Chapter 24 #2
Nevertheless, he manages to move. He comes right up to me with a smile on his face, and I wonder how much it’s costing him.
His voice sounds battered, and his grin slips a bit as he hands me my plate, puts the bottle of iced tea down next to me, and says so that only I can hear, “Then stop missing me when you’re the one who left. ”
“Wyatt,” I whisper as he pulls back his head and his ear brushes my cheek.
He looks at me with a hurt expression, and as he opens his mouth, I think he’s going to start talking about everything, about us, about what happened, right here in front of everyone, but all he says is, “I got rid of the mushrooms for you.”
My fingers grip the edge of the plate. “Thank you.”
And then the moment’s gone. His face brightens as we all stand up and shuffle into the theater. The film starts. Wyatt is a champion at hiding his feelings. He fishes a handful of popcorn out of the bag in between him and Levi and begins tossing pieces of them against the back of Knox’s head.
“Hey.” Paisley nudges him in the side and brushes the popcorn off his hair.
With a tender smile on his face, he takes her ear between his thumb and index finger and pulls softly.
She giggles. “You’re terrifying when you try to be sweet, Knox.”
“When I try?” Now he tugs on both her ears so hard that she pulls back laughing. “I am always sweet, Snow Queen, every damn day.”
Wyatt and I look at each other. It’s automatic; it’s something we can’t control because Paisley and Knox’s love just radiates outward, and whenever our bodies register those kinds of feelings, we automatically turn to those we associate them with.
“You all blubber way too much,” Aaron says, stretching out to scratch his boyfriend’s neck.
Levi in turn reaches his greasy fingers back to stroke Aaron’s hand.
Once again Wyatt and I look at each other because we’re thinking the exact same thing: Camila.
Her fingers are always greasy after she eats.
The corners of our mouths twitch. I turn away.
With his arm draped over the back of the chair in his row, Knox turns halfway to the right. “This movie sucks. Let’s go out to the shop and just chill.” We all get up and file back to the fireplace and the variety of chairs and sofas.
Paisley taps his nose. “Well, suggest something, skater boy.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“You call me Snow Queen.”
“But that’s sweet.”
“Skater boy is, too.”
“ESPN’s showing the Snowdogs versus the Bullheads,” Wyatt says, causing everyone to groan.
“Pleeease,” Levi says. “I hate hockey.”
I look at him questioningly. “But you’re a figure skater.”
“You got it, Moore… Figure and skater come together to form something rather different from hockey and player.”
“But both take place out on the ice and…”
“Are you really trying to compare the two?” Aaron moves to steal the last piece of my baguette.
“All good, all good.” I pull up my legs, yank at the elastic band of my right sock, and look out at everyone. The dim light makes our faces shadowy and mysterious, and I like that, somehow, it makes me feel like we’re in our own little world. “Let’s play Guess Who’s on My Mind.”
Knox laughs. “We haven’t played that since high school, Aria.”
“It’s cool.” Wyatt wiggles his eyebrows.
“Nostalgic memories of cheap beer in the gym and bonfires in the Highlands.” He puts his empty plate to the side and opens his bottle of Coke to take a swig.
My eyes get caught on his lips as they close around the bottle, and I get hot, way too hot—my God, how they move…
“You okay?”
His voice makes me flinch, and the piece of my baguette that I was putting to my mouth falls to the ground. “Yeah…umm…of course.”
“Are you having an allergic reaction, Aria?”
“What?”
“Your face is so blotchy.”
“It’s the light.”
Wyatt’s grin comes far too quickly, smugly, and seductively for my stomach not to react.
“I’m up for Guess Who as well,” Levi says, playing with the buttons of Aaron’s cardigan.
Paisley takes a sip of her hot chocolate. “What’s that?” She doesn’t notice the mustache it leaves. The smile Knox makes as he wipes it off with his thumb is priceless. He says, “It’s a game.”
“More info, please, skater boy.”
He laughs. “Everyone draws a name, thinks of a song that fits the person, and writes it down on a piece of paper. Then they are drawn, one after the other, and we play the song, and everyone has to guess who chose it, who it fits, and why.”
“Oooh,” she says as her eyes light up. “I’m down with that!”
“Great.” Aaron stands up and digs around in the drawer of a huge, dark desk until he finds some pens and paper. He passes them out, makes little pieces of paper with our names on them, and puts out his hand so that each of us can take one.
I draw Paisley. As we think, all we can hear is the film in the background and the rustling of paper.
I tap the top of the pen against my lower lip and stare into space.
Knox told me that Paisley didn’t have the nicest of pasts.
He didn’t go into details, but Harper said her former trainer had to go to jail for sexual assault, and Knox mentioned that she’d grown up in a Minneapolis trailer park.
The tip of my tongue brushes my upper lip as I bend forward and write down “Survivor” by Destiny’s Child.
When I look back up, Wyatt’s there with his upside down hat in his hands, looking down at me. His eyes are resting on the tip of my tongue, and his expression is almost ravenous. My cheeks burning, I lower my eyes and place my piece of paper inside.
He turns, and his Adam’s apple hops. “Okay,” he says, swinging up onto the desk and bouncing his legs back and forth.
“The first song is…” Levi plays a drumroll on his phone and Wyatt, attempting to make things exciting, digs around in his hat and shifts his eyes back and forth until Knox launches a slipper at his head.
“Dude,” Wyatt says, rubbing his temple. “You know how much bacteria is in those things?”
“You’re a piece of bacteria,” Knox counters.
“Scientifically speaking, that’s true,” Paisley says. “No offense, Wy.”
