Chapter 16 #2
She shrugs. Her shoulders move under the hoodie, but it’s too big, so the gesture is lost inside it. “I don’t know. It just felt like everything was —” she sighs. “I don’t know.”
I look down at her hands. “Like what?”
Her lips press together.
“Like everything was in my head. Like it was one-sided. Like I was crazy.” She shrugs again. Her lips purse. She will not look at me.
I shake my head.
“No, Melly.”
I can hear my own voice. It’s rougher than it was a minute ago.
“That’s not true. I —”
Fuck. This is embarrassing to admit. This is the most embarrassing thing I have ever tried to say out loud to another human being, but she is lying in her bed in my hoodie picking at a thread and she has just told me that she spent years thinking she imagined it all, and there is nothing in this world that is going to stop me from getting this sentence out.
“I was just a kid. And after everything I saw my mom go through —”
She gives me a small knowing nod. She knows. She has always known. “Yeah, no, I’m not blaming you.”
“You weren’t crazy, Melly.”
I make myself look at her until her eyes come up.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I still don’t. I have no idea what I’m doing right now, but I’m not a kid anymore, and back then it was — it was easier for me to pretend like I wasn’t feeling anything than to deal with what I was feeling.”
She tenses. Just a little.
“Say whatever you want to say,” I tell her. “I want to hear it.”
She shakes her head. The smile comes back, smaller this time, almost shy. “I just never thought you would ever talk to me like this. Like we’re hanging out. Like we’re actually talking.”
I want to kick my own ass.
I grin anyway because I cannot help but grin when she does, that has been true since I was twelve years old, and it is true now.
“I needed to grow up a little bit,” I tell her. “And distance makes the heart grow fonder.”
She shoves my shoulder.
“Seriously,” she says. “So, in high school, I wasn’t crazy?”
I shake my head. “Not that much.”
She rolls her eyes. “I really liked you.”
“I really liked you too.”
“You did?” She scoffs. She actually scoffs.
She does not believe me. After everything that was said on this bed ten seconds ago, after the apology, after the I’m sorry for how I treated you back then, she still does not believe that I liked her in high school, and the not-believing is sitting on my chest like a weight, because this is what I did to her, this is the damage I did, this is the receipt I am going to be paying down for the rest of my life.
I nod, smiling. “Of course, Melly. How could I not?”
I stare at her, remembering what it felt like back then. I was fucking terrified of how big my feelings were for this girl. I thought if I scared her away, the feelings would go with it, but instead they stayed dormant until I saw her again.
“I remember the exact moment I knew I liked you.”
She goes very still.
I swallow. “You came to school in that blue outfit.”
She chuckles, covering her mouth. “Oh my god.”
I shake my head. “It was one of those things –– I don’t know, but it showed your shoulders and your legs, and then you looked at me, and I was a fucking goner, Melly.”
She holds back her smile as she listens to me, and then after a quiet moment, she stands up and walks over to her closet. She shuffles through a few things and pulls out the exact shirt, and then she walks to her dresser and grabs the shorts.
“This one?”
I sit up, nodding. “That’s the one.” I smile. “You still have it?”
She laughs. A real laugh. The first real laugh of this conversation. “I actually still fit it.” She holds it up against her front.
I stare at the outfit. I remember every single time she wore it.
The first time in eleventh grade. The time she wore just the shorts to a pool party at Lewis’s house.
The time she wore the top to a hockey game with jeans.
I have a private mental folder for that outfit.
I have had it since I was sixteen. It has, until tonight, been a fairly shameful folder.
“It’s your color.”
She nods. “Which happens to be your name.”
She puts the outfit down on the dresser, and she lies back down on the bed next to me, on her side this time, facing me, her cheek on her hand. The hoodie is bunched up under her chin.
“Remember when I asked you what your favorite color was?”
I do.
I watch her talk. I watch her mouth move. I watch her eyes.
“I thought it was going to be too cliché for your favorite to be blue.”
“My name isn’t the reason it’s my favorite color.”
Her brows furrow. She gives me a face. “Right.”
“What’s your favorite color?”
She grins. “It’s been the same since the sixth grade.”
I look at her lips and then her eyes. And I smile because even though we’ve known each other since we were kids, I feel like there’s still so much I don’t know about her.
“What color is that?”
She tilts her chin down, lifting a brow at me. “Blue.”
“What?” I ask.
She chuckles. “No, I’m telling you that my favorite color is blue.”
I shake my head. I cannot, for one whole second, speak.
I reach for a pillow on her side of the bed to tuck under my head — purely for somewhere for my hand to go, to keep my hand from doing the other thing it wants to do, which is to push her hair behind her ear — and I knock her pillow at an angle, and I see something black underneath it.
I grab the pillow.
She makes a small sound.
It’s black and round and —
“Is that my puck?”
She grabs the pillow from me, turning a gorgeous shade of red. “Um, yeah.”
“Why is it under your pillow?”
“I was holding it when you texted me,” she admits, flushed. She grabs it and crosses her legs.
I reach out for her hands. “Hey,” I say, looking down at the puck. “You don’t have to be embarrassed.”
I stare at the puck, remembering how my heart went boom in my fucking chest when she caught it.
“I thought I was going to die after I tossed it to you.”
“You did?”
I nod.
I walk my fingers up onto hers. The backs of her fingers are warm. She doesn’t pull away.
I gently take the puck.
“And you have no idea how happy it makes me that you have it in bed with you. What a lucky puck.”