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Mind racing, I launch out of my chair and go dashing up the back stairs and into my bedroom. I shut the door behind me, push my desk chair in front of it, and climb onto my bed. Reaching over the side, I grab the shoebox out from underneath my bedside table.
Sitting up on my bed, I lift the lid off and am greeted first with a picture of the six of us. It was the summer we met Miles. We were six. Mackenzie is on one end, arm around Miles’s back. He has his arm around Aaron’s shoulders. Aaron’s arm is wrapped tightly around my waist with Sarah’s resting on top of his from the other direction. My arms are around them. And at the other end, Joel’s arm is draped around Sarah’s shoulders. We’re all laughing hysterically.
I can’t help but smile as tears fill my eyes. Those six-year-olds had no idea what they were getting into. A lifetime of friendship that grows stronger every year. Sometimes we still feel like those kids, and other times it feels like another lifetime.
I carefully set the picture aside and keep going, finding pictures of myself with various combinations of my friends, pictures with Sarah and our parents. And then a pile of pictures with Aaron. Him kissing my cheek when we were kids. Us holding hands as we smile for a picture in elementary school. Me on his back, laughing hysterically in middle school. Him smiling brightly with his arm slung over my shoulder, and my hair in my face from the wind. On the beach in Charleston the summer before ninth grade. I’m standing on my tip toes, kissing him on the cheek as he smiles like an idiot.
My heart soars. I remember how I felt in all of those pictures, like he was my boy.
Has he always been?
It’s terrifying. But… it’s there. It’s always been there.
You two have never been just friends.
Granted, some of it was puppy love. But what happened since then?
I reach into the box, and what I pull out this time isn’t a picture. It’s a pile of love notes. Love notes he wrote to me last year when we pretended to date. He told me he was going to be the best fake boyfriend ever. And he was. Except it didn’t feel all that fake.
I pull out the first one and read it.
Love note #1
Beautiful,
There is nothing more intoxicating than the combination of your smile, sass, and gracious heart.
XX Ace
I remember I sent him a text after that, teasing him and asking if he was secretly in love with me. He playfully asked me to marry him one day.
I shake my head. Have I missed it this whole time? Have I been ignoring it? Pushing it away?
My heartbeat quickens as I read through the notes. He put so much thought into them. I know I spent time and put thought into everything I made for him on Valentine’s Day, but he spent the whole week showing me how I deserved to be treated.
My hand hovers over the fifth note as emotion swells inside me. The locks I have on my heart preventing him from getting in are cracking. Or maybe, somehow, he has the key to them.
Fuck.
Is this crazy? To think we could be something more? That we finally could cross the lines we always seem to blur?
I look back down at the note—the one he wrote me on Valentine’s Day and put in a bouquet he had delivered to me in class.
Love note #5
Rae,
I’m the luckiest guy in the world to have you as my best friend, my person, and my (fake) girlfriend. I love you, Beautiful.
Ace
I love you. All theI love youswe’ve said over the years. How many did we mean as best friends and how many slipped out as something else?
I feel like I’m standing in the ocean being pummeled by wave after wave. They crash down on me and pull me under. I’m stuck in the riptide of Aaron and me, what we are, and what we could be. I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I’m surrounded, drowning in uncertainty and conflicting feelings.
I grab the next note—the one he ran over to my house and taped on my window as I slowly walked back from his house Valentine’s night. The night we kissed in his bedroom, and I felt things I didn’t want to admit. Heart racing, blood pounding, body warming intense feelings.
I look at the last two notes. One he left on my window, asking me to look at the stars with him. Stars. Somehow, it always ends up there. It was our special thing when we were kids, but I’d argue it’s become more special in recent years. And that night was incredibly special. I smile to myself as I grab the last note, the one he handed me in place of making his wish to ask me to go to Formal with him. Of course, I saidhell yes. And we had an incredible time at that dance. I felt special, adored, the way any girl wants to feel on Valentine’s Day and all the time.
