Kiss Me, Curse Me - By Kate Shay Page 0,2

face from Betty, but the mysterious woman had already disappeared off somewhere.

“Hank?” Coreen backed away from the dirty teen, thinking only of her dress. She wanted to look her best.

“I know. I had to,” he said.

Coreen’s father patted Hank on the shoulder. “He’s just one of many, okay? They rarely get time off and are just raring for trouble when they do.”

Hank brushed off and held his shirt in his hand, tightening the grip, wishing he had finished the guy off.

“Come on, corn on the cob sounds good right about now, don’t you two think? And anyways, soon it’ll be time to leave,” Coreen’s father said, nodding at the setting sun.

Hank slipped his dirty hand into Coreen’s, and she let him hold hers, though her thoughts wandered to another. They moseyed the busy streets till the sky turned pink, then orange, then black.

***

“Woo!” the observers cried as the jazz music strummed along, and the townsfolk danced, clapped, and yelled.

A still-dirty Hank twirled Coreen this way and that under the clear, starry night. Hank had convinced her father to let them stay for the night activities. It was odd that her father had even agreed to it. He was so stern all the time. She was always to be home by dark. The last time, she’d broken the rule. The fair was the first time she’d been allowed out again—a whole month. The cave visit had been worth it. It was all she could think about in her month of solitude. Hank had been her only allowed visitor. In her new freedom, she was really after something else, searching the faces with no luck. She unconsciously sighed.

“What?” Hank stopped dancing in the center of the grassy, lantern-lit circle, the couples buzzing around them.

Coreen avoided his grey eyes and sunk her head into his chest.

He lifted her chin up to look into her bright, crystal-blue ones. “We can go.”

“Maybe if we sit, I’ll catch my breath a little.”

“I’ll get you a lemonade, sweet and bitter,” he said eagerly.

He led her to a lone chair, and she sat watching the revelers in a blur, unable to focus on the merry mix. It was the kind of night where the heat lingered as the wind stilled. She wanted the wind—oh, how she craved it in that moment, just a little movement to wash away the foreboding humidity and her uncertainties. She focused back to Hank, who was boisterously chatting with a schoolmate, the two of them laughing, surely about the fight. Coreen stood, scanned the crowd one last time and glanced up at the low, full moon.

It’s too early, she told herself but left anyway.

***

The back trail wasn’t far off: to the end of the dusty D district, through the brush to the open fields, down to the Washington River, and along the bank for a ways. She knew the river by now—the lulled spots, the rocky places, where it was deep, and where it wasn’t. Along she followed until it curved just a little, leading into a shallow area. She sat on “their” rock. It was long and flat with just enough room for two. She waited, just her and the moon.

The river in this spot was quiet enough for her to know when she was no longer alone. She had not been waiting long when heavy, rushed steps sounded from the direction she had just come.

It’s not him, it’s not him.

Coreen jumped from the rock, losing her white shoe in the process. It was too late to turn back, so she pushed through the brush, through the sticker bushes, and farther into the trees, feeling a sharp pain strike her leg and creep up into her groin. It was distracting enough to make her want to stop, but she kept going till she was perfectly concealed, peeking her head out just enough to see.

Hank stood tall and slender where she had been sitting; he leaned down and picked up her shoe.

“Coreen?” His voice was lost on the water echoing across to the other bank. “Coreen!”

After waiting and calling until he was certain she wasn’t around, he continued up the river’s edge along the wilderness and away from people. Surely, she hasn’t ventured out too far, he thought.

Coreen hung back. She had a deep cut on her bare, white leg, and she didn’t want to move. The pain told her how bad it really was. She watched it bleed, watched a red puddle form on the earth and seep into it, the blood