Chapter 13
Thirteen
I recounted the saga at the carnival to Nikki as I made us popcorn for our Love Is Blind catch-up binge. It wasn’t that I was so willing and eager to do so, but Nikki had a sixth sense about this kind of stuff, and there was no point in hiding it.
“Oh that is bold,” Nikki said as she hopped onto the couch with Gracie and the bowl of popcorn. “He loves you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” I flopped back onto the couch and pulled one of our vintage crocheted blankets up to my chest. “It’s really nothing. People kiss all the time and nothing comes of it, so stop being so dramatic about it, please.”
Admittedly, reality had set in the next morning despite the fact that his touch and his scent had lingered on me.
We’d had an agreement that neither of us should be dating, but we had kissed anyway, and now things were about to be awkward, which was probably one of the reasons we had that kind of agreement in the first place.
“Besides, you spent the entire night with Alec,” I continued. “And you’ve been mum on all those details.”
“Who says mum anymore?” Nikki popped another piece of popcorn into her mouth.
“People who deflect.”
“Fine, fine, fine.” Nikki shifted in the couch cushions so she could sit up, and Gracie let out a heavy, inconvenienced sigh as her own position was compromised. How dare you? I could imagine her saying to Nikki.
“He’s a nerd,” Nikki said flatly. “He builds robots or something. At some point he might have actually been speaking a different language. His hair is too floppy, and he wears Axe body spray for crying out loud. We’re so not compatible.”
Nikki’s phone chimed under the blankets, and she dove for it immediately.
“Really? That’s a shame.” I smirked at her while her head was down into her phone, her thumbs furiously swiping across the keypad. “What are you doing?”
“I’m texting him.”
“Of course you are.”
The one detail I had left out was that Brooklyn and I hadn’t actually texted much since the carnival. I hadn’t gone out of my way to reach out to him, but neither had he, and it wasn’t farfetched to think the same thoughts were floating around in his head too. The same stinging uncertainty.
“Apparently they’re doing ’90s night tomorrow at this roller rink downtown, and Alec invited us.” Nikki kept her head down as she talked, still texting. Her lips lifted into the faintest smile. When she finally looked up and realized I’d been watching her, she scowled. “Do you want to go or not?”
I tried not to let the fact that Brooklyn hadn’t invited me himself get under my skin, and instead focused on what a walking contradiction I’d become by simultaneously being annoyed he hadn’t texted me, while not wanting to text him myself.
“Do you want to go with Mr. Not Compatible?” I asked her, trying to distract myself from my own traitorous thoughts.
Nikki shrugged. “That doesn’t mean he’s not nice to look at.”
“Uh-huh. Sure.”
“What about you?” She shot me a conspiratorial glance.
“I might pass.” I gave her a casual half shrug. “I need to send out a few more agent queries and whatnot.”
That wasn’t entirely a lie—the sudden and unexpected development of my social life had meant the time spent in front of my computer had dwindled.
As much as Mom’s words echoed in the back of my mind about having fun this summer, there were moments when I thought I should have been doing more; more emails to agents, more time spent developing a new manuscript, more focus on my future.
“What about Brooklyn?”
“What about him?” I quipped a little too quickly.
“Don’t you want to see him?”
I sighed, and the admission came out with it. “He didn’t exactly invite me himself.”
Nikki didn’t miss a beat. “Probably because he’s nervous to talk to you since you went all radio silent on him after kissing him.”
“How do you know—”
“Because I know you.”
She knew me better than anyone else did, and recently, I’d spent so much time and effort worrying about her it was easy to forget that she did the same for me.
Nikki hopped across the couch cushions to squish herself beside me. “You should come anyway because it’ll be fun.”
She wiggled her eyebrows at me, satisfied with throwing my own words back at me when I’d convinced her to come to the fair. It worked; begrudgingly so.
“All right fine.” I held my hands up. “I suppose I can take advantage of an opportunity to channel Cher Horowitz.”
And that was exactly what we did. I wore a yellow plaid skirt I’d thrifted a few years ago in college (for this exact moment, perhaps?) and paired it with a white baby tee and knee-high white socks.
