ten #2
“Interesting to know this is what we’ve been missing out on,” Everett remarked after a while.
“What do you mean?” I asked him.
“I’m just saying, this is nice,” Everett said. “We could have been hanging out like this for a couple months now.”
“Yeah, because you called me up so many times since then.” I knocked my elbow against his playfully.
“I didn’t have your number,” Everett pointed out.
“Couldn’t be bothered to ask for it?”
“Hey, if I recall correctly, you were the one who was trying to sneak out the next morning.”
“Fine, point goes to you,” I said. He laughed around his straw.
We walked in silence for a few minutes before he said, “Maybe we wouldn’t have to keep this secret if I’d asked for your number.”
I glanced over at him. We were passing by a bar and the purple glow of a neon sign in the window splashed over his face, made
his hair darker, like it was when he came out of the ocean, when he’d just showered. Only a week, and I knew those things
about him.
“No,” I said, once we’d passed the window and were back to the orange glow of streetlights spotlighting the honey of his hair.
“If everyone knew we’d hooked up, it would be this thing.”
“Thing?” he repeated.
“Laurel would have read into everything,” I said. “Like if you and I went to a movie alone, she’d be convinced it was code.
Davi would have asked all the time if you were sleeping over because he has a very strict bathroom schedule—”
“Oh, that I discovered this week,” Everett said, grinning.
“—and Gabe, well.” I waved a hand in front of us. “Before things fell apart, Gabe would have wanted nothing more than another couple in the group. He would have pushed us into situations that he’d hoped would make us fall in love with each other.”
Everett mulled this over. He tossed his cup into a trash can as we passed, and I followed suit. “What you’re saying is, this
worked out the best it possibly could have for us.”
“Exactly,” I said. We stopped at the entrance to the pier, looked back at it one final time. It stretched out into nothing,
only the few boat lights bobbing off in the distance a reminder of what it looked like during the day. We stared out at it
for a minute before we both turned to each other. “Now we can actually be friends.”
Everett reached up and brushed my hair behind my ear. The move startled me, but I didn’t flinch, didn’t move away. “Friends,”
he repeated. I swallowed. “So, because I didn’t ask for your number, because we have this secret now, we can manage to uphold
this pact that Laurel has proposed?”
My breath caught at his question. At his wording—this pact that Laurel proposed, not this pact we made.
I nodded quickly, hoped he didn’t notice. “Look at it this way, even if we had hung out with each other the last two months,
we would have been upholding it anyway,” I said. I’m not sure why, exactly, it sounded like I was trying to convince us both
of something. “We just wouldn’t have known the pact existed yet. So technically we’d end up in the same place.”
Everett squinted, a small smile playing at his lips. “I don’t know,” he said then, edging closer to me. “I don’t think I would
have done a very good job just hanging out with you if I had asked for your number.”
His answer was a trickle of warmth moving from my neck down. “I thought you weren’t looking for anything,” I said, voice a
little scratchy.
“I wasn’t,” Everett said. He left it at that.
The drive home was laced with whatever started on the end of that pier, something crackling in the air between us. That, or
we were both silently acknowledging it now. That whatever had so quickly drawn us together at that party was still alive and
well.
Back at the house, Everett leaned against the jamb of the door into the house, still wide-open, like he was dropping me off
for the night instead of coming inside with me, ready to retreat to our opposite rooms. I stood in front of him, closer than
I should have, not as close as I wanted to, pulled closer still.
We leaned together and kissed on an inhale, bodies fitting together as easily as they did before. I fit into all the places
he wasn’t, and he molded to me where any gaps remained. It was a hell of a kiss, as kisses go, tongues skimming against lips
until our mouths opened against each other and Everett’s hand came up to cup my face, something I remembered him doing two
months ago and something that still made my knees go weak. It was his toothpaste, I realized, that the cinnamon came from.
His free hand slid against my lower back, pressing me closer to him, my pulse picking up as our hips rolled together. My hands
were about to skim under his shirt when I remembered. When every reason not to do this came back to me.
“No,” I said as I pushed away from him. Everett’s hands left me immediately, his brow drawing down.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” I said again. “Not—not no.” I pressed a hand to his chest, let the warmth of it seep into me for a minute before I realized it was starting to pull
me under again and I let go. “I want to—trust me, I want to. But we’re not supposed to be doing this.”
His concern morphed into confusion, like we hadn’t just covered this on the pier. “Because . . . ?”
“Because of Laurel’s rule,” I said again. It wasn’t lost on me that I’d done the exact same thing he had earlier. Calling
it hers, not ours, making it something we existed outside of. “Because of the pact.”
Everett’s mouth quirked. “We already broke the pact.”
“No one knows that.”
He leaned a little closer to me. “We know that.”
Pine, salt, cinnamon, eyes that feel like the ocean rushing in on you. I paused to clear my throat. “Semantics.”
If I’d been honest with myself, I wished he would have closed that gap between us again. I would have let him do whatever
he wanted in that open doorway, and I wouldn’t have told a single soul about it.
But instead, he nodded and stepped away. Held a hand out to me, like we were closing a business deal. He did it all with that
trademark charm, a casual grin on his face. I took his hand, shook it, tried not to show what the rub of his palm against
mine did to me.
“Friends?” he said.
I almost laughed. “Or something like that.”
It was the first lie I ever told him. I couldn’t have been just friends with Everett Bridges if I tried.