Chapter 22
Friday, before I had to be back at Brentwood for our football game and before Logan had to be at Jefferson for his, we went out to Lookout Ledge.
It was the tallest point in Brentwood, a road winding its way up a hill.
You could see the tops of the trees from the bridge, and there was a little patch of gravel where people normally parked for the view.
Logan specifically borrowed his dad’s truck today, parking off the road and popping the bed undone.
He’d brought blankets and pillows to create a cushion against the hard metal, and we both lay down on it, staring up at the sky.
It was full of white, puffy clouds, making it perfect to pick out shapes.
“That’s totally a football,” I said, pointing to one.
“You see a football, I see a potato chip,” Logan replied, his hand toying with mine among the soft blankets. “Or maybe I’m just hungry.”
And my heart bumped harder every time the pad of his thumb slipped down to the delicate skin of my wrist. “You packed everything but snacks.”
Logan had an adorable habit of not being able to sit still. His foot moved to a silent beat, like a ticking metronome. His fingers traced small circles on my skin, each of his movements almost absentminded. “That one’s a banana sticking out of a martini glass.” Logan pointed off to the left.
Instead of following his finger, I peered over at him. “You’re so bad at this game.”
He gave me a lopsided grin. “No, I’m just creative.”
“That’s one word for it.”
The wind brushed the clouds along, and we watched them, passing answers back and forth in a lazy way.
There was something so comforting about the quiet way we spoke, reminding me of the nights we’d talk on the phone before bed.
It was the same sort of quality, just in the daytime. Soft, sleepy, warm.
Logan shifted, and the length of his arm grazed mine. “I’m glad your dad let you borrow his truck,” I murmured, shifting a fraction of an inch closer. “This would’ve been decidedly less romantic in the back of your car.”
“I don’t know, it’s an old car. There might be some weird stains we could pick out in the fabric of the ceiling.”
I laughed again. I always laughed with him.
Yesterday, when I’d stopped by Expresso’s for an hour, they were so busy that I hadn’t had the chance to bring up his Babble debut. Now, I had the perfect opportunity, but I couldn’t get myself to bring the topic up.
It was all said and done, and Jade had already moved on from the topic entirely today at school. Telling him about our post would only worry him, and he’d said Wednesday he missed when life was easy. So if it meant keeping that to myself to keep the stress off his shoulders, I could do that.
“I decided something,” I told him, and I sat up in the truck bed.
The breeze hadn’t been touching us since we’d been laying down, but as I leaned against the back of the cab, it stirred my hair in greeting.
I pulled the blanket over my lap, because it was a little chilly in my cheer skirt.
“I want to come to your friends’ bonfire tonight. ”
Logan’s blue eyes widened. “You what?”
“I know you technically didn’t invite me, but Danielle did. So, as long as you don’t have some secret girlfriend there, I want to come.”
Logan started sitting up. “Madison—”
But I pushed on his shoulders, forcing him back into the truck bed. “No, I still want to come if you’ve got a secret girlfriend,” I decided. “I want to come show her I’m willing to fight.”
“Secret girlfriend,” he scoffed, and then, in a fluid movement, he shifted so that he could rest his head on the blanket that covered my thigh. “I thought you had a friend thing.”
“I do, but I can leave that a little early.” I rested one of my hands on my other thigh, but with my left, I reached down to pick up Logan’s. He accepted it greedily, wrapping his fingers around mine. “I want to get to know you more, which means knowing your friends. Right?”
He didn’t agree right away, but watched me intently, as if searching for a hint of a lie.“Noah will be there,” he said finally, slowly.
“Noah,” I echoed, the glasses-wearing boy filling my mind’s eye. “I need to win him over.”
“It’ll be tough.”
“Because he hates me?”
“He doesn’t hate you.” Logan tucked our hands closer, almost protectively. “He just… doesn’t know you.”
“Then wouldn’t it be the perfect time?” I watched Logan’s expression, and the unease didn’t disappear. “Unless you’d rather me not meet your friends yet.”
“No, I—” He shook his head once. “Only if you want to.”
I scrunched my nose and leaned down, bringing our faces closer. “I want to.”
Logan’s eyes dropped from mine to my lips, as if he thought I’d lean even further to kiss him.
The thought, and the sudden, clear visual in my mind, caused me to jerk back, nearly knocking my head on the truck’s back window.
