Oh.
“Then why,” I say, with the precision of someone who is several drinks in but still making a coherent legal argument, “are you out there?”
“Actually, we’re both still on the porch,” he says with maddening logic.
Instead of throwing my purse at him, I push the door open and step inside, kicking off one shoe, then the other. I reach up to pull a dragon clip from my hair and immediately get it caught in the pins underneath, because of course I do.
Only then does he follow me across the threshold.
“Here—” he starts.
“No.” I bat his hand away without looking at him. “Stop being so nice.”
“You want me to be mean?”
“I want you to stop taking care of me.” I reach for the second dragon hair clip, but come away with only a bobby pin. “Oh, no!”
“What?”
“My dragon is gone.” I immediately regret the despair in my voice. “It must have fallen out on the walk back. Or when I was dancing.”
The thought makes me want to cry, which somehow makes everything worse. I cannot cry over a lost hair clip. Not when there are women in the world with polished shoes who don’t even wear hair clips.
“Do you want me to go look for it?” he offers.
His tone is entirely too … something. Too kind, maybe.
“No.” I want to sound proud and dignified, but I probably don’t. “I want you to stop treating me like I’m twelve. That’s not how you’re supposed to see me.”
“Trust me,” he says, with a quiet certainty that does something irreversible to my cardiovascular system, “I don’t see you as twelve.”
“But here you are.” I gesture at him, at the room, at the general situation. “Helping me get ready for bed so you can tuck me in. Which is very kind. Very Miller. And I don’t even—” I stop.
The words come out before I can catch them.
“I don’t even have my Cinnamoroll pajamas anymore.”
Silence.
He looks at me.
I look at him.
And then, because I have apparently decided that tonight is the night I say every true thing I’ve ever kept to myself, I set down the dragon clutch and say, plainly, without bravado and without apology:
“I don’t want to be your wingwoman. I wanted to be your date. I only bought this dress so you could take it off. ”
The room goes very quiet.
His expression doesn’t change.
But his eyes do.
Something shifts in them—deep and immediate and entirely certain—and for one perfect, terrible second, I think maybe he will take it off.
fifteen
“SWEET CHILD O’ MINE” — GUNS N’ ROSES
