Chapter Eight #2
“You were smelling me too? Was that before or after you lied to my face and turned on me when I tried to help you?”
I’m reaching my limit. I want this conversation to be over. BUT.
“It was a competition, Ivan! It’s not my fault you have the self-preservation instincts of a grilled cheese sandwich.”
“A grilled cheese—” Ivan parrots incredulously. “You know what? I’ve got this from here.” He dramatically hoists my backpack up higher on his shoulder and makes for the door. “I’ll bring the bag back, but after that, could you do me a favor and leave me alone for the rest of the summer?”
“Only if you leave me alone first,” I bark back. “And make sure you put that in the recycling bin; don’t just trash it.”
“Of course I’m gonna recycle it!” Ivan hisses. “God, you are the worst.”
“Just checking,” I hiss back. “And feeling’s mutual.”
Ivan has no response for that. He unlocks my door, yanks it open, and looks both ways before stepping out into the hall.
The door is almost closed again when I spot it.
One single, slender bottle of margarita mix half hidden by the door of my wardrobe.
I’m not going through this again. Ivan needs to take this down with all the rest. Then we’ll never talk or even look at each other once for the rest of our lives.
Without anything else to hold the bottle, I stuff it under my shirt, holding it up against my back when I step out into the hall.
“Ivan!” I call out. He’s about to get into an elevator with a group of other students, but he hears my voice and stops. So does everyone else getting into the elevator.
“We, um,” I start. “You forgot … something.”
Ivan’s eyes light up in recognition. My strange posture, holding one hand behind my back like a cater waiter, clues him in to my situation.
“Right,” he says with a quick look at the six-odd strangers holding the elevator for him. “Let me just grab …”
Just what? He can’t come back into my room; people are watching.
I also can’t slip the bottle into the backpack without anyone noticing.
“No!” I call out. “I’ll come over there.
To you.” I shuffle sideways along the hallway wall, not wanting anyone to see what I have behind my back.
The hard part will be getting from the wall to the elevator.
My grip on this thing isn’t amazing either, so when I try to step forward I feel it slip an inch down.
I officially have about five seconds before it looks like I pooped an empty bottle of marg mix on the hallway floor.
Ivan is there in three. He leaps out of the elevator, strides across the hall, and grabs me by my waist—or, no.
It just looks like he does. His arms are around me, but his hands are occupied with steadying the bottle.
“Hold it here,” Ivan whispers. “Look at me.” I do look at him, and there they are, those green eyes in magnified close-up.
I feel a puff of warm air on my cheek that moistens my skin, hear the whisper his breath makes as it comes up his throat, crosses his lips.
Our faces are close enough that if either of us felt the urge to lean in and headbutt the other, we could.
“Oh my god, I knew she looked familiar.” Someone in the hallway has stopped to look at us. I don’t know what they’re talking about because Ivan Hunt’s face is near my face and Ivan Hunt’s hands are slowly starting to move the glass bottle from the back of my shirt to the front.
“Hey—” I start to say.
“Shush.” Ivan is calm and concentrating on moving the bottle.
His hands are on top of my shirt, but as the bottle rolls it catches on my slightly sweaty skin.
Still, he makes progress. It tickles a little, and the cold glass is giving me goose bumps, but I dare not move.
Not like I would know how or where to go.
This whole situation is fairly unique for me. For most people, I might assume.
“You’re so right, it’s her,” a stranger says.
“Well, that’s one mystery solved,” adds another.
The bottle is now under my shirt and pressed up against my stomach. Ivan keeps one arm around my waist and uses the other to quickly flip the bottle from under my shirt to under his.
“It’s not gonna work,” I say, angling my head down to see the obvious bulge in his shirt. Now his breath is rustling the errant curls I tuck behind my ear, and I hear it come shallower than before. If he’s this nervous, how does he think I feel?
“Got this,” he mutters. His voice sounds slow and thick, an entire world of difference from the sharp, mean tones we used with each other back in my room. “Go.”
Ivan pushes away from me, and I’ve never been more grateful to have my back against a wall.
It’s like the building itself is holding me up just when my knees were about to give out.
