Chapter Sixteen
Chapter
Sixteen
Late Thursday afternoon, I log off early from work, and I’m struggling with building a puzzle for Afterwards when Mona calls. I can’t understand her at first, she’s talking so fast.
“Hi, Rea—fuck.” She hisses through her teeth. “C-could you come to the yoga studio? I accidentally—” Then she sounds far away, like she’s lowered the phone and is speaking over her shoulder. “Miranda, no, please don’t call anyone. I’ll be fine.”
I freeze. “What happened?”
Silence.
“Mona?”
There’s more conversation on the other end of the line, and then I hear Mona gasp again. Her voice is pained. “Can you come?”
“I’m on my way.”
As I shove my feet into my boots and thunder down the stairs, yelping at how cold it is when I open the door—I forgot to grab my jacket—I list all of the things that might have gone wrong.
Is an old injury bothering her? Did she break a bone?
Did the building collapse? I’m ignoring the more rational half of my brain, which protests, Surely you can’t hurt yourself that bad in yoga, as I fumble to get the keys into the ignition of my car.
It could be nothing—it’s probably nothing—but all I can hear is a panicked alarm blaring against the inside of my skull.
Before I pull out onto the street, I shoot a quick text to Wesley.
Reagan:
might not make it to dnd tonight
emergency with mona
Almost immediately, my phone begins to buzz in my palm.
Shit.
Throw it into the passenger seat, or pick up? I don’t have time to think it through—I jam the green answer button with my thumb.
“Hello?” I say.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?” A brief pause. “Is she okay?”
“Um.” Fuck me, but I can’t keep the slight wobble out of my voice, that dissonance you get when you’re trying not to cry. “I don’t know. She said that there was an accident at the yoga studio and asked me to come.”
“Do you need help?”
I have no idea. It’s probably nothing, I think again. I don’t even know what to say.
“I live pretty close by,” Wesley says gently. His voice sounds so close, and something in his tone has my shoulders relaxing by a marginal amount. “How about I meet you there? Just in case.”
“Just in case,” I echo. This is suddenly too much, and I haven’t even put the car in drive yet. I won’t talk on the phone and drive; it’s one of my many rules. “Thank you,” I say, then hang up.
The drive is a blur; I don’t even register familiar landmarks, seeing only the flashes of red and green traffic lights and flurries of yellow leaves against the brittle gray sky.
I nearly hit another car as I swerve into an unprotected left turn, but for once, it doesn’t send me into a panic. I’m already there.
Finally, I skid into the parking spot next to Mona’s Kia Soul and climb out of my car, but she’s nowhere in sight. I scan the parking lot for her, but instead, my eyes snag on Wesley’s golden head, facing away from me. I use it as a compass and weave through the cars toward them.
I hear them before they see me.
“…God, she always does this. I’m sorry—I probably freaked her out. You really didn’t need to come, Wesley.”
“I don’t mind. She was worried about you.”
He rolls his shoulders in an easy shrug, and I notice he must have forgotten his jacket, too—maybe more than his jacket. His blue T-shirt looks too thin for this weather, and I can see his feet are bare in his slides, peeking out from beneath faded gray sweatpants. He really must have rushed here.
Something in my chest seizes, and it’s not the familiar grip of panic. It’s too warm.
Finally, I see Mona hunched on the curb next to where Wesley stands, her right leg extended before her. I approach at a fast clip, and my tone is snappier than it needs to be. “Hey.” I pause, take a breath; it doesn’t help. “What happened?”
“I sprained it.” Mona sighs. “I slipped during class. I’ll be fine, but I can’t drive.”
I look down to where her ankle is swollen and red. It’s nothing, I try to tell my heart, which thuds at a frantic pace inside my rib cage. See?
I force a laugh, and it comes out a little high-pitched. “Why didn’t you just say so, Mona?”
She groans. “There was so much happening, my class was all worried, I just—I got overwhelmed. I’m sorry.”
“Did you call Shay?”
Weirdly, her eyes jump away from mine. “I think she’s at office hours for something.”
For the first time, I turn to Wesley, who shields himself from the cold with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. He flashes me a quick smile. “I’m glad it’s not too serious,” he says.
“Me, too. Thanks for coming anyway.” For once, I don’t try to bite back the warmth and relief in my voice.
“Want help getting her into the car?”
“That would be great, actually.”
With only a bit of awkward maneuvering, we manage to get Mona standing, and we brace her on either side with our arms tucked under her shoulders.
