Our friendship.
I tied the laces and stood up.
Oh good God, they were cozy, like walking on a bouncy cloud comfy. I’d tried them on yesterday and only reluctantly taken them off to go to bed. And to see how happy he’d been that I’d loved them, made it all the better. Because if I’d thought the last month had been overwhelming, the last eighteen hours since he’d kissed me had been nothing in comparison.
And I still hadn’t told anyone.
“Hey, nice kicks.” Brooke bent down to examine them, practically grabbing my foot and toppling me over. “Oh my goodness, they’re so cute! And they have your name on them! Where did they come from? I want some! Look at the little bones!”
I laughed, trying to stay upright. “They were a gift, from one of my, um, friends.”
Even as I said the words it sounded wrong. Friends. We definitely weren’t that anymore. Or we weren’t just that. But I wasn’t entirely sure what we were. A couple?
No, nooooo. That was too much, too soon.
We were asomething.
Since I’d seen him yesterday, normal service had resumed on our levels of contact. Before his accident, we rarely went a day without speaking, but since I’d been avoiding him for a month,our constant messaging had ceased. And while I knew I’d missed him, I hadn’t realized just how much until they started up again. Or how much I needed to hear from him, hear about the latest club gossip, or whatever idiotic prank he and Drew had got up to, or even his teasing. And the more we talked, the quicker the pressure sitting on my chest disappeared. But when I woke up this morning, it was there once more, not as heavily as it had been, but it was there.
Because everything was about to change again.
“Molly?”
I snapped out of the staring contest I’d been having with the inside of my locker and shut it. I’d been so far away I hadn’t even noticed Brooke was waiting for me.
“Yeah, I’m coming. Sorry.”
I followed her out of the locker room, Brooke taking off in the opposite direction to me. “I’ll see you later. I need to head to surgery. But you want to meet for lunch if there’s time?”
“Yes, sounds good. See you later.”
I didn’t have surgeries until this afternoon, so I headed off toward my office, via the nurses station, to collect my schedule for the day. The entrance hall to the surgery floor had been decorated for the holidays, and dozens of brightly colored paper chains were strung across the ceiling. A giant wreath was attached to the front of the desk, where I could see a familiar figure standing next to a Christmas tree, dressed in her signature black for the winter – thick long overcoat, skinny jeans and flat mid-length boots. I don’t know how I kept forgetting my parents had come down to stay with Coop and Freddie for Christmas, waiting for the baby to arrive.
Oh, because someone kept kissing me. That was why.
“Mamon? Qu’est-ce tu fait ici?”
She spun around as I approached, her sleek, dark bob never moving. If it weren’t for my mountain of curls, we’d look almost identical.
Her eyes lit up, the faint lines around the corners of her eyes deepening as she smiled, her arms stretched out wide. “What’s this? You’re speaking French to me today?Je suis tellement fier.”
“I speak French to you.”
“Not enough,” she replied in her thick Parisian accent as she pulled me into a big hug, but not before she gave me the look that mothers give you when you both know something’s not true.
Although it was partly true.
I did speak French, just not as much as Cooper, who always spoke French to her. Our mother was French and had met our Canadian father during an exchange program when she was studying abroad for a year in Canada. They’d fallen in love, and much to the horror of our grand-père, she never returned to Paris, although she never lost her accent. As a compromise to her French roots, my parents settled in Montreal, where we’d been born. We’d been brought up speaking both French and English, but during my teenage years I’d taken it upon myself to rebel against her insistence I only ever spoke French to her, mostly because I knew how much it annoyed her.
And it kind of stuck.
“Anyway, are you going to tell me what you’re doing here? It’s a nice surprise, but I am busy.”
“Because,ma chérie, I haven’t seen you since we’ve been down. You’re always too busy to see yourMamon, and FaceTime doesn’t count.” She held my face in her hands, examining me. “You look goodchérie, très belle.”
“Thank you, and I haven’t seen you because I’m busy. You’ve only been down a week. I’ve been letting you settle with the soon-to-be parents.”
That also wasn’t quite true, but my mother had this ability to see right through me. I think it was a superpower all mothers had, like a human bullshit detector. But I hadn’t wanted to talk about my love life, because that was always the first topic on the agenda whenever I saw her.
