Then he kissed me.
And when I kissed him back, I held him exactly the way I'd always intended to.
Like somebody I planned to keep.
EPILOGUE
KIERAN
Five months later…
The last time I sat in a folding chair waiting for my name to be called, nobody had come.
I hadn't expected anyone to.
By the time I graduated high school, I had already learned not to look for familiar faces in a crowd.
When my name was called, I walked across the stage, accepted my diploma, and smiled for the photographer because that was what I was supposed to do. There had been applause. There was always applause. Then I found my seat again and waited for the ceremony to end.
Nobody took photographs of me afterward.
Nobody hugged me.
Nobody asked where I wanted to celebrate.
The day ended the same way most days did back then.
Alone.
A burst of laughter from somewhere in the audience pulled me back to the present. I looked up from the graduationprogram. For a second, my gaze snagged on a section several rows back. And right in the middle of all of them sat Thane.
The moment he caught me looking, he smiled. My stomach did that ridiculous little flip it still insisted on doing whenever he looked at me like that.
Five months later, and apparently, some things hadn't changed.
My phone vibrated against my leg. I glanced down. The Seattle Orcas group chat had been active all morning. Most of it was nonsense. A steady stream of congratulations, memes, and several messages from teammates who were either on vacation or scattered around the country for the offseason.
I shook my head and slipped the phone back into my pocket.
Then I looked toward the audience again.
They were still there.
All of them.
Waiting.
For me.
For the first time in my life, graduation didn't feel like something I was surviving.
My fingers brushed the edge of the graduation program resting in my lap.
A few months ago, I would have spent this entire ceremony wondering about all that was missing. Instead, I found myself thinking about a coffee shop and a woman sitting across from me with tears in her eyes.
Janelle.
We'd talked for nearly three hours. Some parts had been awkward. Some parts had hurt. Most of it had been overdue. She cried. Eventually, so did I.
