
He touched her face gently. "You saved me. I returned the favor."
"So you own a little piece of my soul, too."
Neither of them moved. Finally he said, "Kara, I want to kiss you. Is that all right?"
She nodded. She wanted to tell him she didn't know how to kiss, but he didn't give her a chance to say anything.
He slid his hand from her cheek to the back of her head, pulled her to him and kissed her. It was soft at first, their lips barely touching, barely moving, but eventually he gently forced her lips apart and she felt his tongue begin to explore hers. He tasted like alcohol. She knew she probably did, too.
She was awkward at first but he didn't seem to notice or care. By the time she put her arms around his neck, she was really getting the hang of it. His arms tightened around her. Their bodies were pressed together. That felt good, too.
She wasn't sure how long they stood there, arms around each other, the kiss getting deeper and hungrier. It made her think of the way her father had kissed her mother back on Picon. Then Connelly slid his hand under her t-shirt and bra and over her breast. She made a sound that was part moan and part whimper, a sound she didn't even know she could make.
He took his hand off her breast and pulled back from the kiss. "You'd better tell me to stop if you don't want to go any further with this. Tell me to stop now and I will."
"No," she breathed. "I don't want you to stop."
As soon as she said it, he took her hand and pressed it against the front of his jeans. When she didn't know what to do, he put his hand over hers and held it tightly against him and squeezed.
He closed his eyes tightly while she rubbed her hand against the length of him through his jeans. She didn't realize it could get that hard…or that big.
"I will make this good for you, Kara, I promise. Before I ever…I will make sure…" He kissed her again.
That's what they were doing, standing there kissing, her hand on the front of his jeans, when Karl lifted the tent flap and walked in.
"What the frak?"
She and Connelly quickly separated.
Karl took her arm, pulled her away from Connelly and got between them.
"What the frak is going on?" Karl sounded angry.
For a few moments neither of them said anything. Then Connelly said, "You must be the brother." He was still breathing hard.
"Yeah. Who the frak are you?"
"It's okay, Karl," she said. "He's my friend."
"Friend? It looks like he's a lot more than just a friend."
"Tell him what happened, Kara. I'll see you tomorrow."
"No the hell you won't see her tomorrow if this is what you've got in mind. Do you know she's only fourteen?"
Connelly gave her an incredulous look. "Fourteen? Lords of Kobol!"
She hung her head. "I told him I was almost eighteen," she said to Karl. "It's not his fault."
"Well now you know," Karl said to Connelly. "You stay the frak away from her. I promised her father I'd take care of her."
"Wait a minute. What do you mean you promised her father you'd take care of her? I thought you were her brother."
She and Karl looked at each other. "Different fathers," she said.
Connelly looked at her and then at Karl and then back at her. "Okay, this is clearer now. You say you're brother and sister so you can live together. You two really need to get your story straight. One thing you have got just perfect, Kara, is that innocent act of yours. I've always hated being lied to."
He turned and left the tent.
She sat down on her cot. "We're busted. Oh, frak, I've really screwed up."
She told Karl everything that had happened before she and Connelly got back to the tent. She didn't need to tell him about what had happened after. He'd seen enough to figure that part out.
"Are you all right?"
"Thanks to him.
"You don't know how lucky you are. I didn't know you'd been going to the woods like that or I'd have gone with you. Okay, this Connelly guy kept you from getting raped. And you lied to him about your age. He gets a pass this time. And he's sure right about one thing. You can't ever go back to the woods again. You've got to promise me."
She nodded.
"And you've got to promise me you'll stay away from him."
She shook her head. "I like him," she said defiantly.
"Kara, he's too old for you. You said he's twenty-five and that he's been married. You know what he wants."
"Would that be so bad?"
"Right now it would. You're too young. Fourteen is way too young to have sex. You're under the age of consent. I know you learned about that in sex-ed class. What if he got you pregnant? He would be arrested because you're not sixteen. Do you want that? A baby to take care of and him in jail?"
"No."
"Then stay away from him. In a couple of years maybe, but right now don't even think about doing something like that."
"You've been doing it with Carrie."
"I have not."
"You haven't?"
"No. I didn't want to. Not with her. I've talked to her a couple of times. The last time she asked me to introduce her to a guy I play soccer with. Now promise me that you won't go around that Connelly guy again."
"I won't be anywhere alone with him. You have my word of honor."
That was all she was going to promise Karl. She liked Hugh Connelly too much.
She was going to keep looking for him. He may not even talk to her now, but she wasn't going to give up until she found him and told him the truth about her and Karl. And she needed to apologize to him for lying about her age. She couldn't be alone with him. She'd promised Karl, but she still wanted to see him.
Connelly had kissed her, her first grown-up kiss, and what a kiss. He really knew how to kiss. She shut her eyes and thought about how good the kiss had felt. Just thinking about the way he had kissed her made her get that funny feeling again.
She bet Karl had never had a kiss that good.
Kara smiled to herself. She bet even Carrie Warner had never had a kiss that good.
The only man who might kiss her better than Hugh Connelly would be Prince Olliver.
Karl was right. She needed to grow up before she started looking for a man who not only had eyes as blue as the sky at twilight but also had wings over his heart.