Twenty-two #2
Her front door was unlocked, so I went up to her room. Cella was at her desk indulging her most recent hobby: scrapbooking. She wrote something with her calligraphy pen, a relic from an old phase. There were little cut-up pictures everywhere. I was in a lot of them.
“Hey,” she said. “Yellow glitter or blue?”
“Uh . . .”
Cella perked up. Abandoning the glitter, she began to cut the letters out of her CREEPY sign like she planned to use them. Probably on a page dedicated to me. Fuck.
“I have something to tell you,” I blurted.
“I do, too, actually. Can you come tell me if this looks okay?” When I leaned over the desk, Cella swiveled around in her chair, putting herself directly in my line of sight. “Ha! Got you. What do you want to tell me that’s so bad I’ve got to trick you into meeting my eye?”
I straightened. My entire back felt clenched tight.
“You first.”
“Nuh-uh,” said Cella. “You’re kind of psyching me out, twitching like that. Just spit it out.”
I wished it were that simple: something I could spit out and be done with, no real harm except the bad taste it left my mouth.
My sweatshirt was on her unmade bed. I kept a few in her closet for when I slept over, and she liked to wear them because they were so big and worn.
She had a toothbrush for me in her bathroom.
I sat down on her bed, far enough from her that the air didn’t feel so heavy.
Her parents squeezed an air mattress into the room whenever I slept over, and after they said their goodnights, I always climbed into bed beside her.
My side was the left, because Cella liked to sleep in the corner.
“Quit looking around all nostalgic or I’m really going to start worrying.”
“Do you ever feel that way? Like, nostalgic for things that are still happening?”
“I’m literally scrapbooking right now. And you’re stalling.”
“That’s—yeah, that’s correct.”
“Plan on stopping anytime soon?”
“I’ll go on as long as you let me.”
“Was I letting you? Is that what you think is happening?”
“I vote blue, by the way. About the glitter. I had to really sit on it for a minute.”
“Kieran.”
“I’m dating Mason.”
“Say it already!”
“I just did.”
Cella stopped short with her mouth still open, then burst into giggles.
“I’m not joking.”
Hearing my tone, Cella’s smile turned into a dropped jaw. “No.”
“Yes.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I told you I’m not.”
She turned slowly in her purple desk chair, a full three-sixty and then some, stopping when her back was to me. She stood, pushing her chair out, and did a lap around what little walking space her room afforded. Then she sat back in her chair.
“I’m processing,” she said.
“I see that.”
“You don’t like each other. The last time you saw him, you got mad at him in drama for clicking his pen.”
“It was annoying as hell,” I said, which was true. “But that wasn’t the last time I saw him.”
That seemed to stump her. She tapped her calligraphy pen against her lip.
“You’re serious.”
She wasn’t asking, but I said, “I’m serious. We’re serious.”
“Well, I’ll be,” she said under her breath in a dollish accent. “Guess that means I’ve definitely got to move on, huh?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, hating that it felt like another lie. I was sorry—for keeping secrets, for breaking friend code. But I wasn’t sorry for being with Mason, so did that even mean anything?
“When he broke up with me, the real reason wasn’t just that he was a werewolf. I never told you this . . . I guess it felt private, or I was just embarrassed, but he told me he had a mate. And he’d found her. Or, uh, them. You?”
“Yeah. Me.”
“Holy shit.”
She took another lap.
“I want you to know—”
She put up a hand to stop me and only dropped it when she was back in her chair.
“I want you to know it doesn’t feel good, dating your ex. If that’s even worth anything.”
But it did feel good. Being with him only ever felt good. How did people do this, come clean, without spinning a hundred other half lies along the way?
“It can’t be helped,” said Cella, with a brave face if I’d ever seen one. “We only dated a few weeks. I’m surprised, is all. Like, hearing little explosions in my brain, surprised. I thought you were . . .”
“Straight? Yeah, me too.”
She waved the hand still holding her pen. “No, not that, as if. I just thought you were, like, strongly against Mason’s entire existence. I guess you haven’t been at each other’s throats the same way, and you almost seemed civil at the camp . . .”
“He put a beetle in my hood at dinner—what do you mean as if?”
“But I thought,” said Cella. “This sounds vain now, but I thought you two lost steam since he wasn’t, you know. Dating me? Unless . . . when did you get together?”
I had known it was coming, but it punched all the same. I couldn’t remember ever feeling so nervous. Vampires don’t sweat, but I felt like I could be the first.
“End of October.”
Cella whistled. “Didn’t waste any time, did he?” she said. “So, what? You’ve just been acting since? And here I thought drama was my thing.” She laughed unconvincingly.
“We just wanted things to go on as normal,” I said. “People would talk if we started acting friendly out of nowhere. He kind of attracts a lot of attention.”
“Like you don’t?” said Cella. “You could have told me. I wish.”
She was taking the whole thing so well. It was what I’d wanted, and at the same time it made everything worse, knowing what was coming—the part I absolutely could not let myself walk out of here without confessing. “I didn’t want to hurt you. Or make you mad.”
“It doesn’t feel great,” she admitted. “I’d like to be mad, a little. But that would literally be arguing with fate, so . . .”
“Right.”
“Congrats, by the way. For the gay thing, not for stealing my boyfriend. I reserve the right not to congratulate you for that part. I’ll add a little rainbow sticker on your page.”
“You really don’t have to,” I said and cut my eyes sideways, searching for the right words.
Cella spoke first. “Can I ask you something?”
“Anything.”
“You didn’t actually, did you? Steal him.”
It could have been all in my head, but I thought I felt a tangible change in the air. Cella saw my face and the room seemed to shrink.
“Kieran,” she said. “Please tell me there was no overlap.”
My hands roamed the sheets for something to grab. I brought my sweatshirt onto my lap and looked for the right words, another half-truth to safely land this plane. Ultimately, that was the person I was—I would rather lie than go down.
Cella didn’t give me the chance. “Kieran. Answer the question.”
This part was inevitable. It rocked me anyway.
“We weren’t together.”
Her shoulders dropped away from her ears. “Then what’s with you?”
“We kissed.”
Cella’s fist closed around the pen. “You kissed. You mean at Blake’s? The stupid doll?”
It was an out, but there was no real way out of this. This horrible thing I’d done, it was a labyrinth.