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“You’re welcome?” he suggests, and I laugh, nudging him with my elbow. There’s barely any space between us now, and when he tilts his head to look at me, his eyes pull me into something thrilling, something intense. I don’t know how I missed it before.
“You’re welcome. And thank you. Again,” I say, then charge forward with the secret I’ve been keeping since his house. “So I’ve been thinking. If we win, you should keep the money.”
“Rowan—”
I knew he’d protest, so I cut him off immediately. “And you should one hundred percent not use it for your dad. He did something horrible not just to that kid, but to your whole family. To you.” The words tumble out smoothly now. “You should use it for yourself. For some nice things. Change your last name, and maybe you could study abroad, or you could get a suit at… wherever they sell nice suits.”
He’s quiet for a few moments. I’d be positive I said completely the wrong thing if he weren’t still nearly touching me, a whisper of space between his hip and mine.
“Now I don’t know what to say,” he says, and forces a laugh. “Which, as you know, is unusual for me. I don’t know if I could accept all of it, but thank you. That… sounds really wonderful.” He heaves a sigh, and then speaks again. “I’m scared,” he says, and the words are so soft. I could tuck myself in with a blanket made of I’m scared. “I’ve never said that to anyone before, but I’m really fucking scared of what happens when I leave. I want to leave so badly, and yet… I get worried that I’m not as independent as I think I am. I’ll get to school and I won’t know how to work the laundry machine, even though I’ve been doing my own laundry for years. Or I won’t know how to get around the city, and I’ll get lost. My mom seems happy with Christopher, but I’m worried she’ll overwork herself. I’m worried my sister won’t be able to outrun it all. Or that wherever I am, I won’t be able to get away from my father.
“Sometimes I worry I’ll turn out like him. I wonder if that kind of thing is genetic. If I’m doomed to fuck up as much as he did, if there’s this violent streak inside me.”
“That’s fucking terrifying,” I say, tapping his shoe with mine, letting him know he’s wrong, that he’s not doomed. “And you are nothing like that.”
This boy is gentle to his core. He spars with his words, not his fists. He is so close that I could use the tip of my nose to connect each freckle on his cheeks. Forget counting. His mouth looks soft, and I wonder how he’d kiss—slow and deliberate or hard and desperate, if he’d grip my waist or my hips. Would he be measured, each motion of his lips plotted out beforehand? Or would he turn off his mind, let his body take over?
The thought of him losing control like that is almost too much for my poor brain to handle.
“You don’t have to talk about it,” I say. “If you don’t want to.”
“That’s the thing. I think I do. I’ve not talked about it for so long, and with you… for some reason, it’s not as hard as I thought it would be.”
“I want to make a dirty joke right now, but I don’t want to embarrass you.”
He nudges my shoulder with his. It’s a friendly teasing kind of gesture that makes me think thoroughly unfriendly thoughts. And our legs—still almost touching. It feels somehow more intimate than our dance in the library. I have never been so aware of every nerve on my outer thigh.
A car honks a few streets away, and when I turn my head on instinct, I realize a bit of my hair is stuck between the slats of the bench. Just in case I wasn’t enough of a mess tonight. I reach up to my messy bun that is more mess than bun at this point and tug-tug-t
ug it out of its elastic and pins.
“It might be a lost cause,” I say by way of explanation. “I sealed its fate when I showered in the dark this morning and couldn’t dry it, and it’s been getting exponentially worse by the hour.”
Neil watches me comb my fingers through it. “It, uh. It doesn’t look bad, you know. You’ve been playing with it all day, but. It always looks nice.”
And then he does something that maybe shocks us both: he reaches for one of my curls loosed by the pins, grazing it with a fingertip. As though to say, This. This is the hair that always looks nice. It’s so light, that touch. The gentleness decimates me, the way he’s uncertain but brave at the same time. The fingertip is gone before I can lean into him, even as I’m imagining what it would feel like for him to slide both of his hands into my hair.
It always looks nice.
“And I don’t actually hate your suits,” I tell him. “I mean, don’t get cocky about it or anything. It’s still a supremely dorky thing to wear in high school, but… you don’t look terrible in them.”
“We’re not the best at compliments, are we?”
“I’m better,” I say, and he laughs. His laugh sounds like that first gooey indie pop song he played for me in Doo Wop Records, the Free Puppies! one. Behind his glasses, his dark eyes light up, turning amber. Again I’m convinced I’ve never paid enough attention to him when he laughs. Maybe he hasn’t done it enough in my presence. Maybe he has looked at me only through narrowed eyes, his brows slashed in annoyance. But tonight I want to make him laugh again and again.
Heart hammering, I shift my leg until it’s finally right up against his, closing the distance between us. I couldn’t take it anymore, not touching him.
His breath catches in his throat. God, that is a great sound. “You cold?” he asks, and it makes me feel slightly guilty, given I’m wearing his hoodie.
“A little,” I say, surprised by the sudden scratchiness of my voice. If being cold makes him inch closer, then I am fucking Antarctica.
Then I hear, feel the rustle of fabric as he moves his leg against mine too, this pressure that confirms what’s happening is absolutely deliberate, and we are hip to hip and thigh to thigh and knee to knee. He brushes my knee once with his thumb, a quick little swipe.
That swipe deserves its own romance novel.
“Okay?” he asks, and I don’t know if he’s asking if I’m okay, if what we’re doing is okay, or okay as in am I ready to go, and I’m not. I’m not. It’s cold, but I could light a fire with how it feels to be this close to him. Yes, this is okay, but it’s also not nearly enough.
All I can do is nod. Suddenly his hoodie feels too warm. I’ve mourned what we lost by not being friends, but what if we’d become friends and then something else? Maybe we’d have shared all our firsts. Learned together, explored together, and beyond the physical, we’d have helped each other on those rough days. This entire night, I’ve been defending my emotions because I couldn’t admit the reality: that I have real feelings for this boy. There are so many things I didn’t know about him, like that he is a fan of children’s books and his favorite word is ‘tsundoku’ and he alters his suits himself. He cares about his mother and his sister. He cares about me, Rowan Roth, the girl he’s been trying to destroy for four years.
