Chapter 16 #2
helped her by labeling all the hangers in the closet according to activity. She tried on the three labeled “date night” before
breakfast. And again before lunch. And then an hour before she set the alarm to leave.
Aubrey: You’re good.
Kai: Something left to aspire to then.
Aubrey: What?
Kai: Because I aim to be great. In everything.
Heat creeps up Aubrey’s neck. Kai’s confident in a way that both unnerves and excites her. It makes her wish she could remember
their night together, just a little. And even though she can’t, here comes a tingling between her legs and a clamminess on
her palms. She can’t do this. She can’t be picturing a naked twenty-two-year-old and especially not a naked twenty-two-year-old
who works for her.
She grips her phone and starts to draft a new text when his comes through.
Kai: Let me show you. I’ll teach you to surf. They’ve got a killer sim in this place.
Oh no. No, no, no. What did she say when she asked him to meet her here?
She looks back at their text chain. She’d told him she’d found the bracelet and would bring it to the office on Monday, to which he sent about a billion happy emojis before asking if he could swing by and get it tonight.
She’d said she wouldn’t be home and countered with a We could meet outside the arcade in Southie at 7.
Does that sound like an invitation? For a date?
Her fingers remain paralyzed over the keyboard on her phone. She looks up. Ethan. Her actual date. Her breath hitches, the sight of him too much to bear after the image of him still and waxen under the shadow
cast by the hospital sheet.
He hasn’t noticed her yet. He’s pushing back those black-rimmed glasses that make him look both a little nerdy and a whole
lot sexy at the same time. And she’s kinda glad he didn’t get LASIK surgery here. He’s fit but not overly so, like someone
who goes to the gym out of a love of pasta and ice cream rather than adrenaline and testosterone.
He’s early. He’d said “seven fifteen” when she’d gotten up the nerve to search this Aubrey’s contacts for his number. He sees
her, and she waves, just as Kai rounds the corner, holding a giant pink swirl of cotton candy. Kai reaches her first. He pinches
a section of the delicate sugary fluff and presses it above his lips like a moustache. That he twirls.
She bursts out laughing, and when he stands before her, she doesn’t react quick enough to dodge his kiss. A kiss she feels
in her toes. His hair’s loose, free of its bun, and she gets a whiff of her eucalyptus. That he hasn’t washed his hair since
he did so in her shower sends a strange but pleasant feeling through her.
They part, she steps back, and then her waist is warmed by something. Ethan’s somehow at her side and somehow pressing his hand to her lower back. He didn’t do that at home. Then again, at home he hadn’t seen a strikingly hot guy stick his tongue down her throat.
“Oh, sorry,” Aubrey says. “Ethan this is Kai, my, uh . . . he works for me. At AIM.”
The heat in her cheeks must be making them ten shades darker than the cotton candy.
Kai’s face crumples, but he sticks out his hand to shake Ethan’s.
After, Ethan doesn’t return his hand to Aubrey’s waist, as much as she wants him to.
“AIM’ing high, then?” he says to Kai.
Despite the obviousness of Ethan’s joke, Kai smiles politely. “Yes, and I’m learning all sorts of things.”
He’s disappointed but not embarrassed. The embarrassment is all her, and normally she’d not want to live in this awkwardness
for a second longer than she had to, but she resists her urge to mumble a quick goodbye. Instead, she finds herself suggesting
Ethan check on the line for tickets while she goes over some “work stuff” with Kai.
Though his forehead crinkles, Ethan leaves Aubrey alone with Kai.
She spins the cotton candy in her hand. “Thanks for this.”
“I checked. It’s vegan.”
Her stomach sinks. “You did?”
He shrugs, and she slides his bracelet off her wrist.
“It’s beautiful,” she says as it passes from her fingers to his. A jolt she has no way of covering spikes through her, but
fortunately he’s looking down.
“Appreciate it. Was my grandma’s.”
“Oh, I’m sorry.”
“She’s not dead, just stingy. I’d loved it since I was tall enough to sneak it out of her nightstand. Ma added the tag when
I left for the mainland.”
“A reminder of home,” Aubrey says, thinking of the Women Who Code poster.
“And family.”
“Family, yes,” Aubrey murmurs. Her mom and dad and siblings, all in her home state of Pennsylvania. Are they here? And has
she not been back to see them in . . . my god . . . four years? Has it really been four? As long as the years of high school
that made her never want to return. “Well, I’m glad it’s safe and back where it belongs.”
As she says it, she turns to check on Ethan, who’s standing at the entrance to the arcade. When he sees her, he smiles, and
the guilt and grief that have been keeping her heart pumping get worse not better. She feels that tug down to the place she’s
been since he died. Her throat’s as dry as sandpaper, and she thrusts her tongue against the roof of her mouth, the backs
of her teeth, trying to summon saliva that will let her talk, let her try to make it up to Ethan by not letting the same thing
happen again here. And the only way to do that is to not pretend. She has to be herself and see if they fit.
She turns to test her voice, to say goodbye to Kai, but he’s already gone.
Ethan’s the one here, waiting for her by the door, tickets in hand. Inside, he doesn’t balk when she says no to playing laser
tag. He orders a bright pink drink called a ladybird that smells like coconut and strawberries and is sweeter than the cotton
candy. Aubrey chooses a voodoo queen, eyes lighting up at the pretty purple color and the orchid floating on top. The lavender
soothes her and the prosecco topper puts a bounce in her step that helps her kick up so much virtual dust as she races her
virtual Humvee across the desert in Storm the Sand that she easily beats Ethan—or he lets her easily beat him. Though it certainly makes her a bad feminist, she kinda hopes
it’s that second one.
He’s an expert at darts, she’s surprisingly good at swinging a golf club, and they’re both terrible at shooting hoops. They’re so into whacking the mole that they order greasy fries and nachos, hold the cheese, and cancel their reservation at the trendy seafood place around the corner.
Aubrey’s drinking some gold concoction that tastes like honey and heaven out of a mug in the shape of a lion’s head beside
the Skee-Ball when Ethan leans in and says above the pulsing music, “You’re so not an Autumn.”
His face remains close to hers and she tries to hide the flush she feels coming behind the lion’s mane, but he puts his arm
on her wrist and draws the drink to the side. Then he kisses her.
The sensation’s so familiar and new at the same time that Aubrey doesn’t care if it’s good or bad (it’s not bad), all she
cares is that it’s happening. Again.
“God, I missed this,” she says aloud, and she knows her face is showing her mortification and fear. The old Ethan would have
called her confusing comment an “Aubreyism” and laughed and she’d have laughed with him, but this Ethan just looks at her,
his lips quirking into a grin.
“Me too. You’re right, so right. I never knew how much I could miss something I never even had.”
Two columns draw in Aubrey’s brain, the start of a pro-con list of continuing down this road with Ethan, knowing what could
happen, understanding the risks, unsure of what is in her power to cause or prevent and then his lips press against hers and
she erases the list that doesn’t matter anyway. Both ways are going to happen, and here, in this world, Aubrey might as well
stop living in the past and worrying about the future and just enjoy it.