All the other times I've been up here, sitting on this sun-warmed boulder, I'd been invited by the girl with me at the time, and there usually wasn't a lot of talking going on.

It feels weird to be up here with Kira, and right now, there's also not much talking going on, but we're not trying out any kissing techniques on each other, either... something I really wish I could fix right now. I guess I'd better clear my mind and think of something else before I forget why we're here and end up pissing her off again.

This is actually a cool spot for spying on people. The tree in front of the boulder hides us well enough from people on the path or at the stream. You usually have to be in exactly the right spot to see who is up here, but that spot is a bit uncomfortable and highly likely to make you fall and roll downhill. When you're up here, though, you can clearly see the bridge, the path and sections of the stream and some of the clearings in the forest around us.

It would make an awesome guard tower!

If you want to lie in wait for people and pounce on them at the last minute, this is the ideal spot. I am so going to set a trap between those two trees over there, and then I'll hide up here and call Jet and when he...

"Are we just here to catch a tan, or was there a reason for this awesome occasion?" Kira suddenly asks, snapping my attention back to the mission at hand. 

I'm not sure what she means. I've made myself comfortable while I checked out the ambush potential of our current location, but the sun is now mostly blocked by the branches of the trees towering above us. Not all that much is shining on us right now.

Besides, we're both fully dressed, and I don't see that changing any time soon. I glance at Kira and am surprised to see that she is looking tense and not in the normal what-the-hell-is-Ethan-up-to-now way. She seems nervous, plucking at the material of her skirt and biting her lip.

She is so close to me right now, the breeze is carrying subtle whiffs of her perfume to me, and the fragrance is making me feel lightheaded. I love the way Kira smells. I guess it won't be very manly of me to pass out and fall off the boulder.

"If we're trying to catch a tan, we're doing it wrong," I point out logically because Kira has a thing for logic.

"Ethan, why are we here?" Apparently, she is not all that impressed with my attempt at logic because she is really sounding annoyed now. Damn, the direct opposite of what I was aiming for.

"I need your help," I blurt out. Shit! That was not the speech I rehearsed with Burlap. I was supposed to say some seriously pretty words that were going to make me sound as though I was quoting friggin' Shakespeare. Something about one of the pockets of nature having some issues with... uhm... what was it? Something was definitely dying out and facing extinction... but I cannot remember what it was... or why... or what I was planning to do about it...

Shit! I told him we should use the whole speaking in my ear via a headset thing, and he said it gets done too often in movies. What the hell does that matter?! This is not a friggin' movie! There was no chance in hell of me remembering his flowery speech!

Great! What do I need her help with?! 

Replanting something I've never heard of before to save something that probably doesn't even exist. Kira will know if we make up stuff... Why did I listen to Burlap? I always do, but usually, he makes sense, and he gets me. He didn't get me this time, and I am now completely lost.

I should just jump down from here and run home and ask Deli for a plan. One with shorter sentences and words I actually understand and will remember.

"Oooo... kay?" Kira says, looking at me, waiting for more, and all I can do is blush like a blooming pre-teen girl, rub the back of my neck and grin at her like a friggin' idiot. What the hell do I need her to help me with that will not cause her to grab the hockey stick lying safely next to me and beat me up with it? I cannot think of a thing!

I'm so screwed!

"Ethan," she says, narrowing her eyes, looking ready to take flight. "I am not digging thorns out of hard-to-reach places for you again."

That catches me by surprise, making me laugh, but it also saves me from saying more stupid things. I sit up straighter and wipe my hand through my hair, trying to find my mojo... if I ever had any. Well, if I had any, it wouldn't be in my hair, and mojo isn't really the word I'm looking for. Courage! That's it; I need to find my courage because it ran away at some point and probably got snared in that trap I was daydreaming about setting up between the trees for Jet and is now stuck in a giant hole.

The logistics of my ambush plans are starting to seem a bit unrealistic to me now that my courage has tested the theory behind them.

Focus, Ethan!

