I bury my head in my hands. ‘You make it sound so easy.’
‘You asked me what I would do. In all seriousness, I would tell him this is stupid. None of us really know what’s going to happen in the future. Why be stopped by possibilities?’
‘Even you, who knows exactly how your life is going to turn out?’
‘That’s the point – I know how I want my life to turn out, I don’t know how it actually will. Sometimes you’ve just got to do what you want to do in the present.’
‘So I should try and convince him.’
‘If you don’t try, you’ll never know. Think about the Secret Sender. Yeah, there were a lot of bad things that happened, and yeah you got completely carried away with it – but if you had never put yourself out there, you wouldn’t have realised you liked writing so much. Not doing anything at all would have been way worse.’
‘Have I told you enough yet that you were right about that?’
‘You wrote it all in the school newspaper, but I won’t get enough of being told I’m right.’
‘I think I forgot how annoying you were during this silent treatment.’
Kira flicks her hair with her hand. ‘Well, I’m back. So you better get used to it again.’
Forty-Six
And when we kiss, we touch
Oh its a hard rush
It feels, it feels . . . electric
I hope I don’t regret it
‘Electric’ fromThe In-Between
After I get home from meeting Kira, I sit in the kitchen, staring at my laptop. It’s the evening, and Mum is out for dinner with Gina, so I’m eating alone. There’s two tabs open. One, a crossed-through list of potential people to interview. Two, my empty UCAS status screen. Both are disheartening.
A tap at the kitchen-door window. I look around and nearly jump out of my skin.
There is Ty, waving at me.
I open the door and he’s standing on the step in a white jacket and jeans. He looks almost angelic in the garden lights.
For a split second we stare at each other, and the air feels heavy, pulsing between us. I think about what Kira said, how she would kiss him if she was me. I can’t do that, can I? But now she’s said it, I can’t get the idea out of my head.
Ty pulls me outside. It’s good I’m wearing thick slippers, it’s freezing out here!
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
‘I was feeling . . . warm,’ he says hoarsely. ‘The fresh air is good.’
There it is again. The undercurrent of something more.
‘So warm that you’re making me stand in the freezing cold? It’s basically the middle of the night,’ I say, taking a step closer to him, so I can feel the warmth radiating off him. ‘Why did you come over?’
‘Selena, it’s seven p.m. I wanted to hang out,’ he says. ‘See how your interview was going?’
‘Not well,’ I confess. ‘I still don’t have a person to interview. I feel I’ve now called up half the town. I did make up with Kira though.’
‘How did that go?’ he says.
The cold bites me.Remember what Kira said.
