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“We are just friends.”
“Not for long.” He smirked, and her heart jumped under her ribs.
Swallowing, Abby took a sip of her drink, trying her best not to allow him to completely disarm her. “But what if I get you into trouble?”
“Abby, do you think the other night at the park was the first time I noticed you?”
At a loss for words, she parted her lips to speak, but she had no idea what to say. Her words lodged in her throat.
“Because it’s not.” Kaden spoke slowly, staring off to the side like he was picturing the scene in his mind. “The first time I noticed you, we were in seventh grade. I remember it because we had English together, and we had to write our own poems and read them to the class.”
Abby groaned. “I hated that.”
“We all did. But I remember watching you. When it was your turn, you read your poem, and you were so monotone it put some of the kids to sleep. I mean, you sounded like a robot.”
“Hey.”
“But the words, they hit me. Here.” Kaden patted his chest. “Maybe you didn’t sound emotional, and your facial expressions might have been tense, but your words...I could feel them like I had written them myself. The whole thing was a metaphor about being numb, unable to feel, and it was like you were speaking right through me. Because everything you wrote was exactly how I felt after my mom died. Your poem, it brought me back to life.”
Abby sat, stunned, speechless.
Her throat constricted. She remembered that poem. She had written it about herself. About how she never felt normal, always shoving down how she really felt when people all around her so easily expressed themselves. Even as a child, she loved her family fiercely, but when it came to displays of affection, she struggled.
She was the flower in her poem, the one that bloomed and came to life after the spring rain. Except the poem was fiction. In real life, she had never fully opened, and she had always felt like she was waiting for that one singular moment to define her and push all her feelings, everything she stored inside her heart, to come bursting out.
“Why didn’t you tell me before now?” she asked, finding her words.
Kaden smiled, as laughter lit his eyes. “And have you think I was the strangest kid on the planet? Um, no thanks.” He shook his head. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. At the time, that poem was enough. It got me through. But the other night when I saw you at the park, I can’t deny a part of me wasn’t waiting to talk to you for so long. And then, the next day when you hit me—”
“Bumped you,” Abby interjected, trying to ease the intensity of the moment.
His eyes locked on hers, not letting her out that easy. “When you hit me, it felt like it was meant to be. You and I. Like, some outside force beyond our control was throwing us together for a reason.”
Abby swallowed, trying to stifle the swell of emotion in her chest but only half succeeding. Was that why it felt like he knew her so well? The poem?
“So, to make a long story short, you’re not getting rid of me that easily. And we’re not going to be just friends. Not if I have anything to do with it.”
“Do you always say exactly how you feel?”
Kaden shrugged. “We both know I don’t have much practice with this, but I figure I might as well be honest. What’s the point in hiding what I’m really thinking? All I’d be doing is depriving myself and everyone around me of the truth. And how can you ever really know me if I pretend to feel any way other than how I really do? That would just be like pretending to be something I’m not.”
His words sunk inside her like an anchor, tethering her to reality. Maybe the reason she never quite felt like herself was because she didn’t allow herself to be. She deprived herself of every intense emotion. She shelved anything overwhelming, anything that required too much of her energy, and maybe that was the problem. By keeping everything bottled up inside, she had deprived, not only those around her of getting close but she hadn’t allowed herself to grow and know herself in the way she should’ve. Her feelings scared her. And rather than face them head-on, she hid them. Not only was she lying to everyone around her by shoving her feelings down, but she was lying to herself, too.
She met his gaze again. “How do you do it?”
“You just...do. You shove all fear aside, and you lay it all on the line. There is no other way. Being yourself and putting yourself out there is like taking a leap of faith.”
“What if you let the wrong people in?”
Kaden smiled. “You’re not taking the leap of faith in others. You’re having faith in yourself. Because you trust yourself enough to know who you are, to admit to yourself how you really feel, all others be damned.”
Abby’s chest grew heavy as she nodded, then focused on her lunch, saying nothing. She mulled over everything he said, wondering if she’d go her whole life only half living and afraid of feeling. The thought depressed her.
Her thoughts ran circles around everything Kaden told her—how he had noticed her years ago and unwittingly touched his life. A warm ball settled in the pit of her stomach, warming her from the inside out, and she found herself wishing she had noticed him back then, too. Because talking to Kaden these past few days had made her feel more alive than ever. And though she had no idea what these feelings were blooming inside her chest, there was a part of her that didn’t want to push them aside. She wanted to feel them, and although that wasn’t a life-shattering realization, it was something. The thought occurred to her that maybe this was what GG did for her grandfather. Maybe this was how she had made him feel.
Remembering him brought her back to the present. “Oh!” Abby sat up in her seat, catching Kaden’s gaze with her own as he crumpled up his paper bag, already finished with his lunch. “I almost forgot.”
Leaning across the table, she scanned the faces around her to be sure no one was listening. “You’ll never believe what I found out. When I got home yesterday, my mother and grandfather were arguing because she found out he’s been leaving the house. He’s not supposed to be driving. Anyway, apparently, two days ago, my grandfather took a little road trip. To Newberry.”
