Chapter 21
But If the World Was Ending You’d Come Over, Right?
Aria
I’m slipping into my gray wool sweater when my phone vibrates. A text from Paxton. He’s sent a picture. I hastily dig a scrunchie out of the drawer of my bathroom cabinet, put my hair up in a loose bun, and reach for my phone before leaving the bathroom.
Clicking on our chat and enlarging the image, I see a nighttime shot of Silver Lake, ringed by snow, dazzling with thousands of stars.
Oooh, I write and add a smiling face with heart eyes as well as the astonished face emoji. Were you there?
He comes online and writes… Yesterday. And then, But it would have been nicer with you. ?
I read his message a hundred times with a huge smile on my face; maybe it was even two hundred times, who knows?
In any event, I’m so distracted that I miss the first stair.
My heart leaps in fright, and I clutch at the railing.
The phone slips out of my hands, my legs buckle, and as I lose my balance, my hand slips off, too.
I fall to the side and start tumbling down the steps, a strange situation, because, somehow, I don’t notice any of it even though it’s happening to me.
It all happens so quickly; I can’t even think.
I just fall, as per my usual, and then suddenly chair legs are scraping across the wooden floorboards in the dining area, there’s a collective gasp, children crying, and…
Wyatt. He’s kneeling in front of me, lips parted, skin soft, and I want to touch it, reach out and stroke it.
I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve got a concussion; maybe I’m just disturbed or something in between.
I mean, we all know I go all stupid whenever Wyatt’s around.
“Everything okay?”
I can’t believe it. Everything okay? Are you kidding me?
Like, how is that even possible? What a joke.
What an absolute joke. Responding doesn’t make any sense.
Having said that, what really does make a lot of sense at the moment, what seems downright essential, to be honest, is reaching out and touching his face, right here, right now, in front of the guests and a screaming kid.
I run my thumb down Wyatt’s face, palm his jaw…
His ex-girlfriend’s hand is caressing him everywhere, wonderful, totally normal, absolutely.
Wyatt flinches as if I’d burned him. Who knows, maybe I did.
I mean, that’s what it feels like every time we look at each other, every time we share a breath.
But he doesn’t retreat because it’s a good kind of burning, painful maybe, destructive, but too beautiful and too bright and too wonderful to look away.
He swallows. Two times, in fact, because, even though it’s nothing, it’s all too much.
“Did you hurt yourself, Aria?”
God, how much this voice frazzles me! It’s healing; it’s so warm, so raw, so absolutely not normal at all.
The two of us form a closed unity here at the bottom of the stairs.
Everything around us is blurry because we’re living in a fifty-millimeter camera lens, both of us in focus, while everything else is not.
It’s like we’re standing at different ends of a long speaking tube. His words reach me with a lag, one after the other, and I really have to concentrate to understand them because I’m looking straight into those golden-brown eyes I want to disappear into.
“Did I…umm…hurt myself? Yeah. Yeah, I think so.”
“Where?”
I slowly let my hand slide off his face and point to the left side of my chest.
Wyatt looks at it before looking back at me. “Did you fall on it?”
I shake my head. “My heart.”
“Yeah.” His forehead is creased, his lids are heavy, and his lashes are thick. “Mine, too.”
What’s going on? I must have hit my head.
I’m starting to feel sick, a little woozy; it’s like I’ve had something to drink, but all I did was look at my phone because Paxton…
Oh my God, Paxton. There’s a Paxton that you wanted to get to know, that you were starting to adore, Aria. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?
“No, all’s good, really.”
Wyatt’s wrapped his wide arms around me and helped me up to keep me from falling.
But then all of a sudden he wheezes and lets go, at least with one arm.
The kid is still screaming and pointing at me, which is really getting on my nerves.
I mean, I’m not dead or anything, just hanging off my ex-boyfriend’s arm. What’s weird about that?
Then Wyatt carefully puts me down and kneels, and all I can think is, Wow, is he about to propose or something? Then I realize I’ve got to be out of my mind.
He takes the edge of my sweater between his fingers. “May I?”
May I? Back in the day, taking off our clothes was something we did a million times; we could even do it in our sleep, but now everything is different. Nothing of that is left; now it’s a may I?
I nod, although I want to say no.
Then I say, “Yeah,” while shaking my head no.
YEAH-NO-I-DON’T-KNOW. I’m confused, no doubt about it, totally and completely confused.
