Chapter 26
Luke
Iwas about to kiss her. I’m not sure if I should be happy or angry that the blonde girl came over to talk to Harper.
On the one hand, everything in my body wanted to wrap Harper in my arms and kiss her.
But the other more sane part of me is worried I got my wires crossed somewhere and that we’re still firmly in the friend zone.
She’s here with some British guy, for crying out loud. At least, she was.
Harper is walking back to me, her pace slow. And while I feel irritated to have been interrupted, Harper looks. . . relieved? She gives me a gentle smile as she walks over, but she doesn’t come to sit next to me. She stands, waiting for me to get up.
Yup. I must have mixed my signals. I’m 99.
9 percent sure that if I had kissed Harper, it would have been the nail in our friendship coffin.
The evidence? It could be the fact that she insisted I go out with someone else, or the fact that she’s also dating a British guy—or at least was.
I wouldn’t be surprised if Harper were working on erasing Tom from her memory the same way she’d erase a kiss from me.
“Sorry about dragging you into all this,” Harper says as I stand up.
I brush a few stray black pebbles from my jeans. “I’m sorry that guy doesn’t have an empathetic bone in his body.”
She bites her lip, looking down. “It is a stupid fear.”
“No, it isn’t.” Harper wasn’t afraid of birds until a group of seagulls swarmed her when we were kids.
Even I was terrified that day. But Harper was the one holding the food, so she was the one who got pecked at.
I was able to laugh about it later, but Harper has always been freaked out around large groups of birds since then.
Harper looks surprised by my reaction. “I can’t enjoy the view because of some stupid birds. You don’t think that’s ridiculous?”
“Irrational, maybe, but if that’s how you feel.
. .” I shrug. “I don’t know. It’s not that big of a deal.
So what if you’re scared of birds? I’m scared of swimming in the ocean.
” I gesture a hand out to the crashing waves in front of us.
With Harper’s fear of seagulls and my fear of the ocean, it isn’t often you find us on the beach.
“Yeah, but you can still go to the beach. You just don’t go swimming.” She pauses to look around, like she’s afraid a bird is going to swoop in and peck at her.
“If you grabbed my hand and dragged me into the water right now, I’d probably start screaming like a five-year-old.”
The corner of her lip quirks up.
“Care to test out that theory?” I offer her my hand.
I would let her drag me into the water if she really wanted to. If it would bring a smile to her face and make her forget how Tom laughed at her, I’d do it, even if it meant getting my clothes soaking wet and dealing with whatever creatures waited in the water.
“I’m not dragging you into the water.”
“Why not?” I wiggle my fingers, tempting her to take my hand.
“Because it’s freezing.” She gestures to the winter jackets we’re both wearing. When I roll my eyes, she continues. “And if I throw you into the water, you’ll drag me in with you.”
I pretend to think about it, putting a hand to my chin in a contemplative pose. “Yeah, probably. But only because that’s how my body would react. My brain would never do anything to hurt you.”
I get rewarded with another smile.
“If I had a change of clothes in the car, I would throw you in the ocean,” she says with a mischievous grin.
I cock an eyebrow. “Don’t you mean if we both had a change of clothes?”
“No,” she says simply.
I laugh. “Well, let’s get moving then.” I start walking back toward where we parked.
“Why?” she says, coming up by my side.
I want to reach out and take her hand, but I keep my hands to myself. “We need to leave before you change your mind and we’re both standing here in wet clothes.”
She laughs, and I know whatever moment we almost had—or the moment I contrived in my head—is over.
We make our way down the beach, keeping an appropriate distance between us.
When we reach where we started, I turn toward the parking lot, but Harper lingers, her eyes on the massive rock structure in front of us.
“Harper?” I ask when she seems frozen in place.
“Can we go look one more time?” Her voice is full of longing.
“Of course.” I follow a few steps behind, letting her take the lead.
There’s a bigger crowd of people taking photos at the octagon-shaped rocks than there were before. A few people are perched up on the pillars for photos, but Harper walks past them, rounding the corner to where all the birds are flying and making nests on the cliffside.
She keeps her gaze downward, like she can forget they exist, but their high-pitched calls fill the air. Harper’s back is to me, so I can’t see her face, but she moves forward, only looking up enough to see the spires of rock coming out of the ocean.
I don’t say a word, afraid of breaking her focus and making her run in the other direction again.
A seagull lands on the sand in front of her, and Harper comes to a halting stop, backing up a step or two until she bumps into me. I put both my hands on her shoulder, steadying her.
“You’re okay,” I say softly.
Harper doesn’t say a word as the seagull takes a few steps toward her, sees she doesn’t have any food, and then flies off again. The encounter is over almost immediately.
I drop my arms. “Doesn’t seem like you’re afraid of birds to me. Maybe you were just afraid of weird British guys.”
“Ha ha,” she says with heavy sarcasm.
§
“Did you know Justin Bieber filmed a music video here?” Harper says as we pass the sign for Fjaerárgljúfur Canyon.
