“Seriously. I’m almost eighteen, but I haven’t done anything yet. I’ve lived in Pittsburgh and now Rhode Island, so that makes a grand total of two places I’ve been to in my entire life.”
“Really?”
“Really,” she said. “I have an empty passport because some friends and I once planned a road trip to Canada, but my mother had a work emergency. I had to stay home and take care of my little brother.” Her gaze went to the sand at our feet. “She’s had a lot of emergencies.”
I sensed the gulf between her experiences and mine stretching as wide as the ocean before us.
She glanced up at me. “I’m whining, right? Sorry, I just feel like… Nothing, never mind.”
“Tell me.”
“No, it’s dumb.”
“Hey,” I said. “I don’t know you all that well, but I can safely say ‘dumb’ is not a word I’d ever associate with you.”
“Are you trying to flatter me into telling you something personal?”
“Did it work?”
“Seems so.” Harper looked out toward the ocean. “My whole life has been nothing but stress. It runs through me like a current, all the time. I feel like I’m sitting in a sling shot and one day it’s going to snap. I’ll go flying into a bright, brilliant future of my own making, or straight into the ground. So I spend every waking hour on the lookout. Planning, studying, being vigilant. Because if Iamgoing to get smashed to bits, I want to be prepared. As if it won’t hurt as bad if I see it coming. The only thing worse than being smashed to bits is not seeing it coming.” She shook her head. “That feels like death.”
Her words hung in the cold air, but her trust in me at that moment was soft and warm. She’d laid something deeply personal—andreal—into my hands for safekeeping...but I didn’t have the first idea what to say. I wanted to tell her I knew how she felt. That I had the smallest iota of understanding, but I couldn’t. Any tightrope I walked had a safety net below it a mile wide. It’s why I was going into the family business. Because it was safe.
And piano isn’t.
The silence became too much. Harper hunched deeper into my jacket. “Soanyway…”
“Doesn’t matter,” I blurted.
“Sorry?”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re catapulted into the dirt,” I said. “You’ll pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and go again. But for what it’s worth, my money is on the brilliant future.”
Harper studied me, gauging my sincerity. I held her gaze, the space between us growing shorter, the air warmer. Only the crashing of the waves on the shore and the moonlight. We both started to speak at the same time.
“Go ahead,” she said.
“No, ladies first.”
“I don’t know what I was going to say,” she said with a small laugh.
“Me, neither.”
“You? At a loss for words?”
“Yeah, that was a lie…” My eyes roamed her delicate face, her large eyes fringed with long lashes, her full lips. “I was about to say that I’m glad Bandit stole your money.”
“You are?”
I nodded.
“We would’ve met in chemistry class,” she said.
“It wouldn’t have been the same,” I murmured. “In the hallway, it was perfect.”
My words disarmed her, defenses down, her beautiful face open. Her mouth too, lips parted, and I wanted to kiss her. Badly. Severely. A needy desire that wasn’t born of lust but something else. Something real. For the first time, my heart seemed to be reaching for something real. Her. This girl…
Harper sat back and quickly looked away. “We shouldn’t.”