My sister—whose maximalist style belonged more in the ’80s—sported a variation of Britney Spears’s live “Baby One More Time” outfit in a cropped neon-pink tube top and white flare pants.
Of course, nothing measured up to how effortlessly cool Brooklyn looked in his faded jeans and his Deftones T-shirt, like he was made for the ’90s. Despite it being close to dusk, he wore a pair of Ray-Bans as he and Alec lingered outside the roller rink, waiting for us.
“Hey.” He greeted me effortlessly, as if nothing at all had transpired last weekend.
What’s the right move when you greet someone whose tongue has been down your throat, but whom you aren’t dating, or are in any way, shape, or form romantically involved with?
Do you hug them? Do you kiss them on the cheek?
Or do you do nothing, for fear that touching them would cause some type of nuclear meltdown?
“Hey, yourself.” I tried to echo his casualness, and his lips lifted into an easygoing smile.
“This place is sick.” Nikki beamed as we followed the boys inside. She fell into step ahead of Brooklyn and me with Alec, who looked like he’d borrowed the flannel shirt limply hanging off his shoulder from Brooklyn as it hung off his shoulder.
We were blasted by the sound of the Beastie Boys as soon as we walked into the lobby.
There were pinball machines and vintage Pac-Man games in the corner next to the bar, and then the entire room opened up into the actual roller rink.
A disco ball hung over it, throwing a confetti of lights onto the slick rink surface.
“Where’s your sister?” I asked Brooklyn.
“Oh, she . . .” He rocked on the toes of his Converse as we waited in line to get our skates. “She had to bail last-minute. Some kind of junior league emergency. Who knows.”
Nikki glanced back at me over her shoulder, and gave me a wicked, conniving look. I blinked, and she turned her attention back to Alec, throwing her head back and laughing at something he said. Not compatible my ass.
When it was our turn to get our skates, Brooklyn paid before I even had a chance to grab my wallet from my purse.
For someone who hadn’t even reached out to invite me, he was certainly acting like he wanted me there.
He lit up when he turned to hand me the skates, and his smile melted away the weird sense of unease building inside of me.
He had that effect on me without even trying.
“You okay?” he asked as I sat on a bench in front of the rink, wrangling the skates.
It took only a moment standing upright for me to realize that this was not for me.
I gingerly inched over to the cut-out section of the wall that separated the rink from the floor, and gripped the sides of the gate with white knuckles.
“Yeah, but I’m not sure I’m entirely coordinated enough for this. ”
“Come on.” He held his hand out to me. “You can do it, just don’t think too much.”
After another few moments of hesitation, I slipped my hand into his, suddenly hyperaware of how clammy my palms must have been. He slowly rolled backward, pulling me onto the rink, but didn’t let go of my hand.
“See?” he said. “You’re fine. Now push yourself forward slowly. Bend your knees a little and relax your body, you’re too stiff.”
I tried to breathe normally as I grasped the sleeve of his shirt. “How ridiculous do I look?”
“No.” He shook his head. “You look great.”
After a few timid laps, I started to feel less like Bambi on ice, but he kept a reassuring hand on the small of my back, and his touch damn near set me on fire.
We took a break and leaned against the wall, observing Nikki and Alec from the other side of the rink. My heart lifted as I watched Nikki laugh and act so goddamn normal, but then that weird sense of unease constricted my heart again.
“Your sister is fine. Alec’s gonna take care of her.”
I scoffed. “I didn’t say—”
“You didn’t have to,” Brooklyn interjected. “I know you.”
I winced as he echoed the same sentiment my sister had earlier. It was one thing for me to be so transparent with Nikki, but to him? I was so see-through he could see everything inside me—aching heart included.
There was no point in denying it, so I collected myself and pushed off of the wall, rolling forward slowly on my skates. “Still, no offense to Alec, but he doesn’t know her.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing.” He shrugged. “Did you ever consider that maybe your sister wants to be treated like a normal person instead of someone who had a bad lapse in judgment because of mental health problems and now feels like it follows her everywhere?”
