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Sooo…is my caterpillar a butterfly yet?
Ava
Someone’s a nosy Ned. I didn’t ask you when your first kiss with Cindy was
And I don’t want to know
Reed
What can I say? I’m emotionally invested.
And I’m not the type to kiss and tell. Not sure if you knew
I bit down hard on my lower lip. I was playing with fire—I knew that from how flushed my cheeks were feeling—but I couldn’t bring myself to step away from the flames. This flutter in my chest… The kiss had sparked it all, and now I was addicted to the way it felt.
If only I could feel it with someone other than Reed. That sobering thought doused a bit of the heat, splintering the magical feeling. The flutter in my chest dulled.
And then my phone lit up again, this time with an incoming call.Reed.
“Hello?” I whispered into the phone, like a teenager afraid of being caught talking to a boy past curfew. Which was ridiculous.
“Why are you whispering?”
“No reason.” I cleared my throat, but the ache didn’t dissolve. “Your, uh—your voice sounds different on the phone.” The lilting tilt to his vowels, the soft way he ended a sentence. It made my skin shiver.It sounds so different directly in my ear.
“Really? Yours sounds the same. What does my phone voice sound like? Super macho and mysterious?”
“High-pitched and crackly.”
He made an offended noise, but didn’t try to quip back. “Did you finish your article yet?”
Reed asking about Babble had my guard up, since I knew his stance on the site. But, too, after Maisie’s call, the article would most likely go into the trash icon. “Why? Got any insider info for me?”
“You wish.” He paused then, but I could hear him draw in a breath. “Are you in your room?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Go to your window.”
I had been expecting to see something on the lawn, maybe, or even something on the windowsill itself. Something to explain why Reed wanted me to stand there. And once I parted the curtains, I spotted the house across the street with its lights on. One specific light in particular that was in a bedroom upstairs, the room beside Rachel’s. And, like the subject in a painting, Reed stood in plain view.
The sun was quickly setting, casting a warm glow on our street. The lawn stretching between Reed and me felt more like inches instead of so many feet; I could see his expression so clearly. A slight tilt to his lips, eyebrows raised.
“I feel like we’re in a music video.” Reed started casting glances around his bedroom, ducking his head out of the window for a second. “Should I hold up a sign?”
There was something about watching his lips move but hearing his voice directly in my ear, as if he were leaning into whisper himself. Goosebumps crawled along my skin. “Wow, was that a Taylor Swift reference? I’m proud.”
Reed ducked his head for a second, but when he tilted his chin back up, he gave me the world’s most brilliant smile. One that rivaled the brightness of the setting sun.
There it was again. Playing with fire. Juggling it like I knew what I was doing. Like getting burned wouldn’t be a bad thing. Because at any moment, Rachel could look out the window or could walk into Reed’s room or my mom could pull into the driveway.
At any moment, he could pull away from me, just like he always did with everyone else.
This wasn’t a game to him—for it to be a game, he’d have to be playing. We’d both made it clear that the kiss meant nothing, but in moments like this, gazing at him across the yard, caught in a universe of him and me, it was impossible to keep the lie. Reality was cruel, and quickly set in.
“I’m going to Josh’s tomorrow,” I told Reed, pinching my curtain tightly, the sheer material grating underneath my fingertips. “We’re going to watch a movie.”
“Oh, yeah? What movie?”
