Chapter 11
NOT FOR A SECOND
Sera
Istare at Thane’s profile with laser focus, trying to intimidate him into submission.
I am the bad cop in this scenario, and I will do whatever it takes to get him to confess to whatever is bothering him.
It’s written all over his face, tucked in his furrowed brow and in every fake smile.
It has been five years since I spent time with Thane, but the forced proximity of yesterday and last night re-tuned my antenna to his frequency.
Something is wrong, and I am going to figure out what it is.
Even if it means I have to play my “Spill It Card.”
“So?” I ask impatiently, when he doesn’t budge.
“’So,’ what?” he repeats, keeping his eyes ridiculously pinned on the road.
“So, you’re not going to tell me what’s going on?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Fina.”
“Sure you do. You got all weird this morning, and you’re trying to skirt around the truth. But I know you, and something isn’t right. You might as well spill.”
“Maybe I’m not who you used to know. Maybe I changed on my walkabout,” he insists, still avoiding eye contact.
“Your… what?”
“My walkabout. You know, a time of reflection of the soul, a returning to find yourself and reconnect with your roots. The Aborigines in Australia did walkabouts all the time after they left their jobs in society for the rainy season. They’d go back to their tribes and reconnect with their old ways of life. ”
“You’re neither Aborigine nor Australian. And getting better at pretending nothing is wrong during a soul search seems counterintuitive.”
“Minor detail.” He waves his hand, dismissing my facts.
“Well, did you?”
“Did I what?”
“Find yourself? Reconnect with your roots? Reflect on your soul?”
He laughs and shifts in his seat. “I learned a lot. Does that count?”
“Depends. What did you learn besides the societal norms of Aboriginal people?”
“That’s a loaded question and a really long story,” he replies.
“I’ve got…” I check my watch, “three and a half hours, plus nine days on top of that.”
“It’ll bore you.”
“Regardless, I’m a captive audience.”
“Your vote of confidence is reassuring,” he jokes.
“Come on, Thane. If you don’t stop acting weird and start talking, I’m going to think I did something wrong to upset you last night.
” My stomach drops. “Wait, did I upset you?” I never even entertained the thought that me being vulnerable last night made him uncomfortable.
My mind races back through the events of yesterday, analyzing every move I made and every word I said.
“Are you going to be in trouble with a girlfriend because we slept in the same bed? Because I will vouch for you that nothing happened.”
Thane scoffs. “No. But that’s a good question to turn on you. Will you be in trouble if Brad finds out?”
“As of my birthday last week, Bradley is no longer my boyfriend,” I say, hating the sting that comes from admitting it to Thane.
“Was he upset because you were going to the lake house with your ex?”
The humiliation of being cheated on flushes my cheeks hot.
After all these years apart, I still have nothing to show for myself besides broken relationships and failure in love.
Something is wrong with me, and if I admit to Thane that Bradley cheated on me, he will definitely see it, if he doesn’t already.
“First of all, I had no idea you were coming, remember? And second of all, you’re hardly an ex.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. We were young and na?ve.”
“Have you fallen in love since then?”
I hesitate. “No.”
“Then I’m your ex.”
“It was barely a month long. And what makes you think I was in love with you?”
“Just a hunch,” he says with a shrug.
“Well, your hunch was way off. That whole thing was such a small blip in our lives that I’m pretty sure that to this day, no one else in our families ever found out about it. You probably don’t even remember much about it.”
A montage of memories rushes through my mind as the words escape my mouth.
He wasn’t just a blip; he was everything to me.
And that summer, for one amazing month, I got to stop pretending he was just my brother’s best friend.
He was mine. My heart. My dream. My future.
I got to know what his body felt like when I hugged him.
I learned the sound of his heartbeat through his T-shirt.
His woodsy, Thane-scent became my favorite smell, and I’ve never been able to forget it.
Then there was how warm and safe I felt when he pulled me close and kissed the top of my head because I was so much shorter than him.
I’m not sure if he ever knew that I loved him, but I did.
It wasn’t just a childhood-crush kind of love, but the kind of love that grew slowly over time through awkward phases and braces.
The kind of love that pulsed through every vein in my body and brought excitement to my life.
The kind of love that, no matter how hard I tried to push it away and ignore it, still entwined my heart.
After Thane kissed me, my black-and-white world exploded with color, which is exactly why it killed me when he left. I had given him my whole heart, and in return he disappeared into the night without even saying goodbye—taking all that color with him.
Moving on like I was unaffected after that tore me to shreds.
No one knew how I ached for his soft whisper over the fence in the backyard, or his pinky grasping mine in a dark movie theater just so we could touch.
How the butterflies in my stomach became such a fixture to me that when Thane ran off, they died, leaving me empty and hollow.
I carried that void for years, and never really healed from it.
I just taped over the wounds and pretended they weren’t killing me.
“What makes you think I don’t remember?”
“You’ve lived a thousand lives since our little crush.”
“’Little crush’? Why do you minimize it like that?”
“Because that’s all it was, wasn’t it? I didn’t tell a soul, and I assume you didn’t either.”
“That’s a big assumption.”
“Well, Bash probably would’ve beat the crap out of you if he knew you’d been kissing his little sister, and you ran off so fast after the accident you didn’t have much time to tell anyone else.”
His eyes drop shamefully for a second, and I know I’ve struck a nerve. But which one? The running off, or the betraying his best friend?
“You regret us,” I say, my throat drying up like an Arizona desert. I almost don’t want to hear his answer, because if he agrees with me, it’ll tear my heart in two all over again.
Would it be worse to hear he disagrees?
“Not for a second,” he replies. “Do you?”
I copy his words, because to come up with my own will expose my wounds too much. “Not for a second,” I say with a shaky voice.
“Good to know,” he says softly. “We may have drifted apart, but we’ll always have Operation Bisquick.”
The mere mention of our secret code name stops my heart and sets my body on fire.
“You remember?”
“I could live a thousand lives and I’d still never forget.” He smiles over at me, zapping my heart into rhythm again.