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“Please,” I plead. He’s already at the stairwell. The very same one he’d found me at when I’d gone exploring at the back-to-school bash.
How different things are now…
“I just want everyone—” I swallow. “This to all be okay.” Pleading, willing it to go back to our normal.
His hand stalls on the banister. I’m not trying to hide my emotions anymore; they are open and visible.
“I’m tired of the awkwardness. I hate it.”All of it.The bulkiness of it clinging to the air anytime we were all around each other.
Speaking the truth lifts some of the weight from my chest. Yet, it does nothing to shift the heightened thickness in the air. That stays with persistence.
Shifting, he gives me a portion of himself, even though that jaw still works in place. Face weathered and fierce even at profile.
I take that as my cue, eating up the distance, and placing either of my hands beside his one on the smooth finish of the rail. A lifetime ago we stood in this very same spot, only our positions reversed.
I’d been the one looking for escape then. Any way out. A disagreement the only thing to fill the walls then too.
“I don’t want to talk,” he says eventually. Sounding as exhausted as I felt. “Not right now, Princess.” Plucking the phone, I’d forgotten I was still holding from my grasp and charging the rest of the way up the stairs.
My head hangs. The blunt tip of disappointment prodding my gut in his wake. “You never want to talk,” I mumble, speaking only to my shoes. “No one does.”
I couldn’t tell you how long I stayed downstairs after that. We both needed the distance though, so I kept to myself.
The heaviness of it all must have gotten to me because my lashes are fluttering back open. Soft kisses pepper my chin before they lower, finding my neck the more I come to.
I groan, and I swear I see something that resembles a smile coming from Cole’s hovering face. Strands of his black hair dangle the longer he leans over the arm of the couch my head currently rests on.
Those ice-colored eyes totally zoned in on me. The blue color in them as intense as ever. Vivid and bright.
I chalk that demur grin up to a hallucination. The haziness of my mind, jumbled almost, but not entirely awake yet.
“Come,” he says. Straightening his arms, elbows firmly locked on either side of my face. Using them as leverage he lifts himself from his squatted position behind me. Taller now, but no less close than before.
“Where?” I blink.
The room, I realize, is encased in too much blackness. The sun must have set fully since I dozed off.
Well, other than the light from the lamp at my feet. Funny how I don’t remember being the one to turn it on.
“Where else,” he mocks. “I owed you a date, remember?”
I don’t move automatically. That deeply rooted insecurity of disappointment from before reminds me why I’m down here to begin with.
Unlike me, that hostility Cole had before has disappeared. His eyes sparkle with mischief right before I’m being moved. Arms hooking my underarms and up and over the side of the couch I go. My feet land on the ground with a thud.
“Cool it, Iceman! I’m not a basketball,” I joke, grabbing at my dizzied frame. “You can’t just toss me around.”
“You sure about that?” Eyes full on glittering now.
I don’t hesitate. “Absolutely—whoa!”
Moving, we’re moving, him tossing me over his shoulder with predator-like speed.
“Put me down,” I complain but it holds no weight. The fits of laughter between each word do not help my case. But neither is the bouncing as he climbs the stairs.
His playfulness so different than earlier. This is my favorite version of him. The eased, no walls up, Cole.
Our spring break hadn’t started out the best, but it seems to be getting better now.
