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“That’s classic,” Tia cackled.
“You were in the way,” I said quietly, actually poking Sawyer in the ribs this time. I turned toward him.
When he faced me, we were already so close that I could feel his breath across my lips. His deep blue eyes were serious.
And then he turned forward again without touching me or flirting back at all, like I was some freshman majorette he found more annoying than sexy.
I took the hint. We stayed on Harper’s bed for another half hour as she led us through an overview of the senior class. I laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer laughed with Harper and Tia. Sawyer and I didn’t laugh together.
“Enough,” Harper finally said. “Even I get tired of photography after eighteen hours.” She turned off the computer and led the way out of her bedroom, through the narrow hall to the living room.
We filed behind her. I was the last one out, behind Sawyer. It wasn’t often that I was this close to him when we were standing up and he wasn’t dressed as a pelican. I was eye level with his shoulder blades. I got a great view of the white-blond, baby-fine hairs at his nape. And I was disappointed he didn’t take this opportunity to turn around and grab me playfully. Maybe it was all in my head, but I got the impression he was dissing me by doing nothing.
When we emerged from the hallway, Tia was rummaging through the kitchen, insisting she was hungry again, and Harper was trying to help her find the right junk food. Sawyer put a hand on the armrest of a wing chair and the other on the armrest of the sofa and hopped over both, then plopped onto one end of the sofa, as if he did this four times a day and that was his place. My first instinct was to join him on the sofa. The night had been squeaky clean so far, and it would stay that way if we weren’t sitting next to each other.
But I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of chasing him around. I chose the wing chair and didn’t look at him.
Tia was the one who claimed the other end of the sofa, collapsing her entire five-foot-nine frame onto it while clutching a bag of chips. She looked and sounded like a tree falling in the forest. Harper took the other side chair and clicked the remote so the TV turned on to our usual viewing, a bridal gown reality show.
Actually, I didn’t know whether this show was their usual viewing. Maybe they only watched it with me whenever we had a sleepover, because it was my usual viewing. I’d been planning my wedding to Aidan ever since we started dating. Perhaps a little before. Harper would have a Florida wedding, barefoot on the beach. Tia, if she changed her mind and got married someday, would probably elope. But my wedding would be in New York where I would live and work, and the gown would be the centerpiece. In an old city that embodied intellect and effort and the collective culture of the entire world, my dress would stand out, a white work of art against the somber gray stonework of a church, or a monument, or a bank, wherever Aidan and I decided to hold the ceremony.
This had been my dream for years, more consistent than my fantasy that our next sex together would finally blow my mind. I had recited the slowly evolving details of my dream wedding to Tia and Harper. Suddenly the entire scenario seemed hopelessly naive, an invention of sixth grade instead of ninth.
Now I was in twelfth, and I was hoping against hope that Harper and Tia wouldn’t bring up my obsession in front of Sawyer.
“There’s . . . ,” Harper began as a bride swept across the screen in a classic gown with a slim silhouette. She was about to say the dress was perfect for me. It was exactly the kind of gown I would have called dibs on the other hundred times we’d watched this show.
Behind the retro glasses she’d settled across her nose when she took out her contacts, her eyes flicked to Sawyer. “. . . a dress that should not be accessorized with pink cowboy boots,” she finished as the bride pulled up the hem and showed off her special brand of quirky.
“That’s a Kaye dress,” Tia said, typically missing our hints at subtlety and restraint. “If you wore that with pink cowboy boots, your mama would shit twice.”
Luckily, the next dress was exquisitely sewn with hundreds of delicate fabric flowers, a Harper dress. Following that was a cleavage-baring number with sheer panels down to the navel in front and the butt crack in back—definitely a dress for Tia, who couldn’t tell sexy from raunchy. The conversation moved far enough from the topic of me that I worked up the courage to steal a glance at Sawyer.
He was asleep. His elbow was draped over the armrest, cradling his chin. His eyes were closed, his blond eyelashes casting long shadows down his cheeks.
“Hey,” Tia said, shoving his shoulder. Without opening his eyes, he let out a groan.
“Come on,” Tia said, pulling his arm until he stretched out across the sofa with his head on her thigh. He never opened his eyes, and the whole process was so seamless that it looked like he’d slept in her lap a million times. Maybe he had. The two of them had been off and on forever. They made my attempts at flirting with him look like something out of kindergarten.
In deference to him, she turned off the lamp on the table next to her. The only light remaining came from the TV hung over the fireplace, and a faint glow from the streetlights outside through the gauzy curtains on the big front window. Now Sawyer and Tia looked like a boyfriend and girlfriend getting cozy.
Watching them with a ball of resentment burning in my stomach, I realized I didn’t have a chance with Sawyer, even if I wanted one. We both pretended I was too good for him. But realistically, why would he want a stick-in-the-mud like me? Life-of-the-party girls like Tia were more his speed. Staring at them owning the sofa together, with Tia’s hand lying on his chest, was a great way to finally drive that fact home to my beleaguered, lovelorn brain.
