Hades

3. Tess

CHAPTER 3

TESS

“Can I? Can I kiss you?”

Tess blinked. Hard. Because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re dreaming, right?

And she had to be dreaming. There was no way—no way in H.E.-double hockey sticks—that Benjamin Brady Keane, the tall and fine athletic god from Boston, was seriously asking for permission to kiss her.

She was a chubby and mere Black mortal from…well, that was complicated. Whenever anyone at her high school bothered to ask, she had to tell them the long story of how she’d been born on a mission trip in Angola and had lived in some of the poorest nations all over the world before convincing her mother to settle back down in Ohio, the state her family originally hailed from, so she could finish up her high school education in the U.S.A. and hopefully land a college scholarship.

It was a somewhat confusing and complicated story. She hadn’t gotten many follow-up questions. Or managed to make many friends who were as dedicated to service as she was.

Not until Benjamin walked into her mother’s trailer office at the Ohio Valley site for God’s Works Youth Missions.

The area had flooded earlier in the year, wiping out a slew of homes. He’d come to Ohio—along with a host of teenagers on a special God’s Work mission trip—to help fix, and in some cases completely rebuild, the homes people had lost in the flood.

She’d worked enough of these summer missions to know that most of the high schoolers were here for stories to include in their college admission packages. Those kids weren’t so bad. At least they worked hard to earn their end-of-summer letters of recommendation.

But then there were the other high schoolers, like Benjamin’s jerk of a friend, Donovan, who’d been bemoaning being made to come here all summer.

His parents actually thought eight weeks of hard labor under the Ohio sun would somehow magically fix everything wrong with the entitled brat they’d made with their sixteen years of indulgence. And unfortunately, he wasn’t the only one. Donovan’s cabin was filled with guys who spent more time comparing their abs and biceps than actually working.

Benjamin lived in Donovan’s cabin, but he wasn’t anything like his friends. He didn’t need to build character or content for his college applications. He’d come to the mission with character already installed and guaranteed admission to any Division 1 university with a hockey program.

Not only was Benjamin beyond fine—with wavy black hair, friendly blue eyes, and the kind of strong, square jaw comic artists like to draw on superheroes—but he was also a truly good guy. He’d been helping her cover for her alcoholic mother all summer without revealing to Tess that he knew the real reason she was so overworked.

Not until that day, the magical Fourth of July when he confessed everything: that he had an alcoholic parent too, that he wasn’t helping her out of pure generosity.

“I’ve been wanting to kiss you all summer….I like you. I really like you,” he’d told her.

Then he’d asked if he could kiss her.

So, yeah, this definitely, definitely had to be a dream. There was simply no other explanation.

Even if she wasn’t waking up after many eye blinks.

But if it really was a dream, what was the harm in saying yes? Of indulging herself for once in her life of service?

In the end, she consented to being kissed for the first time ever with a simple nod.

A huge smile broke out across Benjamin’s way-too-handsome-for-her face. “Yes?”

“Yes. Yes, you can kiss me,” she confirmed, whispering the words.

Because if this really was the dream she suspected it was, she didn’t want to wake herself up.

She wasn’t intimate with the phrase “too good to be true” back then, but soon she’d swallow down that bitter pill of a lesson.

And she’d remember the terrible taste for the rest of her life.