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Callum
My apartment was silent when I walked back in.Squeezing my hand into a fist, the plastic handles from the take-out bag dug into my fingers. She’d either found the note or she hadn’t. Anticipation hummed in my veins.
The kitchen was empty. I left the take-out bag on the counter and ventured into the living room. Wren was perched on the edge of the couch, holding a piece of paper in her shaking hand. Her wet eyes searched mine.
“You know?” she rasped.
I lowered my chin. “Yeah. I know.”
Her small mouth fell open, but she quickly closed it. “I was going to tell you tonight. I’ve been rehearsing all the things I wanted to say. I forgot them as soon as I got here, but I promise I was going to tell you. I’ve been hating myself for not saying anything, but I just—”
“So tell me.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “Tell me what you were goin’ to say, Wren.”
She shuddered. “I really like how you say my name.”
“I like sayin’ it.”
Her chest rose and fell as she took deep breaths. I watched her. She fascinated me, up close like this. After so many notes passed back and forth between us, being in the same room was still a novelty. An addicting one.
“How did you know it was me?” she asked absently, rubbing her cheek, barely looking at me. “Did I give myself away? I didn’t think…”
I blinked at her. She was more adorable than I’d imagined she’d be. When she panicked and got shy, her cheeks lit up like cherries.
“How many five-foot-tall women named Wren who live with their great-aunt Jenny in Queens and say ‘holy granola’ with a New Jersey accent do you think there are?”
She’d dropped so many hints, I had wondered a couple times if she had wanted me to figure it out on my own. I thought it was more likely she simply wasn’t aware I had soaked up every single detail my little bird had ever written to me and kept them in the forefront of my mind. She had thought I wouldn’t know her anywhere.
Her breath came out in a heavy gust, and when I sat down on the couch beside her, she shifted her body to look at me with her impossibly wide eyes.
“Okay, wow. I am terrible at subterfuge.” She swiped the back of her hand over her forehead. “I really was going to tell you tonight.”
I cocked my head. “I believe you.”
Her hands were tiny and soft looking, always moving, fidgeting with her clothes, touching her face or hair. I warred between wanting to grab them, hold them, still them, and following their erratic path, touching every place she did. For now, I pressed them down to her lap. She sucked in a breath that shot me straight in the groin. I liked that sound even more than I expected.
“Should I start?” she asked.
“Please do.”
“Were you angry when you first saw me?” Her hand turned up under mine, her fingers sliding along my palm. “Are you angry now?”
I closed my hand around hers, keeping it still. “I’ve been angry for a long time, Wren. But not so much now.”
“Okay.” She tried to move the hand under mine. When that didn’t work, she used the other to tuck her already tucked hair. “I was going to come to see you in New Jersey, like I said I would, but I got scared. I thought you would think I was ugly and fat and you’d be disappointedIwas the girl you’d been writing to and...I have a lot of baggage and my self-esteem had pretty much bottomed out at that point. So, I went down to Maryland to visit my cousin, and we went to the Swerve Tour there, a week before the Jersey show. I scrounged up all my savings and bought a backstage pass.”
My stomach clenched tighter and tighter with every word that passed her little pink lips. All of this was brand new information.
“I don’t know if you remember when I went to prom and then dropped off the face of the planet for a while.” Her eyes lifted to mine. They were shining, but she wasn’t crying. I didn’t know what I’d do if she cried.
“Of course I remember.” She’d sent me into a blind panic when she went silent on me. I had broken a knuckle when I punched drywall only to find a stud right behind it.
“Right.” Her gaze fell to my hand on hers again. “Well, I went to prom alone. And that took major guts. I was there for a while, sitting at a table by myself, when Karthik Singh...he was my first kiss—”
“I remember that too, Wren.” I knew my instincts about that Karthik kid had been right. He should have been dead the second he looked at her. He never should have had the chance to touch her, least of all hurt her.
“Well, Karthik invited me to sit with his friends. So, I did, and everything was fine. They were talking about random crushes and hookups they’d had. Obviously, I had nothing to contribute. Then the subject changed to a bet they had all made, to hook up with the person they were assigned by the rest of the group. One girl practically gagged about having to make out with David Watanabe, which, honestly, I understood. He only ever talked about his favorite serial killers and never brushed his teeth. I laughed too, even though I felt pretty awful and gross about the whole thing. But then...”
She drew in a deep breath, and everything went quiet, like the moment before a tornado touched down. The seconds prior to a nuclear explosion. The last inhale before plunging into an icy abyss.