“Wait, are we still talking about Nikki?”
Brooklyn shrugged again even though the silence was enough of an answer, opening a door for me to walk—or skate—right through.
I pinched the sleeve of his T-shirt as we skated forward, slower than we had been before.
I looked up at him, and as the lights reflected in his eyes the way the moon reflected on the ocean on a clear night, I recognized that flicker of guilt from that night at the fair.
“Is that why we’re avoiding what happened last weekend?”
Brooklyn let out a wry chuckle. “That obvious, huh?”
“No, I’m just extremely perceptive.”
This time his laughter was more genuine, and that sense of unease loosened its grip.
“I’m guilty too,” I admitted. “I didn’t exactly go out of my way to reach out to you.”
“Honestly, I’m not sure what I would have said even if you had.”
“Well, we kissed,” I stated. “And if that was a one-time thing, getting something out of our systems, that’s fine. I get it.”
Even though I did get it, the sight of him was starting to sting. Getting it and being accepting of it were two different things, apparently.
“Yeah, I guess so.” He rubbed the side of his face. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
“No Scrubs” by TLC started playing from the speakers, and even though we’d been casually skating along through a sea of people, they all seemed to come to life and started singing along.
Including Brooklyn, who shot me a sideways glare when I laughed.
At the very least, he always managed to do that.
“Come on, you can’t just hum along to ‘No Scrubs,’ even if you’re as bad of a singer as me.”
“Well, you’re no scrub,” I chided, and we both belted out the chorus as it came on.
Without warning, Brooklyn stopped on a dime, and when he went to pull me back to him, my feet got tangled up in each other. Before I had a chance to steady myself I toppled over, taking him with me as he fumbled to keep me upright. I landed hard on top of him, and his body shuddered underneath me.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted. “Are you okay?”
“Fine. Totally fine,” he replied through breathy laughter. “Are you?”
Suddenly, we were all alone. It was then that I truly realized the position I was in.
My knees hugged one of his thighs, and from there up, every single inch of our bodies, every dip and every curve, aligned too perfectly, like a lock and its one and only key.
I had my hands pressed into his torso, feeling the way his chest moved up and down with every breath he took.
Under the fabric of his shirt, his heartbeat thundered against his ribs.
Mine did, too, reminding me of how precarious this whole situation was and how gossamer thin the line was between wanting to avoid him altogether and kissing him again like we had on the Ferris wheel. So, no, maybe I was not at all fine.
“I need to tell you something.”
“Okay.” I nodded intently, swallowing a thick wad of tension that had lodged itself in my throat. “Tell me.”
It didn’t seem to matter to either of us that we were still lying on the floor of a roller rink, people skating past us with confused glances.
But of course, my sister had impeccable timing.
“Oh my god.” Nikki cackled as she skated up to us. “You guys absolutely ate shit, it was great.”
We scrambled to our feet, my whole body still reverberating from the impact.
“You sure you’re all right?” Brooklyn asked me, and in a seemingly thoughtless motion he reached over and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear.
“I’m fine.” I heaved out a breath. “It was my fault, I’m sorry. I got a little too confident, I guess.”
Brooklyn rubbed the back of his neck, rolling his head around a few times. “Yeah, me too.”
Nikki slid me the most antagonizing smirk before skating away again, pulling Alec along behind her, who watched her with equal parts fascination and confusion.
“Anyway.” I felt that gross wad of tension ball up in my throat again, and I had to force my words past it. “What did you want to tell me?”
Brooklyn heaved out another sigh as he shook his head. “Are we good now?”
“Of course we are,” I told him.
Even though I’d come to the conclusion I selfishly wanted us to be more than maybe just good. We’d unlocked our own Pandora’s box, and there was no way to stuff all the things I’d been feeling back into it.
“Excellent. Good. Great.”
His voice was soft, and all the colorful lights dotted his face as he gave me a weary smile. I didn’t know where I was, but I was not on earth; instead I was lost in the stars of his galaxy like a wayward comet. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get home. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.