I remember the incident Kira is referring to. I was grounded... again, and I didn't want to be grounded, as usual, so I stuffed some pillows and a hoodie in my bed (it was a work of art, very convincing) and escaped out my window... right into a thorny shrub! I got tiny thorns all over my back, from my waist down, all over the backs of my legs. Deli and Kira used tweezers to get them out, and I swear they took some sadistic pleasure in pinching me with those things as often as they could get away with.

This incident happened when I was in the ninth grade, shortly after I moved into my aunt's old bedroom upstairs, so I forgot about the stupid shrub. My dad's youngest sister used the room with its private bathroom until she finished her degree at Silverview University. When she got a job and moved out, I called dibs on it even though it is a lot smaller than my room downstairs, and my dad was probably relieved by the idea of us not constantly running into each other and had no issue with me moving up there.

The room has its own bathroom and a convenient escape route out of the house... and, though I didn't realise it right away (I should've, but I didn't), it has the extra perk of making Kira the first thing I see when I get up in the morning... unless she keeps her curtains closed... which she tends to do.

Still, she is within shouting distance, and she comes to the window when I whistle for her, mostly just to glare at me or tell me off since she hates it when I do that - which makes it so much more fun to do - but hey, I get to see her.

I've since dug up that shrub and moved it to the other side of our garden. Told my dad it got uprooted by an animal that looked like a cross between a Wombat and a Warthog (neither of which are apparently found on this continent), and I decided it had a better chance at surviving if I replanted it where no animal can come charging through.

He just looked at me in that narrowed-eye way he always does just before he throws a shoe at me, and then he shrugged. I don't think he liked having the shrub there much either; he was always getting his clothes snagged on it when he tried to get the hosepipe from its wheel mounted against the wall beneath my window.

"Believe me; you enjoyed that event more than I did," I remind Kicks.

Kira is making faces at me, looking a little bit guilty, and she is so friggin' cute right now; my heart is doing all kinds of stupid tricks, causing my blood to roar in my ears. 

When she was helping me catch up on maths, she often looked at me like that when I caught her secretly eating M&Ms after hiding them from me and telling me they were finished. I have so many memories of Kira and me over the years arguing about M&Ms. There's a bucket in one of their kitchen cabinets filled with all the kinds on the market, and she seems to think it belongs to her. She keeps the bucket filled, so it technically does belong to her... but it doesn't... it's mine...

"I want you to tutor me again," I hear myself say, and now I want to grab the hockey stick and knock myself out. What am I saying?! We're supposed to go play in the woods and try to save the whatchamacallits from extinction by planting more thingamabobs they can use as habitats. A project she will love.

Tutor me in what? I don't wanna do more math! I wanna do fun things. This is going so wrong!

Kira is not looking impressed with my idea either, there are so many expressions flitting over her face right now, and she is sticking her cheeky nose into the air and popping out her lower lip in that cute sulky way and... Man! That is just asking for a kiss!

No! No! Deli always says that Kira is not asking for a kiss when she does that and that I should not go around kissing the girl. No kissing allowed unless Kira clearly tells me it is okay. She also said last night that if I just lose it and go ahead and kiss the girl anyway, she'll run for the hills, and it will be game over.

So, no kissing that mouth, no matter how much that lip is just begging for it.

"Which subject this time?"

What is she talking about now? 

Oh! Right! Tutoring! I don't want to be tutored; I don't need tutoring. I just have to study sometimes, that's all. I'm all good. I'm passing everything I need to pass and even the things I don't need to pass, and lately, I almost enjoy maths... No, that's a stretch, but I'm doing just fine in it now. The only thing I want to be tutored in is... "Dating."

Shit! I said that out loud! How do I unsay it? What the hell am I doing? She is giving me a look now, clearly confused, and I can sense that another Kira leaving in a huff scene is loading.

"History?" she asks, and now I'm worried about sunstroke. Neither of us has History as a subject! Why would I need tutoring in History? Or does she mean that I'm going to be history soon?

"I want you to teach me how to be a good boyfriend."

