Chapter Twenty-Nine. Rory
Rory
A warm September sunset was splashing into the street as Rory knocked on Elliott and Maggie’s door.
“Rory! You came!” Maggie’s arms were thrown around his neck, and his closed around her waist, swinging her up from the ground in a circle as he would have done to Daye.
“Of course I came. Happy birthday! How does it feel to be seventeen?”
“Like I drank half a bottle of wine, and I’m ready for the second half.
” Maggie laughed, her lips purple-stained, and nudged the plastic flower crown she was wearing back into place.
“C’mon, you’re way too sober to be festive.
” She was already dragging him toward the kitchen, Noah and Hanna cheering as he walked through the door and Elliott shoving a shot glass into his hand, grinning, and Rory felt drunk already, on the ease of friendship and familiar city sounds.
And before Rory could put his empty glass down, Elliott was pouring them all another round, and Maggie was plopping her flower crown on Noah’s head, and Hanna was perching on the arm of Rory’s chair, and they were drinking, slamming glasses down on the table only to fill them up again, mouths twisting and cheeks heating in pink blotches under summer tans.
And then all the bottles were empty and they were all spilling out into the September night, loud and brash and pliant.
Throats sore from shouting and cheeks sore from smiling and stomachs sore from laughter about nothing at all.
Rory found himself leaning against a lamppost with Hanna, fighting for air as their friends disappeared around a corner, a slurred “C’mon” from Elliott drifting in their wake.
It sent Hanna and him into fresh gales of laughter, Hanna’s forehead against his shoulder, Rory’s forehead against the cold lamppost, both of them gasping, gasping, gasping, tears in their eyes with so much laughter, though neither of them could remember what they were laughing about.
And then Hanna was rising on her tiptoes, and Rory was leaning down, and their lips met, sticky with sticky toffee puddings and sour with cheap wine, and Hanna’s mouth was opening under his and for a moment everything was weightless and perfect, a soap bubble floating in the air, but then—he knew it would happen, he knew but he was helpless to stop it all the same—but then his eyes were closing.
And in the darkness of his eyelids, all Rory could see was Daye.
He knew. Of course he knew. He knew for months of wresting his mind away from that flash of a nipple and the shape of her under that too-small-too-loose-half-transparent bathing suit whenever he touched himself.
Months of waking from a new breed of nightmares, of him stripping an unresponsive Daye in order to touch instead of weave, fingers slipping into crannies he had no right knowing.
He knew from the days he spent avoiding her and the nights he spent looking at her to make sure she was still there, holding her hand gingerly and trying not to wake her as he shook and shook and shook with panic.
But it was an amorphous kind of knowledge, easily denied.
But this—his eyes closing, the realness of Hanna, hair night-black under the streetlamps and cheeks pink with wine and laughter, replaced with the image of Daye, sun-streaked and summer wild—this he had no way to deny.
With Hanna’s hand closing around his, dragging him after the floating voices of their friends, he had no choice but to acknowledge, finally, what he had known all along: he was in love with Daye.