Chapter 4 #2
I had gone to college out of state, and the first few months were a transition, but one I could handle, even if my one grammar class kicked me in the butt more than any English class in my life and made me question the decision more than a few times.
Because I often asked, What if I fail?
But then I heard Josh’s words and thought, What if I don’t?
And now, here we were sitting next to each other once again in the dark of the Hutton household.
“How are you doing?” I asked as I fought to get comfortable next to him. “Final year of college. That’s exciting.”
“I’m doing good.”
“Figuring out what you are doing after graduation?”
“As much as I can,” he said.
He didn’t seem as thrilled as I’d figured he would be. As much as he had been when he first invited me even to sit on the couch with him.
“Yep. It’s great,” he said.
“You sure?”
“Positive,” he said, though blandly.
“You just seem different.”
He stared at me. “Maybe that’s just you.”
I shrugged, not commenting on that. Since I’d started college, I’d felt different, but we weren’t talking about me. “Are you upset then?”
“Upset?”
“About … Lauren.”
His eyebrows bent low over his gaze.
“I just thought … she didn’t come, and your mom said that you were bringing a girlfriend that you’d been with. I thought it was kind of serious.”
“My mom likes to get ahead of herself,” he said swiftly. “I’m surprised you are here though this year.”
“What do you mean?” Did he not want to see me?
I shifted on the couch to get ready to head back to bed. I’d likely already overstayed my welcome here. It was his house after all. I was the guest.
“Surprised that you don’t have a boyfriend by now or someone from school who invited you home with them for the holiday.”
“Nope. No one is interested in me like that.”
“I highly doubt that.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to conduct a survey,” I challenged.
He sighed, glancing at me again. “It’s good to see you. I mean, it’s good to see everyone here.”
“I thought you came back for Thanksgiving.”
“I did. I just mean … I’m used to you here—with my sister. So, it’s good. Like everyone is here.”
“Yeah, I’m … I’m glad to be here too,” I said, relaxing further into the cushions.
I must’ve been more tired than I realized as the movie went on.
Blinking my eyes open, it took me a second to realize where I was. I wasn’t back at school or in Gina’s bed. I tried to sit up, but was quickly halted. “Oh.”
His hand held me against his chest. “You’re fine.”
“Sorry,” I said.
All around me was warm. The blankets from over the top of the couch had been draped over top of my body and, in relation, Josh’s. And I had fallen asleep on Josh’s chest. His arms cradled around me, keeping us in place as I arched my neck back to see his dark lashes softly blink against his cheeks.
“I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“I fell asleep too,” he said, and I could hear the slight scratchiness to his voice. His hand, too, kept me in place before his thumb started to stroke back and forth on my upper arm.
I couldn’t help myself as I let my eyes slip closed before popping right back open, trying to stay awake while relishing in the feeling. Josh was holding me, and I fit perfectly into the curve of his shoulder.
“It’s all right.”
“I should go back upstairs,” I said, but didn’t move.
“Don’t you want to go back and find out how the movie ends?”
I stared at him for a second before I nodded. “Yeah, okay.”
“I won’t let you fall asleep this time.”
The thing about the Hutton house, being the one all the friends filtered through, was that games were inevitable. And once cheap alcohol entered the mix, it became a free-for-all of nostalgia-fueled competitiveness.
Gina had the brilliant idea of throwing a holiday party at home while her parents were down the block at their own gathering.
The plan? Re-create childhood chaos, but with more wine and fewer broken bones.
Though, honestly, the way everyone was moving through the house, it didn’t feel that far off from the old days.
Sleepovers, tree climbing, and that one infamous game of manhunt that had earned Nick a cast and a lifetime of glory.
We’d already played a chaotic round of charades and half watched a holiday movie before someone inevitably suggested hide-and-seek. It was an old favorite. Everyone grabbed a partner without hesitation—except Gina. She latched on to the nearest person, and it wasn’t me.
Before I could even blink, Josh was at my side.
“Come on,” he muttered, grabbing my hand and tugging me along. “Clock’s ticking.”
He didn’t wait for a response—he never did, not when his competitive streak kicked in.
I remembered it well. Apparently, it hadn’t dulled over the years, and if I was honest, being around him brought out a streak of my own.
All night, we’d challenged each other. A rematch at tipsy checkers.
Charades so intense that Gina nearly choked while laughing. And now this.
He pulled me into the laundry room, both of us laughing as he shut the door quietly behind us. The warmth from the dryer and the buzz of peppermint schnapps made everything feel electric.
“Shh,” Josh warned with a grin. One hand held my arm as he tried to wedge us deeper into the narrow corner. “You’re not going to make me lose this.”
He pushed me back gently, his hand brushing over my stomach as he tried to make space. It was cramped. Close. But somehow, it didn’t feel uncomfortable.
It felt like … we fit.
Like puzzle pieces.
His body pressed into mine, solid and warm, and the room suddenly felt very still. His hand moved slowly, carefully up from my waist, skimming over my chest and brushing the side of my neck.
My breath caught.
So did his.
When our eyes met, something shifted. Or maybe it had been shifting all night, quietly building between laughter and shared glances and late-night conversations after everyone else had gone to bed.
I wasn’t imagining this.
Josh was going to kiss me.
This was actually happening. I could feel it in the way his chest rose and fell against mine, in how his gaze dropped to my lips and lingered. The room spun slightly, or maybe that was just me. I leaned forward.
“Wh-what are you doing?” he asked, voice barely above a whisper.
I froze, eyes wide. My heart slammed against my ribs.
What was I doing?
I whispered, “I … I was going to kiss you.”
It was the truth. The bravest, most terrifying truth I’d likely ever spoken. I could’ve brushed it off, but I didn’t. I was about to kiss Josh Hutton, and he …
Josh’s expression shifted, eyes narrowing slightly, as if he hadn’t expected me to admit it. “Kiss me?”