A quiet gasp escapes my mouth at the sudden lack of his body, his warmth.
At the way he holds a finger up to his lips in a conspiratorial “shh” as he backs up into the elevator.
His arm is cradled around his waist in a way that could maybe mean he has a stomachache.
Or a glass bottle held horizontally across his abs, which are pretty tight now that I’ve pressed up against them for a bit, which is irrelevant information.
“Hold on, I think I have the picture.” Another stranger, another strange thing to say.
“Told you he was dating someone.”
I watch Ivan, wide-eyed, until the elevator doors finally close.
It’s done. He has all the bottles. I’m safe, my room is clear, and he promised he’d recycle.
It takes a few moments for me to remember I have feet and another few to clear my head enough to pay attention to the rest of the universe.
Where someone is already pushing their phone toward my face.
“Zora! Hey, Zora! This is you, right?”
Of course it’s Chaz. I flinch away from his screen, though not fast enough to avoid glimpsing whatever he’s trying to show me.
I expect some bit of nonsense to match with the nonsense people have been spouting since Ivan took the breath from me (bottle!
I meant bottle). I don’t glimpse nonsense, though. I glimpse myself.
Here is a video of two people standing together at the end of a red carpet.
One is a boy in a shearling leather jacket, and the other is a girl in a long, black puffer coat.
His arm is around her, but she yanks herself away and stares back at him in disgust. Okay, glimpse over.
No need to watch any more of that. I know that story, and it sucks, and now I have to own up to the fact that Ivan Hunt publicly identified me as his groupie at Wizzcon.
“That’s me, yeah,” I admit. No use denying it, even though the cringe factor of reliving this moment makes me want to knit myself into a cocoon starting at my feet and all the way up past my head.
“For sure!” Chaz exclaims. “Yo, guys, I was right! I told you she looked familiar.” He bends down to show his phone to the students sitting on the floor. A few of them shuffle forward on their knees to get a better look at the video, which loops back to the beginning.
I try not to watch it again, but it’s hard not to.
I try to think of the girl in the video as someone separate from me, a fictional character who happens to share my face, and then …
I see it. This time, instead of seeing my own seething embarrassment and wanting to cringe my neck flat, I see a different story entirely.
I see the boy, handsome and grinning like he’s looked forward to this moment all week.
I see the girl, flustered with surprise that they’ve run into each other outside.
I watch them watch each other and imagine the bantering chemistry that bubbles up between them when she pretends to be embarrassed.
When she pulls away from him, it’s coy, not rude.
The boy is in on the joke when he gently pulls her back.
With that simple gesture, I see through the reality of that moment.
In real life I remember feeling humiliated, like I was nothing compared to the boy everyone was happy to see.
But that was only my story. From Ivan’s perspective, and from anyone else’s, that blushing embarrassment could mean anything.
It could be a love story. And it is, according to the video description:
Sorry ladies! Looks like VANE made his Wizzcon return with a new gf on his arm! Does anyone recognize his mystery girl? DM us, anon or not!
The group on the floor scrambles to their feet to get a better look at me. I’ve been stared at a lot today, but this is the first time I feel like they’re doing it out of curiosity and not contempt.
“That’s why he was waiting for her to arrive today,” Chaz explains, right as Kavi walks over to see what the fuss is about.
“Oh my god, I’m so sorry,” the girl I remember looking at Ivan in the lounge earlier apologizes. “When you told me to back off on Ivan I didn’t know it was because he was taken. My bad, totally my bad.”
“Were you guys seriously not going to tell anyone?”
“Wait, did he just come out of your room?”
“It’s so cute how he switched seats so you can sit together.”
“What’s your name again? And wait, okay, back up; I need to know how long you’ve been together because I had this theory …”
I don’t have a response for whatever the hell is happening right now, but I have to get a handle on it before it becomes another interpretation of me that I can’t control. I’m so close to being stuck again, written by another hand, or many, many hands. When the only writer who should matter is me.
“I’m Zora,” I begin. And why not sell it with a smile? “And yeah, you got me. I’m Ivan Hunt’s girlfriend.”