“Okay, now that that’s settled… ‘We Found Love’ by Rihanna.”
Levi plays the song on Spotify.
“Paisley,” Aaron says. “For Knox.”
Wyatt confirms with a nod. “Because they found each other when the world seemed hopeless for both of them.”
Our eyes wander to Paisley, who looks down and grabs hold of her knees. She plays with her fingertips and nods. “Right.”
“Babe,” Knox says, a soft smile on his lips as he bends forward and plants a kiss on her forehead.
Her cheeks still turn red, even after a year of being together.
But then I think of Wyatt and me, of our first kiss eight years ago, and then I think of how my body begins to burn whenever he looks at me, and I decide to concentrate on something else.
We keep on playing. We laugh until our face muscles hurt; we make jokes and tease one another, and for the first time in ages, I simply feel happy. It’s as if the last few years had never happened and we were back in high school.
Carefree thoughts; hearts as light as a feather.
Everyone immediately guesses that “Survivor” refers to Paisley, but Levi thinks Knox chose it, Knox thinks that it was Aaron, and only Paisley guesses it was me.
“Okay, let’s move on.” Wyatt pulls the next folded piece of paper out of the hat.
He swallows as soon as he reads the song, and when his eyes dart over to me, I know immediately, immediately, that he must have drawn and chosen a song for me.
For a second I toy with the thought of putting my hands over my ears or cutting them off or whatever because I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle what’s to come.
I mean, we’re talking about his unfiltered thoughts here, thoughts that have probably been going through his head for years, and he can share them with me now without having to speak out loud.
But it’s too late. The first notes are already sounding through the tinny speakers of a phone.
I know this song. I know this song, and it doesn’t make things better cause I know what they’re singing about.
And then, as the words begin to float above our heads and into our hearts, each and every syllable starts to cause me pain.
The song fades. Everybody is looking at me.
Wyatt has balled his hands into fists and is pressing them against his built upper thighs.
His knuckles are white. Levi looks like he thinks he made a terrible mistake by playing the song, Paisley’s eyes are full of tears as she looks from Wyatt to me to Wyatt, Knox looks like he’s expecting me to fall unconscious any second, and Aaron is tugging at a hole in his sock.
Everyone’s tense and waiting for me to react, like I was a lone suitcase that either had clothes or a bomb inside it.
“Sorry,” Wyatt says.
It’s hard for me to breathe. It’s too much. Wyatt’s reveal, those glances and the terrible memories coming up, are too much and have ruined the moment.
I look over at Wyatt. Gold-brown eyes, caramelized sugar in a brown-yellow light.
“You’re sorry,” I say, but hardly recognize my voice. Whatever. “You’re sorry, you say, after all I had to go through, after all I had to feel when I saw you fuck her, Wyatt. And you think a few words, a few shitty words are enough to make me forget?”
“Drop it, Aria.” Wyatt hops down off the desk.
He comes right over to me, and suddenly it’s like we’re alone, surrounded by a blur of colors, a sea of emotions we don’t want to face.
“Stop bringing up the past over and over and throwing it in my face. Here, Wyatt, again, and one more time, BAM, BAM, feels good, huh? I know what I did, okay, Aria? I’ve known it for two years, and,” he gives a dry, frustrated laugh, “don’t you worry, Moore, I’m not going to forget it.
For the rest of my life I’m going to feel like a piece of shit.
I’m going to feel empty inside and simply fucked, yeah.
And when I wake up in the morning, you know what the first thing I feel is?
Hate and rage, sadness and nausea, and the first thing I see are the memories, and they make it even worse.
So believe me when I say that I know what I did, that I know what loss and self-hate feel like, and that I’m always going to feel like a hopeless, beaten dog. Okay?”
He’s breathing powerfully and quickly, and I am too because we’re both running, even though we’re standing still.
My voice breaks when I speak. “I will never be the person I was.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, but I’ll love you all the same, A., always, even if you were someone else every day of the year, three hundred and sixty-five different Aria Moores. Happy me.”
We’re both right. We’ve reached a point where we’re turning around in circles because I can’t stop attacking him for what he did and he can’t stop feeling like shit, and it’s not going to end if we can’t get away from each other.
“Ari,” Wyatt says, real soft and hoarse. “We’ve got to start accepting what happened and either repairing things or letting them go. We simply can’t go on like this.”
His words go right to my heart. My head is spinning as I try to make sense of it all and put something like the ghost of a thought together, but everything’s moving too quickly, too heavily, too wildly.
And then the door opens.
Surrounded by whirling snow, William walks into The Old-Timer.
“Outdated and dusty,” he mumbles, wiping the snow off his jacket with a gloved hand before snorting.
“Me and outdated. I run the town’s social media accounts and can fill out an Excel sheet.
Well, Spirit Susan, you’ll see how hip I am just yet.
” He pauses when he notices all of us. His glance zips to the middle of the room, where Wyatt and I are standing in between all the furniture, and then to the others in their seats watching us like two protagonists in a gripping drama.
And the funny thing is, I completely blocked them out; all I could focus on was Wyatt.
Snow is dripping off William’s beard. “Do you have a fever, Aria? You look glassy. If you do, I’m going to have to ask you to leave immediately. My immune system cannot be disturbed in any way until my base tablets with all that zinc are back in stock and…”
“It’s all good, Will.” I take my bag and push past Wyatt. His elbows brush my breasts, and the sensation makes me shudder so powerfully that I have to take a sharp breath. “I was just about to go anyway.”
The cold night air envelops me and begins to speak. Welcome back, old friend. It’s good to see you. And the way we fit each other—so dark, cold, and lonely—still feels good, too.
Welcome back.