Beyond the Break by Heather Buchta

Author:Heather Buchta [Buchta, Heather]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group
Published: 2020-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Seven

“I can’t believe you don’t like Nutella,” Jake says. “We might have to break up already.”

My phone is wedged between my head and the pillow, and my ear is hot from two hours of talking. I’m guessing it’s midnight from where the moon is outside my window—but I don’t want to take my phone away from my ear to check the time.

It’s Sunday night. I should be asleep. But I want tonight to be like last night, when he hung up only after he knew I’d fallen asleep. Jake wasn’t at church today—he never comes on Sundays—but it feels like an eternity, not two days, since I’ve seen him. Even though we talked on the phone Friday and Saturday nights until our throats were hoarse from whispering. Even though we texted endless emojis and memes during the day while I worked on my million school projects. It’s not enough. I want to feel his shoulder and how it barely brushes mine when he stuffs his hands into his jeans pockets—how before, he made it look like an accident, but now he leans in and keeps us connected, like when he walked me to my bike on Friday night.

“Nutella is gross, says the girl who eats crushed bug guts.” I can hear his smile in his voice, the big one that creases both his cheeks with dimples. “Good thing we don’t kiss.” Last night he asked me my favorite dessert. And when I told him red-velvet cake, he explained how the dye’s made from grinding up cochineal insects with water. I didn’t believe him, so I searched it on my phone. When I told him afterward that I didn’t lose my appetite, and I’d eat them anyway, because it turns out those insects are delicious, he laughed and said, “That’s hot.”

My insides skip even when he’s joking. I’m feeling things in the past two days I didn’t know lived inside of me. Before, sure, my heart would quicken when he was around. Now, when I talk to him, I feel like my heart is going to leap out and onto the phone separating us. It worries me. It thrills me. It worries me that it thrills me.

“Speaking of kissing,” I say, “we need to talk about this list.”

“Ahhh,” Jake says. “The list.” He hums Darth Vader’s “The Imperial March.” “Okay, let’s do this. Do you want to write it down so it’s official?”

“Ugh. I don’t want to turn the lights on.”

“What are you, fifty years old? Write it on your phone.”

I whisper, “Then I have to put you on speaker.”

He chuckles. “I’ll do it.” I hear him rummaging. “Okay. I found Post-its. Ready, go.”

I take a deep breath. He’s being playful about this, and it’s making me grin, but I can see my Bible on my nightstand that I haven’t opened for the past two nights, and it sobers me. “Number one. No sex.”

“Oh, come on,” Jake says. “Does that even need to go on the list? Isn’t that, like, a given? You’re wasting trees.

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