I curl my arm around Mona’s waist to keep her steady, and I’m hyperaware of where Wesley’s skin, chilled from the wind, touches mine—his knuckles brush against my side with each of Mona’s hop-steps to my car.
“I’m sorry,” Mona whines again once we get her situated in my car. She’s looking at Wesley, her eyebrows bunched in an apologetic knot. “I’m going to make you late to the game and everything.”
Wesley shoves his hands as deep into his pockets as they’ll go. My fingers are freezing, too, and I huddle next to the open passenger door to block some of the wind. “I’ve already canceled it,” he says.
Mona winces. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“We’re not going to play without you two,” he says gently. “And Arthur wouldn’t mind having more time to finish the skeleton circle before the party tomorrow.”
I blink. “The what?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Mona releases a dramatic sigh and sheepishly drops her gaze from Wesley’s face—then freezes. Her lips twist into a puzzled smile. “I have that shirt,” she says suddenly. “Mine’s pink, though. Have you been?”
Wesley looks down at his chest. In slow motion, his expression shifts from confusion to mild horror and gets stuck there, his lips half parted and his eyebrows so high they nearly float off his forehead. I’m fairly certain it’s not the wind that turns his cheeks pink.
“I have not,” he finally says.
I look to his shirt, and my eyes go wide. Much of the color has leached out since I last saw it, but even though the logo has faded, I can still make out the familiar words.
Miami Dice.
Mona cheerfully carries on. “You have one, too, don’t you, Rea?”
It’s like I can hear the gears in my head clicking faster and faster as I do the math.
“…I did.”
The beat of silence bounces between the three of us, like a hot potato no one’s willing to catch. Then the realization hits Mona with a start. She presses her hand to her mouth just as I extend my pointer finger toward her, trying to preemptively cut off any smart remarks.
It doesn’t work. Mona begins to giggle through her fingers. “Oh shit—”
I spare enough of a glance to make sure all her limbs are tucked safely inside the car before I shove the passenger door shut.
Wesley still hasn’t looked up.
“You kept it?” I say.
He swallows. “It’s a good shirt.”
I’m biting the inside of my bottom lip so hard I expect to taste blood at any moment. “Yeah,” I say eventually. “It looks good on you.”
And while it does look good, if I’m being honest, it doesn’t fit him well at all.
Instead, it highlights all the ways he’s changed since I last saw him in it.
The fabric still stretches across his shoulders, but even more so now; the sleeves, too, are tight around his upper arms, circling muscles his wiry frame didn’t have back in college.
And it’s definitely not just the second time he’s worn it.
Otherwise, it wouldn’t be that shade of faded blue-gray or have those tiny holes near the bottom.
He starts, “You can have it back, I can—”
“It’s fine. Really.”
He holds my gaze for a second too long, then his eyes soften. “See you at the party, then?”
I ignore Mona’s shit-eating grin as I place my hand on the driver’s side door. “Yeah. See you.”
“That boy is into you, Reagan.”
I pause where I’m hunched over my laptop, keying in more ideas for Afterwards, and whip my head over my shoulder to look at Mona, who’s tucked into the corner of her couch, her ankle iced and elevated on the ottoman.
She’s got a project of her own splayed out on her lap, and she mutters to herself as she finishes hooking together the last of a series of silver chain links.
She’d felt bad about the whole ordeal yesterday, and I’d been more than happy to accept her offer to help me with the last pieces of my costume for Arthur’s Halloween party tonight.
Mona has stabbed several of her cuticles in the process, but now that I can actually visualize the finished product, I think we’ll agree that it was worth all the effort she’s put in.
I’m smiling to myself, imagining the finished costume—but then I remember her words. “He is not,” I protest. “Did Shay tell you that?”
“No,” she says with a laugh. “It just so happens that I have eyes.”
“Oh, shut it.”
“You can’t be serious. You don’t see it?”
Actually, I’ve been trying my best not to think about it for the last twenty-four hours.
He kept the shirt.
He kept the shirt.
A thousand times I’ve imagined how the rest of that night must have played out for him.
I wondered how many people in the house had seen him in my clothes before he left—how many of my friends.
I pictured how he might have returned to his apartment and joked or bragged to his buddies about coming home in some girl’s clothes.
I had always assumed that he just balled them up and threw them away.
What else could I think when he’d never reached out to me again?
Why would he have kept a constant reminder of me in his closet?
Why the hell had he hung on to the shirt?
And why am I so shaken by it?