There was something lighter about him than yesterday. Something had changed. Asta’s heartbeat quickened.
‘Have we not been going through it?’
‘No.’ Felix’s face grew bright with the anticipation of making his point. ‘No, we haven’t. We’ve been stuckinit, not working through it. But if we were friends again, we could.’
‘Friends.’ The word struck Asta as insufficient to capture everything they were to each other.
‘Exactly! The kind of friends with a crap-load of baggage, you know? And then one day we can be like, “Remember that time when we didn’t talk to each other for a while?” “Yeah, that was so dumb. I’m glad we worked through that.” “Yeah, me too. Thank you for saving our friendship, Felix.”’
He paused for her reaction, but she was at a loss for words. The music emanating from the track was so relentlessly upbeat that it made Asta want to laugh. Or maybe that was Felix himself. What he was proposing was ridiculous. And yet, he seemed determined.
When she didn’t speak, the sadness that she had seen in him all week came welling back. His voice changed, grew heavy. ‘Whatever this is between us, it sucks, Asta. And it’s going to suck no matter what we do.’
Asta nodded. It did suck. Some days, she missed him so much that it was like there were knives in her lungs, her stomach, her heart. And suddenly, here he was, holding out to her the faint possibility that one day, it wouldn’t hurt so much anymore.
‘We’ve given it a good shotnotbeing friends,’ he said, a note of playfulness edging into his voice. ‘But I’m not convinced that it’s getting us anywhere.’
Asta looked into his eyes and found them full of an excruciating kind of hope. He wanted this as badly as she did.
‘And you justdecidedthat this was how things were going to be.’
The little curl of a smile appeared briefly, and he started walking again, forcing Asta to hurry to keep up with him. ‘Yeah, I decided.’
‘You’re such a prick.’
He reached out and put an arm around Asta’s shoulders. She was unprepared for how good that felt. How natural.
‘Come on, please? You do kind of need to agree to it. I can’t just be a friendatyou.’
‘Is that what you’ve been trying to do?’ Asta’s irritation came out in a huff. ‘All this week– that was you being myfriend?’
Felix cringed. ‘I’ve been a jerk. I know. I was. . . still figuring my own shit out.’
He stopped in his tracks. He took hold of her elbow so that she would stop, too. ‘I have been trying to talk to you, you know. It just kept going wrong.’
‘Yeah, well. . . baggage, right? It’s not easy for me to be around you, Felix.’ Asta removed her arm from his grasp.
His eyes flashed with something like regret, but sharper, fiercer. ‘Good– I don’t want it to be easy,’ he blurted.
They were halfway to the track, and the music was beginning to intrude into their conversation. Even this early in the morning, there was a whiff of fried food on the air. A group of fans had spotted Felix and were hovering nearby, tittering to each other and pointing.
Asta shifted her weight from one leg to the other. ‘Youwantthis to be hard?’
‘No.’ Felix glanced at the fans and gave them a tight smile and a half-hearted wave. ‘No. But if we avoid the hard parts, we’ll never get anywhere. Itwon’tbe easy – that’s all I’m saying. And I’m okay with that.’ He put his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. He was her old Felix again. ‘What do you say? Friends?’
The fans were edging closer. They had their pens out, racing programs open to Felix’s picture, but his eyes were fixed on Asta.
No, she corrected herself, this was not the old Felix. He was self-aware, almost humble underneath that cocky façade. IfthisFelix had been with her in that stuffy storage room at Pillar, things might have gone differently. He was not the only one who had changed, though. If thisAstahad been in that room that day. . . A surge of nervous hope ran down her spine. They were here, now. Maybe it wasn’t too late.
Asta took a deep breath. She couldn’t let her heart run away with her. He had laid out a simple choice: either she sorted through all the fuckery that had passed between them as his friend, or on her own. He was not offering more.
‘Okay. Let’s be friends,’ she said.
The fans were upon them, and Felix played the obliging star, giving them his attention, his jokes, his smiles. But they were not the fake smiles that he normally used for the public, Asta noticed. He was ebullient.
She went on toward the track, a tender warmth spreading out from her heart.
21
