never been so aware of every nerve on my outer thigh.
A car honks a few streets away, and when I turn my head on instinct, I realize a bit of my hair is stuck between the slats of the bench. Just in case I wasn’t enough of a mess tonight. I reach up to my messy bun that is more mess than bun at this point and tug-tug-tug it out of its elastic and pins.
“It might be a lost cause,” I say by way of explanation. “I sealed its fate when I showered in the dark this morning and couldn’t dry it, and it’s been getting exponentially worse by the hour.”
Neil watches me comb my fingers through it. “It, uh. It doesn’t look bad, you know. You’ve been playing with it all day, but. It always looks nice.”
And then he does something that maybe shocks us both: he reaches for one of my curls loosed by the pins, grazing it with a fingertip. As though to say, This. This is the hair that always looks nice. It’s so light, that touch. The gentleness decimates me, the way he’s uncertain but brave at the same time. The fingertip is gone before I can lean into him, even as I’m imagining what it would feel like for him to slide both of his hands into my hair.
It always looks nice.
“And I don’t actually hate your suits,” I tell him. “I mean, don’t get cocky about it or anything. It’s still a supremely dorky thing to wear in high school, but… you don’t look terrible in them.”
“We’re not the best at compliments, are we?”
“I’m better,” I say, and he laughs. His laugh sounds like that first gooey indie pop song he played for me in Doo Wop Records, the Free Puppies! one. Behind his glasses, his dark eyes light up, turning amber. Again I’m convinced I’ve never paid enough attention to him when he laughs. Maybe he hasn’t done it enough in my presence. Maybe he has looked at me only through narrowed eyes, his brows slashed in annoyance. But tonight I want to make him laugh again and again.
Heart hammering, I shift my leg until it’s finally right up against his, closing the distance between us. I couldn’t take it anymore, not touching him.
His breath catches in his throat. God, that is a great sound. “You cold?” he asks, and it makes me feel slightly guilty, given I’m wearing his hoodie.
“A little,” I say, surprised by the sudden scratchiness of my voice. If being cold makes him inch closer, then I am fucking Antarctica.
Then I hear, feel the rustle of fabric as he moves his leg against mine too, this pressure that confirms what’s happening is absolutely deliberate, and we are hip to hip and thigh to thigh and knee to knee. He brushes my knee once with his thumb, a quick little swipe.
That swipe deserves its own romance novel.
“Okay?” he asks, and I don’t know if he’s asking if I’m okay, if what we’re doing is okay, or okay as in am I ready to go, and I’m not. I’m not. It’s cold, but I could light a fire with how it feels to be this close to him. Yes, this is okay, but it’s also not nearly enough.
All I can do is nod. Suddenly his hoodie feels too warm. I’ve mourned what we lost by not being friends, but what if we’d become friends and then something else? Maybe we’d have shared all our firsts. Learned together, explored together, and beyond the physical, we’d have helped each other on those rough days. This entire night, I’ve been defending my emotions because I couldn’t admit the reality: that I have real feelings for this boy. There are so many things I didn’t know about him, like that he is a fan of children’s books and his favorite word is ‘tsundoku’ and he alters his suits himself. He cares about his mother and his sister. He cares about me, Rowan Roth, the girl he’s been trying to destroy for four years.
I’ve never experienced something earth-shattering, like Neil said. But I have a feeling that if something happened with us… it might be.
And that possibility is what pulls me like a magnet toward my former nemesis, Neil McNair, who is looking at my mouth like he has just discovered the perfect synonym for a word that doesn’t have any.