“Even now,” Mal said. “You’re doing it now.”
I bit my lips, confused. “Doing what?”
I watched Mal’s brow furrow: a writer, searching for words. When he chose them, he delivered them with care, like he wanted them to be petal-thin, to land softly.
But then he spoke, and I felt them like a bludgeon.
“Seeing me,” he said. “You see me, Jo.”
Chapter Fifteen
Jo
You see me, Jo.
I’d heard those words before, from a different man, in a different place, at a different time. The memory was still crisp: me, eighteen years old, sitting at a booth in the Sheridan Student Center, across from a boy who had just unilaterally declared himself my best friend.
“Your only friend,” Ezra clarified.
“I think you’re mistaking my disinterest for affection,” I said, trying to flip nonchalantly through my biology textbook even while my heart pounded in my chest. It had been hard to be cool around Ezra, and not just because of his stupid too-blue eyes that, at the moment, were too black, or the grin that cracked over his face, unfolding from the corners of his mouth like I’d coaxed it out. But me and him? We weren’t possible, in any capacity. Not even in the way he was proposing. “I don’t want to be your friend.”
“Why not?” Ezra said, pouting.
I had a list of reasons, and I didn’t hold back. The girls (many of whom wanted my head on a pike). The parties (so legendarythat I, despite having never been invited, heard about them every other week). The drugs.
“You’re literally high right now,” I said. “I’m not getting caught up in your bullshit.”
Ezra’s grin turned feral. “How did you know?” he said conspiratorially.
I’d recently taken up a job as a campus paramedic, a service that paid a whopping thirty dollars an hour for four-hour shifts three days a week. During our orientation, we learned how to look for the signs of intoxication. To search for clammy skin, bloodshot sclera, racing pulses. To always check the eyes.
“Your pupils,” I said simply. “They’re super dilated right now. It’s kind of creepy, honestly. You look like a wolf.”
Ezra laughed. “All the better to see you with,” he growled. Then he flopped onto the table, peering up at me with a gaze I could only describe as soupy. “But you’re proving my point. You’re the only one who’s even noticed. You do see me, Jojo.”
“Don’t call me that,” I said, stamping out the thrill in my chest at his stupid nickname, at his stupid pretty face. “And no. I don’t. All I see is a brat who doesn’t even know how good he has it, burning up his brain cells so that people will pay attention to him.”
The fight that we had after that had been something of Elion legend. I’d meant to wound Ezra, and I’d succeeded spectacularly (“At least I’m capable of fun,” he’d spat, “not always scraping to survive like a creature.”) and for months afterward, students I’d never met would approach me on my way to class to ask if I was really the one who’d cursed out Ezra Adelman in the middle of the SSC. But a year later, when I asked him why, of all the kids at Elion University, some who would have given their pinkie toe to be his friend, he’d chosen me, he repeated the sentiment.
“You made me feel like I could do anything, if I just tried hard enough,” Ezra had said. “Like I would get roles because I was smart and could be good at my job, not just because my parents knew someone who knew someone. And you were so hard to impress, so I was constantly trying to impress you. And I got better as a consequence.”
And now here was Mal, saying the same.
“You see me as the best version of myself,” Mal continued. “And it makes me want to become that. Not just for me. But for you. Because, as ridiculous as it sounds, I want you to be proud of me.” He ducked his head helplessly. “I don’t know, Jo. I really like what we have now. I don’t want to mess things up.”
“You think sleeping with me will mess things up?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “I’m not good at being... nonchalant. And, you know”—he smiled sheepishly, stroking my chin with his thumb—“I want this to be special for you.”
Today, I thought, had been special. Lying in Mal’s warm embrace under a color-streaked sky, listening to jazz on a cooling summer evening, even the surprise phone call with his parents. I’d experienced so many new sensations, all in one day.
I told him as much. Then, because I couldn’t help it: “Unless what you’re really concerned about is your performance.”
Mal drew back just enough to laugh. Then, without preamble, he pulled me to his chest, and in a clean, practiced swoop, flipped me onto his lap.
“Oh,” he said, “you don’t have to worry about that.”
Two months ago, when I showed up at Il Latini for Mal’s and my first date, I had come prepared. Dahlia and I had picked out a showstopping lingerie set (“Because if you’re going to do this,you should do it, feel me?” she’d said). I’d trimmed, sugared, and plucked every errant hair on my body, doused myself in the most inoffensive perfume I owned, and spent an hour in front of my vanity beating my face into submission... all for Malcolm Waters to take me to a cooking class and kiss my hand.
