“Mhmm!”
“I have to be honest with you…” he begins, clearing his throat. “When I said I was new to all this, I meant it.” I wonder if this is the part where he tells me he doesn’t feel the same way, the nostalgia has worn off, the kiss we shared wasn’t good.
“I haven’t kissed…” Gil trails off, fiddling with the bracelet he’s been working on. He breathes out slowly, and I move to sit next to him.
“Many humans?” I offer, sliding my hand on top of his. He shakes his head.
“Many …anyone,” he says, and his eyes meet mine. “Apart from you. It’s…well, I need to feel a sort of connection with someone, and there just hasn’t been.”
“Except now?” I ask, closing the distance between us.
He nods, his forehead pressing against mine. I exhale, relaxing against him, feeling his arm circle my waist.
“I feel it too,” I say, my lips pressing against his in a sweet peck. He smiles against me. “Guess I don’t have too many exes to worry about.”
“But I’m sure I’ll have hordes to fight through.”
I shake my head, grabbing a string from the table, sliding on beads to busy my hands. If he was honest about his lack of romantic history, I can be honest about mine.
“It’s not that I haven’t, it’s—” How do I explain this to him?God. Relationships in the past have never gone anywhere, emotionally at least, even when it felt like I was connecting and having a great night, it never got past just being physical. “I always chalked it up to being forgettable, but you never forgot, did you?”
My first real friend.
“How could anyone ever forget you?” Gil’s hand has moved to cup my face, the webbing soft on my skin; at his touch, my shoulders relax. I take his hand in mine, slipping the bracelet I made onto his wrist, taking a moment to admire the way the pink contrasts with the green and blue of his scales.
Our bodies shift so that our arms press together, touching exactly in the place our matching bracelets meet. I let out a low hum, thinking about this place—the memories we made together. It’s always been comfortable like this with him. It’s no wonder I decided so long ago that I’d stay—forever.
“I’m sorry our plan didn’t work back then.”
Back then.
My stomach twists. My hair stands on end, thinking about how foolish I had been. Every summer we saw each other, every year we didn’t want things to end. So, I packed up my things and I ran to the cove where Gil promised to meet me—to swim me away from everything.
I was tired of taking up space, surrounded by people who didn’t want me around. Even Grams was grieving back then, the hurt intensified in her eyes the more I grew to look like Mom.
So, with my things packed, I walked to our meeting place and waited, but he was late.
I thought he’d changed his mind.
By the time he surfaced, I was convinced I’d be another burden on him and his family. Before we could even talk, voices were calling my name, and flashlights skimmed the surface of the water.
He had to go home, and I knew there wasn’t enough time to go with him. So, I told him to come back for me, and he promised he would. And I went back to my lonely world where I was a little girl who took pretending too far.
“I tried to find a way back to you,” he says. “If I hadn’t been so late…”
“You were a kid,” I say in defense of his younger self, hating that he blamed himself for any of this.
“Well, so were you.” His voice is sullen. “What happened … after you went back to camp?”
“I don’t remember what exactly. I told them some contrived lie about how the night sky was beautiful and all I wanted to do was go swimming. It obviously wasn’t believable enough. They hadn’t forgotten the way I’d come home summer after summer, talking about my ‘imaginary friend.’ They thought I couldn’t tell fantasy from reality, and uh… honestly, everyone was so worried andangry. Jenna, my cousin, called the whole thing childish. My uncle, though? He was so angry, screaming louder than I’d ever heard him—which is saying a lot. All the while, my aunt had this smug look on her face, like she’d been waiting for him to really snap at me…”
Selfish.
Stupid.
You should have known better.
“When he cooled down, he offered sympathy, and booked me time with a weekly counselor. He thought we hadn’t addressed the grief in my life well enough. He was convinced all of ‘this,’” I gesture between Gil and me, “was a manifestation of that.”