Wyatt laughs. But it’s not a real laugh.
It’s more like he’s just blowing air out of his nose.
His fingertips are resting on the skin of my hip as he continues to rub the edge of my sweater.
Aware of the fact that our guests are still staring at us, I suddenly become totally uncomfortable, hanging around at the bottom of the stairs like a stranded walrus or something, half in Wyatt’s arms, half on the steps.
Be an adult, Aria. At some point Wyatt can’t be anything but a friend. Just a friend you share a past with. Let it happen. Accept what it is if you want it to stop.
I take a deep breath, then nod. His touch doesn’t feel friendly. It doesn’t feel harmless, although he hasn’t done anything but lift up my sweater a tiny bit. He’s only revealed a tiny bit of skin, but I feel like I’m standing in front of him naked.
“What is it?”
“This doesn’t look good.”
“What do you mean? What’s up?”
But before I can get a look myself, he picks me up and presses my body to his; my thigh is against his hip as if I were a baby, as if I weighed nothing, as if I were so light you could carry me just like that. He effortlessly takes the stairs two at a time.
“Where are you taking me?”
He grins. “Don’t worry. I’m not kidnapping you.”
“Oh, Wyatt. I mean, your chances would be so great here in my house.”
“Yeah, I’m a little disappointed in myself.”
We reach the end of the stairs and come onto the landing.
My shoes scuff the wooden baseboard. Wyatt looks to the right for a second, as if considering putting me on the old bench at the end of the hall.
But then he goes to the left and stops in front of his door.
When he starts moving to get the key, I start to panic.
I don’t want to go inside. I mean, it’s number twelve, and that hurts, even though I know it’s just a room.
But, at the moment, I can’t handle any kind of symbolic memories.
“No!” I call out before he can put the key in the door. I start to fidget until he puts me down. “Not in there.”
A shadow of hurt flits across Wyatt’s face. “Aria, I’m not going to fall on top of you or anything. I mean, sure, if you want me to, but, come on, you’re hurt, and you should lie down so that…”
“Let’s go to my room.”
“Your room?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes glide from me down the corridor to the connecting door to our private area.
I can feel his muscles grow tense. And I know it’s stupid.
I know my room will trigger more memories in me than this one does.
But just now I wasn’t thinking; my panicked mind went into SOS mode and chose the first alternative it could think of.
“It’s okay,” I say to cover up the fact that I’m about to collapse out of fear and pain. I look away because if I don’t, I won’t be able to breathe. But when I reach the door, Wyatt’s still rooted to his spot. “It’s just a room, Wyatt.”
He swallows and balls his hands into fists at his sides. Then he shakes them out, as if taking the next few steps was like making it past a wall of hockey players.
But then he starts to move. Not as self-assured as usual, a little hesitant, maybe even nervous. I mean, this is a big deal. For both of us.
We silently walk down the hall, next to each other, until we get to the end and are in front of the ladder up to my room.
I’ve always loved this part of the B it’s like it was my own tree house or something.
But ever since it’s been impossible for Mom to make it up to my room because of her pain, I’ve hated this ladder.
I miss the days she’d randomly come up to see me, what seemed like hundreds of times a day, just to chat.
Of course, now that I think about it, she’d always clean up a bit, throwing away old banana skins and Pop-Tarts that I’d forgotten in my wardrobe and putting away scattered pieces of clothing.
She doesn’t do any of that anymore. She can’t. And now that I think about it, I have absolutely no idea how many Pop-Tarts are rotting in my wardrobe at the moment.
I step to the side and wave my hand at Wyatt to tell him to go first. He looks disappointed, and I’m pretty sure I know why.
You wish, Lopez.
He begins to climb. I curse myself for standing here and staring at his firm ass in those black skinny jeans, and he knows that I am because he knows me, the idiot.
He glances over his shoulder and grins. “How unfair, Moore.”
I blush. Until he’s upstairs, I stare at Mom’s golden ladle, the one she got at a soup cook-off one year that has been hanging like a medal on the wall next to the kitchen door ever since. Then I climb up after him and manage to bang my head against his legs when attempting to pull myself up.
But Wyatt’s just standing there like a tin soldier, his face rigid, his body tense. Only his eyes are moving. They are literally racing all over the place, up, down, right, left, scanning every millimeter of my room.