Blood rushed to my ears, and I was glad my hair was down to shield how red they must’ve been turning.
Logan cleared his throat. “How did you and Jade become friends?”
“We’ve been friends since elementary school.”
“But why?” His fingers traced the knuckles on the hand he held, resting them on his chest. “Why did you become friends? Were you deskmates? Bonded over the same backpack? What drew you to her?”
Drew me to her. It was the perfect way to put it.
Ever since the second grade even, it was as if Jade was a magnet, drawing everyone in.
Or, in some rare cases, repelling others away—like Maisie.
“She came up to me,” I said, using the tip of my finger to flick a lock of golden hair off his forehead.
“On the playground. Asked if we could be best friends.”
“Out of the blue?”
“She said it was because we both had blonde hair,” I said, and then frowned a little as the memory cleared further. “No, she said we were both pretty and had blonde hair.”
“No one else had blonde hair?”
Jade’s small, childish voice had been confident even then. No one else is pretty like us with blonde hair. “I don’t remember.”
Logan hummed a little, and I combed my fingers through his hair further.
It was silky soft, sifting through my fingers like I was passing my hand through water.
His lashes swept down along the tops of his cheekbones, the touch lulling him.
“So you agreed?” he asked, still not letting go of the topic. “To be two blonde besties?”
“No,” I said again. This time, I laughed. “I told her I already had a best friend.”
“Did you?”
“Yep.” I hesitated at first, because talking about Maisie wasn’t ever something I did willingly—couldn’t do willingly, really. But with Logan, I could open that forbidden box just a little. “Her name was Maisie. She lived right next door to me. She went to a different school at the time, though.”
“What did Jade say? When you said you already had a best friend?”
“She said, ‘I’ll be your school best friend,’” I told him, the memory surfacing like an air bubble through the water. “‘She can be your home best friend.’”
“And that worked?”
“Yeah.” That’d been justifiable for my eight-year-old brain. Besides, Jade had lived out in Addison at the time, and Mom would’ve said that was too far for playdates, anyway. Maisie got all my attention at home and Jade got all my attention at school. And life worked well, just like that.
“What happened after that?” Logan squeezed my hand, drawing my faraway gaze back down to him. “Something did.”
The problem with Logan Castle was that I wanted to tell him everything. I wanted to undo the padlock that secured all my secrets and spill them out to him.
I could tell him a little, though. “Maisie switched to Brentwood her freshman year, and things were… rocky.”
Maisie and Jade had met before freshman year, of course.
They’d both attended every one of my birthday parties.
Maisie had always been quiet around Jade, and Jade…
well, she didn’t pay Maisie much attention on those days, of course.
It’d been my birthday, after all. I hadn’t thought much about how different they were, not until Maisie announced she was switching to Brentwood.
I’d been thrilled. My home best friend was finally switching to my school, where I’d get to see her all day, every day.
By freshman year, I’d been mature enough to realize I could totally have two best friends—I didn’t have to separate them into different categories like I’d had to when I was a kid.
“Maisie found a new friend group when she started at Brentwood,” I said, feeling my heart race in my chest. It was beating far too fast, making me feel sick to my stomach. My hand was clammy in Logan’s grip. “We just grew apart.”
Jade had brought up joining the cheer squad to us one day before the school year started. I could still remember Maisie’s response, looking solely at me. I want to do it if you want to do it, she’d said. I’ll do it if you do it.
She doesn’t really want to, does she? Jade had asked me later, after Maisie had gone home for dinner. What if she makes the squad and we don’t, and she doesn’t really want to be on it? What if she beats us out of a spot?
“And you and Jade got closer.” It wasn’t a question.
I looked down at him, at his head propped perfectly in my lap. His blue eyes matched the sky’s color almost perfectly, gazing up at me as if I were his sun. “Mm.”
Logan’s eyes slipped shut, and this time, they didn’t blink open.
His dark lashes cast long shadows on his cheeks, and I let myself study him quietly in the silence.
His nose was sharp, sloping delicately, and I fought the urge to drag the tip of my finger along it.
One of his eyebrows naturally rested slightly higher than the other, both thick and several shades darker than his hair.
“Noah and I have been best friends since the little grades, too,” Logan told me, still not opening his eyes. “He’s more like a brother than a friend.”