She's gaping at me now, but it's okay; I'm gaping right back at her. It just occurred to me when I heard those words falling from my mouth that I am a friggin' genius! I'm back to my original plan, the one where Kira takes me for a test drive. That was the best plan all around. That way, I won't have to do any maths or go digging around in some swamp or something, and we can kiss and cuddle all we want... well... she doesn't want any, so... probably not, but it's a step in the right direction. 

Right? Right?!

Wrong! Kicks is glaring at me now. I don't want to be glared at; I want to be patted on the head (gently) and told that I'm a genius and be taken for a test drive!

"Great," she says in that hot schoolmistress voice she often uses when I'm annoying her. "So you chose the hottest day of the year to make me wrestle up the hill and through the jungle so that I can climb onto this rock, which I have no idea how I'm going to get off again, just so that you can make a stupid joke?"

Wow! Now it's all my fault that she got overheated and scraped up doing bundu bashing! There is a blooming path right there that would've brought her here in under five minutes, and she wouldn't have been all cute and messed up, needing me to fish branches out of her hair before climbing up here. Frowning at her, I roll my eyes.

"No, drama queen, this is not the hottest day of the year; that will be next week Tuesday," I made that up, but... whatever... "I didn't make you wrestle anything, you could've just taken the footpath like a sane person, and it's easy to get down from here; you've done it a million times before. Do it the same way you got up here, just in reverse, from the side behind us, where the boulder is closer to the ground."

Kira huffs and draws her legs up to cross them, and I hastily study the branches above us, the stream, and the squirrel fighting with his pal over a seed. I'm looking everywhere, and at everything, except Kira, because she'd clearly forgotten that she's wearing a dress and probably didn't mean to treat me to the awesome view of her thighs, she is showing me.

Damn. She remembered, and now she's sitting up primly with her legs over the side and those pretty thighs are modestly covered by the tartan skirt again, and my heart is no longer lodged somewhere in my sinuses. I let out a long, steadying breath, but I'm grinning like a fool.

"Stop spewing facts at me, and please explain yourself in five sentences or less, using words that actually make sense," and the hot schoolmarm is back with a vengeance.

"You sound like an English language test," I snort.

"I'll be checking your grammar."

"Fine!" Well, no getting out of it now. I've buggered up the plan and might as well do a good job of mucking it up completely... hopefully using good grammar. Against all the advice I got from Deli and Burlap, I'm going to play it by ear! It would've been a different playing by ear if Burlap wasn't so against teen movies, but here goes nothing!

I turn to look at Kira directly, making sure she is hearing me and I am speaking clearly. No misunderstandings are allowed here. "I want you to date me and help me become the ideal boyfriend."

"I'm sorry," she says cheekily, pulling a face at me. "I should've explained that the words should make sense in the sentence they're used in."

"I thought you were bright," I grunt, a little annoyed by her lack of respect for my superior linguistic attempt and my brilliant playing-by-ear skills.

Great, now I've made her mad, and this is usually when she hits me with whatever she can grab and takes off. The hockey stick is safely out of her reach, and I can get to it before she can. I should be safe.

This is not working at all. I need to find a way to get through to her. Maybe I should just give honesty another shot. I should just tell her that I love her, always have and don't want to lose her when we leave home and tackle the adventure called life. I want to live with her in this world. All my roads keep on leading to her. I'm running out of time, and I don't know how to tell her that in a way that will make her take me seriously.

Every time I've tried to tell her that, she either laughed at me and told me I'm an idiot or got mad at me and told me to stop being an idiot. Either way, the outcome is always one where I end up being called an idiot.

Perhaps Deli is wrong, and Kira simply doesn't feel that way about me, and that is why she never takes me seriously when I try to tell her. And yet, looking into her eyes, seeing myself reflected in their dilated depths, I can see something else there, behind my face, something stirring in recognition. Her lips are quivering slightly, her expression softening, and for a moment, just a moment, I think that she gets it and that she feels it too.

She is not reaching for the stick or taking off her shoe to hit me with it; she is looking at me as though she is really seeing me, slowly blinking her eyes, her expression turning thoughtful.

There might be some hope after all.

"Is there some kind of good reason behind this weird-ass request of yours?" Kira asks, and now I know that I am truly screwed.

♂♀