“I woke up the next morning, and I knew something had changed,” I say. “I felt it. But I didn’t know how to talk about it, and you seemed—fine. You were acting normal, so I acted normal. Then, a few weeks later, you started dating that guy. Tyler, or Trevor, or—”
“Travis.”
“Travis. You started dating Travis, and I took that as a sign. Like, okay, she’s moved on. It didn’t mean the same thing to her; I should get over it.” I look at her. “So I tried to get over it. I thought I did. I left for college. I met Bree, and she was good and kind. She didn’t make me feel like I was standing at the edge of a cliff every time she walked into a room, and I told myself that was better. That safe was better.”
“Was it?”
“No. But I didn’t know that until you showed up on my porch with a suitcase.”
She’s quiet now. Her arms are still crossed, but her grip has loosened, and her jaw isn’t clenched anymore. She’s looking at me the way she did across the kitchen the night of the birthday—searching, careful, trying to decide how much of this to believe.
“I was dating Travis because I was trying to get over you,” she says. “I went on that first date two weeks after we slept together because I thought you didn’t want me, and I was trying to prove to myself that I could want someone else.”
“Did it work?”
“What do you think?”
We look at each other.
The room is quiet. I can hear the clock in the hallway ticking, the hum of the refrigerator downstairs, and Sydney breathing. When I take my hands away from my face and look at her, she’scrying. Not sobbing—just tears running down her face, silent, her lips pressed together.
“Syd.”
“Don’t.” She holds up a hand, but she’s not telling me to stop this time. She’s trying to hold herself together. “Just—give me a second.”
I give her a second. She stands in the middle of the guest room with tears on her face and her hands at her sides, and I watch her process everything.
“You should have told me,” she says.
“I know.”
“I would have—” Her voice breaks, and she presses the back of her hand against her mouth.
The words hang in the room between us. She would have what? Said yes? To me? To being more than friends?
I stand up and close the distance between us. My hand comes up to her face, my thumb brushing the tears off her cheek. She tilts into my palm and closes her eyes, and I can feel her shaking.
“Syd, look at me.”
She opens her eyes.
I place my palm on her cheek and lift her face to mine.
Then I lean down and kiss her. It’s slow, my mouth finding hers as if it has been waiting to land there. Her breath catches, and her hand comes up to my wrist, fingers wrapping around the arm cradling her face. She kisses me back, tentative at first, then with increasing confidence, her other hand gripping the front of my shirt, pulling me closer. I slide my hand from her cheek into her hair, and she makes a sound against my mouth—quiet, almost wounded—and I feel it everywhere.
I kiss her the way I should have kissed her when I was eighteen, but I was young, stupid, and reckless.
Her hands flatten against my chest, and I can feel my heart hammering under her palm; I know she can feel it too. She risesup on her toes, and I bend into her because the height difference between us has always been ridiculous. Her fingers curl into my collar, and I wrap my arm around her waist. For a few seconds, the room, the house, and the fifteen years fall silent; it’s just her mouth and mine and the sound of our breathing.
She pulls back first—just an inch or maybe two. Her forehead rests against my chin, and her hands remain on my chest as we stand there, breathing each other’s air.
“What are we doing?” she whispers.
“I don’t know. But I’m done pretending I don’t want to.”
She rises up on her toes and presses her mouth to mine again. Her lips part, and my tongue slides against hers. The sound that pours out of me is involuntary, raw, and borderline embarrassing.
Two years of no one touching me and fifteen years of wanting her all release at once. Her fingers tighten in my shirt, pulling me closer, and I let her take whatever she wants because I have been so goddamn empty for so long. Her mouth is the first thing that makes me feel full.
