The Virgin’s Bucket List Episode 13

📖 The Story Continues

Alyssa mistook Lindsay’s silence for surrender. She asked whether the famously brave challenger had lost her nerve and offered an alternative: Lindsay could perform a handstand if she could not bear to kiss a social reject. The choice was cruel by design.

Lindsay looked down at her short dress. A handstand would expose her in front of everyone and produce the humiliating footage Alyssa had wanted from the beginning. “You can’t be serious,” she said, although Alyssa’s satisfied expression showed that she was.

“So you’re a coward?” Alyssa asked. The insult found its mark. Lindsay had spent too many years allowing other people to define the limits of her courage.

“Who said I was?” Lindsay replied. Her voice steadied as she turned toward Jeremy. He looked more frightened by the attention than she felt, and she refused to make his humiliation worse.

Wayne quietly offered to take her home. The concern in his eyes promised an escape, but leaving would let Alyssa claim victory and make Jeremy the reason for Lindsay’s refusal. Lindsay shook her head and said she could continue.

“Everyone deserves to be kissed,” she told the room. “We shouldn’t talk down about Jeremy.” She deliberately used his name, granting him the basic respect Alyssa had denied.

Alyssa laughed and asked whether the nerd actually had a name. The casual contempt stirred a memory in Wayne: a frightened boy surrounded by children, and a fearless girl stepping between him and their taunts. Lindsay had defended him then with the same stubborn certainty.

Wayne could no longer remain still. He repeated the rule aloud, confirming that Lindsay had to kiss the only boy wearing glasses. Alyssa agreed impatiently, failing to notice where his attention had settled.

“I can help,” Wayne said. Every face turned toward him. Lindsay stared, unsure what kind of help he could offer without making the situation stranger.

Alyssa immediately objected that he was cheating. She told him that if he cared so much, he could kiss Jeremy himself, but nothing other than Lindsay completing her dare would count. Laughter moved around the circle again.

Lindsay thanked Wayne for trying. She could not drag him into the spectacle or risk his standing with the people he had only just met. More quietly, she told him she could handle it herself.

Her insistence pulled Wayne deeper into the past. The young Lindsay he remembered had once promised to protect him when no one else would. She had called him brave until he learned to believe her, then disappeared from his life before he could tell her what that kindness meant.

“Don’t worry,” the remembered voice seemed to say. “I’ll protect you.” Wayne looked at the girl before him and realized she was still protecting everyone except herself. She truly did not remember him, but she had never stopped being the brave girl he knew.

Lindsay rose and prepared to cross the circle toward Jeremy. Wayne stood at the same time and asked her to wait one second. She paused, torn between annoyance and the dangerous hope that he had found a way out.

Wayne approached Jeremy and asked to borrow his glasses. Jeremy hesitated, then handed them over with an expression of sudden understanding. Without the frames, he was no longer the boy identified by Alyssa’s rule.

Wayne slid the glasses onto his own face. The room reacted with cheers, arguments, and disbelief, but he kept his eyes on Lindsay. “Just to be clear,” he said, “the dare is that Lindsay has to kiss the only boy wearing glasses, right?”

Alyssa protested that the substitution was not what she meant. Wayne pointed out that it was exactly what she had said. Having built the dare on labels rather than names, Alyssa had trapped herself inside her own wording.

Wayne stepped in front of Lindsay, close enough that the noise around them began to fade. Through Jeremy’s lenses, his familiar eyes searched hers for permission rather than demanding compliance. “Are you ready for your first kiss?” he asked, while Lindsay realized the impossible boyfriend from her birthday wish was waiting for her answer.