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“If you love mid-century stuff so much, why didn’t you buy a house in that style?” I have no idea if they’re easy to find or not. Probably not, but Taylen is rich, so he could have found someone to find one for him or paid to be notified when one came on the market. He could have picked an older house from the right era and renovated it to look similar too.
He gives me a blank look that I didn’t expect. “I guess I never thought of it.”
Have you ever tried it? I recall all the things his granny said about us being in love. I always thought it was friendship love. Clearly, Taylen did too. I never thought about him romantically until a few days ago, but it’s like my eyes have suddenly been opened, and every single time I look at him now, I feel shy. It’s like I’m seeing a different person, a stranger. Like the curse was actually about him switching bodies with someone else.
“I guess there are a lot of things we haven’t thought about,” I say softly.
Taylen turns around. I think he’s spurning me, bowing out of the conversation because he doesn’t want to deal with it, but I watch him go to the pile of bags at the door, dig into one, and pull out a literal handful of scratch tickets.
“Where…why…you stopped at the gas station for those?” I just thought he’d had to pee or something.
Taylen looks at me proudly. “Yup. What else could I do? Times such as these call for drastic measures.”
He walks over to the table and pulls out a chair. A minute later, I join him, taking a seat across from him. He spreads the tickets out, filling up almost the whole table, which isn’t small.
Then, he pulls a quarter out of his pocket and smacks it down on the table in front of me. “Get scratching.”
I can’t not laugh at this, but damn him anyway. He knew that after his granny’s place, he was pretty much in the dog house for what he said to me, or rather, about me. I know he didn’t mean it in a bad way, but it still stung. It seemed like being cursed with me would be the worst thing in the world. Or that perhaps I’m gross or unsexy or…No. This is where there are rules against finding your best friend attractive, having a crush on them, or falling in love with them in a non-platonic kind of way. I have to remind myself about my bang list. There are those I bang and those I don’t. Tay has always been on the “don’t” list. That’s all he meant, I’m sure. It shouldn’t have smarted me.
But he obviously knew it did.
Considering he probably bought every single scratch ticket that gas station had, just because he knows I have a strange obsession with them.
When we were kids, I would go over to his place to open gifts with him on Christmas Eve because it was a tradition for us to spend Christmas together that way. I’d always go over to his house the night before because my family didn’t celebrate until the actual day. Then, one year, I got a scratch ticket in my stocking from his mom. I won a dollar, and I was totally and instantly hooked ever since.
We always said that if we ever won any substantial money, we’d give it away since we already had more than enough ourselves.
Taylen starts first. He always has his lucky quarter on him. He’s kept that thing, I kid you not, since we were ten. His granny said it was lucky, and well, when Tay’s granny says something, it’s usually not true. But it could also be true. Sometimes the strangest things are. Like this curse, maybe.
We sit and scratch tickets. Taylen gives a running commentary of every single line while I scratch furiously, my eyes going back and forth between the prize box and the other parts of the ticket.
“Win anything yet?” Taylen has a pile of rejects.
“No.”
“Me neither.”
We keep scratching, and somehow, it’s therapeutic to scratch probably a thousand dollars worth of tickets that aren’t winners. It’s just us sitting here, our hands and eyes moving—the rasp of the quarters and the slick of a ticket being replaced with another.
This is familiar, and familiar means safe. But what if familiar is too familiar? What if we’ve never taken a chance on there being an us because we became so used to the idea that it could never happen? Not only have we never tried it, but we never thought about it. Now that the thoughts are there—tiny insidious seeds in the soil of my gray matter—they’re starting to produce sprouts.
The other thing I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since I woke up this morning?
