WRONG NUMBER / CH

chptr 41

Asking girls out weren't a problem for Calum before he met Leia. It was just a nonchalant, cool thing for him: no biggie. Just girls. Just shallow dates and booty calls.

But when he decided to officially ask Leia out, he felt like all his senses would detonate at once. This was it. The moment he had been dreaming about for months. Asking her out on a real, authentic date. Of course he was nervous.

But she said yes, so all was right in the world.

Unknown to her, Calum had been planning this since last week, when they had an almost-kiss on her front porch yet again. And since this wasn't just some girl going on some date with him, he wanted it to be special: no movies, no dinner, no boring, overrated movie stereotypes.

The first thing that popped into his head was paint, and it stuck.

So Calum picked her up the following Saturday and refused to tell her what they were doing until he had finished signing them up.

He returned with a mischievous grin and something hidden behind his back. Leia smiled back, still confused. "Now are you gonna tell me what we're gonna do?" she pleaded, eager to know.

Calum handed her one of the things behind his back with a half-smirk. It was a paintball gun.

He didn't need to tell her. And he didn't need to know if she liked the idea, since the excited expression on her face gave it away.

And so their first official date was spent in a multicolored war zone.

They played with other people, a group about their age, and they were split into two teams. Calum and Leia played on opposite teams, which made things more exciting. The goal was to retrieve the other team's flag before time ran out.

The game was on.

Calum sat crouched in some fake bushes, peeking through the plastic leaves and spotting the opposite team patrolling their territory. His eyes scanned to find Leia's, but she was nowhere in sight. Since he was tasked to take them down, he aimed his gun at them and placed his finger on the trigger.

"Drop the gun or I'll shoot you," a voice behind him said. He whirled around, recognizing the voice.

Leia had her gun pointed at him with a crazed look of triumph on her face.

Before she could react, he pulled the trigger and shot her square in the chest, spreading a mess of purple onto her jacket. She recoiled reflexively, but it was too late. With an appalled expression she aimed at Calum and shot him-hitting his stomach. Blue bloomed all over his abdomen.

"You should've said something dramatic," she pointed out, shaking her head. "Like, 'I have a wife and three kids. Please have mercy.'"

"There's no mercy in the battlefield. And definitely no talking," he said with an air of superiority. "Why talk when I can just kill you and get it over with?"

They exploded into laughter, forgetting they were from opposite teams and that there were other people besides them. Soon they forgot the game altogether, and they were just running around throwing paint bombs at one another, since they hurt less.

Calum had never thought she looked so beautiful, covered in paint and sweat and laughing with him, running through fake, paint-splattered woods.

In that moment he forgot all about his troubles and worries for the past few months. Because right now all that mattered was that he did meet Leia, and they were together, and he was in love with her.

Why waste his thoughts on things so unimportant when he could be thinking about her?

"Calum! I think I actually swallowed some paint," she exclaimed, half-laughing. She wiped away her mouth and slowed to a walk, waiting for Calum to catch up.

He grinned. "Me too. You hit my cheek." He walked side by side with her, fingers just inches away from his. He itched to slide his hand in hers, but before he could muster up the courage, she does it for him.

Calum acted like he wasn't surprised, but inwardly he was freaking the fuck out.

"Oh, look. The sun's setting," she murmurs, pointing to the sky with her free hand, where it was turning a beautiful shade of golds and pinks and oranges. "It's breathtaking."

"Yeah, it is." But he wasn't looking at the sunset.

She noticed him staring at her, so she turned her head to him. She laughed, seeing just how paint-splattered he really was. She looked down on herself and saw she looked the same. Then her eyes met Calum's again. She reached out to touch his cheek without thinking. "Your mouth's all red," she whispered with an exhausted, slaphappy giggle.

"And yours is blue," he said, unconsciously leaning in.

There was something in the silence that followed and the way their eyes met, a silent conversation that basically said, Let's make violet.

Calum slowly tilted his head and gently pressed his lips to hers, grateful that she had crept closer to him so he could slide his arms around her waist easily. Her hands pressed against his chest, revealing his nervous heartbeat.

Holy shit, Calum thought. Holy fucking shit.

She tasted like paint and cherry lipgloss and everything good in this world. He was too afraid to do anything more than that chaste, pure kiss, too afraid to do something that might possibly ruin the moment.

Because he was kissing her underneath the sunset, covered in paint and the warmth of the low light, and nothing was more perfect than that moment.

He pulled away first, even though his whole being screamed not to. "Was that okay? I didn't ask permission, I'm sorry-"

Leia had pressed her lips to Calum's again, partly because he was rambling again, mostly because she had been waiting for him to kiss her for weeks now.

Then they both pulled away, breathless and dizzy from the contact high, touching their purple lips with shy smiles pasted on their faces. "We should do this more often," Leia said after a moment, fitting her fingers through the spaces between Calum's.

He grinned. "Paintball or kissing?"

"Definitely both," she replied.

Calum kissed her again, his mind still whirring from the fact that he was finally allowed to kiss her, which he had been dreaming about for weeks. He kissed her softly, like she was a rose petal that would bruise easily. He kissed her until their lips were no longer purple, until the sun left them in the darkness. They kissed and wrapped themselves in each other until their heartbeats stopped jumping around in their chests, threatening to explode.

a/n: lmao hey friends! thats a lot of kissing fam. i didn't know how to end the chapter so bear with me. i'm not over heath ledger in 10 Things I Hate About You so im sorry lol