“Is that why we’re going here?” I ask, a little disappointed. For all the years I’ve known Harper, I’ve never seen her as a fangirl.
“No, just a fun fact.” She shrugs as I pull into the parking lot, which is surprisingly crowded.
I’m surprised, because this canyon isn’t directly on the side of the road like the waterfalls we’ve been to.
We had to drive a mile or two down a narrow dirt road to get here, but even though it’s out of the way, there’s no shortage of tourists.
“Is he the reason this place is so crowded?”
She shrugs. “Probably.” Once I put the car in park, she’s quick to hop out and zip her jacket back up.
It’s a little windier now than it was earlier, so we both put hats on. Harper’s hat is knitted, purple, and has a huge pom-pom at the top. She’s trying to tuck her hair away from her face and I have to remind myself once again not to reach out and help her.
That’s not what friends do, I remind myself.
The walkway to the canyon seems like a normal path until we get closer.
I realize we’re standing at the top of the canyon, and the ground breaks away to a huge drop where a river flows through.
That same river of water must have eaten away at these cliffs over thousands of years.
The pathway to the canyon lets us walk close to the edge, peeking over the cliffside.
The water is a deep blue, making the green moss covering the rocks pop even more.
“Wow.” I peer over the edge. There’s a railing to stop anyone from going any further and stepping on the moss. “It looks extra green today.” And it really does. For some reason it looks even brighter, even though the sky is overcast today.
“I was looking it up online. I guess the moss only grows one centimeter a year, which is why they’re so protective of it. Stepping on it once can kill it.”
“Plus the trolls live in it,” I add. We’d walked by a sign earlier that warned to watch out for trolls because it was bad luck to take anything from the land, including the black sand from the beach we’d just been at.
While tourists from Bermuda walk away with jars of pink sand as souvenirs, in Iceland, you get threatened by a troll if you steal a piece of its home.
Harper leads the way, taking us through each lookout that the canyon offers. Though there are a lot of people in the parking lot, everyone is spread out so it doesn’t feel too crowded.
At the end of the canyon is a waterfall, and we hold up my phone to take a selfie.
“Want me to take one for the two of you?” a woman with an Irish accent asks.
“Sure, thanks.” I hand her my phone.
She takes a couple steps back, and I wrap my arm around Harper’s waist to pose for the photo.
“You two are a cute couple. Did you want a more romantic one?” she asks, eager and smiling.
“Darling,” the man next to her says, embarrassed.
“Oh, we’re not—” Harper says at the same time as I say, “No, thanks.” I cringe.
The woman flushes but tries to maintain composure. “Alright then.” She hands me my phone.
“Thanks,” I say, using my best let’s-pretend-that-never-happened voice.
As we walk back to the parking lot, Harper’s quieter than she was before, leaving me to second-guess everything I did in the past five minutes.
Maybe I shouldn’t have let her take our photo?
Or should I have not put my arm around Harper?
Maybe I should have clarified that we weren’t together, like Harper did.
“Can I make a confession?” Harper stops walking and moves off to the side so we aren’t in the way of anyone coming to see the canyon. She keeps her gaze down, like she’s afraid to look at me.
Not good.
“What?” I ask, though I’m not sure I want to know.
“When we were at the airport and you left to go to the bathroom, you forgot your phone.” It takes one second for me to connect the dots.
“Wes texted you. I wasn’t trying to snoop.
A text came in, and I saw my name.” A long string of curses run through my brain.
“I didn’t mean to read it, but I was curious.
” I contemplate running up to the moss, finding some trolls, and asking them to take mercy on me.
“He said good luck telling me how you feel.”
A little bomb goes off in my head. Whatever I had thought she was going to say, it wasn’t this. There had been a worry in the back of my mind when I looked at my phone and saw the text myself, but I never actually thought Harper had read it. The universe would be too cruel for that.
Not only had she read it—she read it and set me up on a date first chance she got.
Couldn’t be worse.
“Luke?” Harper says, pulling my attention back from where I’d been having a mini-meltdown inside my brain.
“It was a joke,” I say so quickly the words sound harsh. Ha ha, there’s nothing funnier than me having a crush on you. “You know Wes. He doesn’t get how the two of us can hang out without there being more to it.”
She looks a little confused. “A joke?”
“Yeah.” I struggle to sound convincing. “When I told him we were going on the trip together, he just started making fun of me for hanging out with a girl.” Oh, that didn’t sound good. “Not that you aren’t cool. I’d rather go to Iceland with you than with Wes.”
That was the truth, at least. Also the truth: I’m going to kill Wes when I get home.
“Oh,” she says, her face still puzzled, but she collects herself and stands a little straighter. “Good. The text kind of freaked me out a little.”
She gives a nervous smile, and it feels like there’s something more she wants to say, but if it has anything to do with the text, I’m not sure how much more I can subject myself to.
“Yeah, sorry. That must have been awkward for you,” I say, desperate to end this conversation.