“I thought … when you led me in here and then how you looked at me …”
“How I looked at you?”
“I’m sorry. I thought you were going to kiss me.”
“You thought I was going to kiss you?” His tone wasn’t unkind exactly. But it wasn’t encouraging either. It was laced with caution. Like he was trying to backpedal through fog.
“Yes.” Heat rose in my cheeks. “I thought … after this week, after everything … I thought maybe you felt something too. I thought we were …”
“Having fun,” he said, cutting in. “We’re literally playing a game right now.”
The words sliced through me. So stark. So final.
I blinked, trying to keep my expression neutral. I could feel the tightening in my chest, the way my throat was beginning to close. “Right. Sure. Fun.”
“I mean …” He hesitated, eyes still on me, but now unreadable. “I’m definitely not going to kiss my little sister’s kid best friend.”
I stiffened. “I’m not a kid.”
“The fact that you feel the need to say that kind of proves my point.”
My breath left me in a rush. I stepped back—or tried to, but there was nowhere to go in the tiny space. I pushed gently against his chest until he moved, just far enough to give me room to breathe.
“You were the one who said it,” I muttered, not looking at him.
“I chose to be your partner because I felt bad for you,” he said quietly, like it was something that should make this better. “You said it yourself. You don’t have anyone here except Gina. No friends at school. I just didn’t want you to feel left out.”
I stared at him, cold settling into my bones. “You felt bad for me?”
He felt bad for me.
“No one else picked you. I thought I was doing something good. I was doing a decent thing. The decent thing.”
My lips parted, but no words came out.
Because what did you even say to that?
The room was still warm. The dryer still hummed. But all I could feel was the sharp sting of embarrassment crawling over my skin.
So, that was it. The moment I’d waited for, dreamed about, built up in my head for years. It hadn’t been something. It had been pity.
Pity!
It stung more than if he’d just laughed in my face.
I struggled to swallow as the heavy burn of emotion started to crawl its way up my throat.
No one else had even known that I was coming to Christmas until I showed up. In Gina’s words, it was for a surprise. In my world, it was because I was forgotten and likely more unwanted than wanted.
Again.
“I didn’t even want to …” He drifted off. “Fuck. I didn’t want …”
He was lying.
He had to be.
Somewhere deep inside, I knew it. I knew that no one could look at me the way he just had, touch me the way he had, without some kind of feeling. He had been leaning in. His hand had moved to my neck. He was teasing, laughing, looking at me like—
No. He was just messing with me. That had to be it.
Except another voice—a quieter, meaner one—whispered something else entirely.
Of course he didn’t like me.
I was younger.
A kid.
Some desperate little loser who had mistaken five minutes of closeness for affection.
I felt sick. My mouth was dry, my cheeks hot with humiliation I couldn’t scrub off. I couldn’t even look at him as he turned, shoved open the laundry room door, and disappeared.
He got found five minutes later. One of the first people out.
I stayed.
Tucked behind the dryer, knees drawn up to my chest, I waited in silence for nearly half an hour. I “won” the game. But I’d never felt more like a loser in my entire life.
By the time I wandered back out, Gina was already scanning the room for me. She spotted my face and pounced.
“Why are you a sourpuss?”
“I’m not.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Your hair’s a mess. Oh my God. Did you hook up with someone while hiding? Is that how you lasted so long? You have to tell me who.”
She grabbed my hands like she could pull the answer from my palms, then dropped them with an actual gasp. “It was Nick, wasn’t it? Nick found you. Ew. Oh my God, it was Nick.”
Her face scrunched up in theatrical disgust. “Nope. I don’t even want to know. If it’s someone vaguely related to my brother, I’m opting out. I’ve already reached my lifetime quota of Josh-adjacent nonsense.”
“It wasn’t Nick,” I said, my voice flat.
She studied me for a second longer, then shrugged. “All right. I believe you.”
“Thanks.”
“But you could tell me. You know that, right?”
“I know. Nothing happened. I’m just tired.”
“Promise?”
That, at least, was easy. “Promise.”
“And you promise nothing will ever happen with, like, anyone even orbiting my brother’s weird, womanizer, backpacking-around-Europe-for-enlightenment vibe?”
My heart stuttered. I raised my eyebrows in mock offense.
“I already have enough Josh in my life,” she muttered. “I don’t need you becoming my honorary sister-in-law to some douche canoe he dragged home from a yoga retreat in Costa Rica.”
“Nothing will ever happen,” I said. “Ever.”
“Good. Because gag. Right?”
Right.
That night, we all went to bed. Gina passed out almost immediately. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, twisting the blankets in my fists, listening to the faint murmur of the television downstairs.
Josh was probably still down there—half watching another movie, stretched out on the couch like nothing had happened. Like I hadn’t tried to kiss him. Like I hadn’t told him the truth.
I thought about sneaking down and asking him what his deal was.
I wanted to. But what I really wanted was to go back in time—to two nights ago, when I hadn’t said anything, hadn’t tried, hadn’t made a fool of myself in a cramped laundry room with someone who would never look at me the way I looked at him.
This is better, I told myself.
Josh? He dated girls who wore matching pajama sets and made vision boards. Girls who wanted to be teachers or lawyers. Girls who volunteered at shelters or had been to Greece on mission trips.
Not girls like me.
Not Brielle, who was known mostly for being the smart one. The decent writer. The overachiever. The girl who read quietly in the back seat while everyone else paired off at high-school dances.
I was proud of all that. I was. I was building something real for myself. Bigger than crushes.
Bigger than this moment.
So, what was I thinking?
How could I ever think that Josh Hutton would ever like me?