Just details.
I rub my hands over my face, trying to scrub the image from my mind. I shouldn’t be thinking about this. Iris is probably sitting at home, heartbroken right now, and I’m thinking about sex.
I look back down at the locket in my hand, at the picture of us, smiling, her head leaning on my shoulder. My thumb brushes over her face, and my heart aches with want.
I miss her already.
I haven’t seen Iris since Christmas.
And that doesn’t mean I haven’t been bothering her like crazy, trying to get her to talk to me.
I scroll through our last messages while I wait for Alex to finish getting ready. I’ve texted her every day, checking in, talking about the weather, telling her about what I did, complaining about Alex, doing anything I can to get her to respond.
To talk to me. Even just to tell me she’s okay.
I don’t understand all of this, and I’m still not sure what’s going to happen between us, if there can even be an us, but never talking to her again?
That ain’t an option.
But I’ve got no idea where she stands on the whole thing. If she’s upset, if she’s mad at me. She hasn’t reached out, and she barely responds to my texts.
All I know is, it makes something ugly twist in my stomach every time she responds with that cold indifference.
It’s the first day back after Christmas break, and I’m hoping that maybe we can talk about this. That maybe I’ll know what to say. When the floor creaks, I glance up, and Alex is standing in the doorway. “Dude, what happened?”
“What do you mean?”
He grabs a banana from the fruit bowl, making a face at it, but eating it anyway. “Come on, Nate. You look like shit. And you’ve been weird since Christmas. What happened with Iris?”
“Uh…”
I can’t even begin to explain this, not to Alex. Would Iris even want me to? I get the feeling this is something I shouldn’t be going around telling people. So I settle for, “We got into an argument.”
Alex raises an eyebrow, “Are you breaking up?”
I shrug, hating every second of it. “I don’t know.”
“Man, that sucks,” he mutters, shaking his head with a frustrated breath.
“It sucks?”
“Yeah, fuckin’ sucks,” Alex says, sounding annoyed that I even asked. “Iris is nice. She talked to me, you know? Felt like she actually cared about us.” I look down at my phone, her one-word responses, all I’ve heard from her in two weeks.
“I know,” I mutter. “She did.”
“So fix it.”
“It ain’t that simple,” I tell him, but he just crosses his arms. Uh oh.
“What?”
“This isn’t about Savannah, is it?” he asks, his expression daring me to say yes.
“Savannah? No way.”
“So, things going wrong between you two right when Savannah started working at the school is a coincidence? If you screw this up over her, I swear to God, Nate…” He trails off, but the threat hangs there, half-formed.
And I don’t blame him.
