strand of hair behind my ear, and his hand never leaves, his thumb tracing the small inch of space along my temple, then making a slow pass along the cut of my jaw toward my lips. I turn into it and let my eyes close, waiting for the alarm to sound in my head that makes me stop.
“Don’t,” I say, getting to my feet and shaking my head. “You’re just avoiding the question, and I know you’re struggling, too. We can be friends, Tory. Just like June and you are friends.”
He falls back on his calves and positions himself like a catcher, arms resting on his knees, head cocked to one side and a faint yet intensely confident smile playing at his lips.
“Abby . . . you and I can’t be friends like that, and you know it.” He blinks once, slowly, and I’m tempted to push him off balance and watch him land on his ass.
“I told Hayden I’d call him. You should go,” I say.
A quick inhale flares his nostrils and his body shakes once with a short laugh. He gets to his feet, his eyes making a slow drag around my room as if he’s memorizing it to infiltrate the space at some later date. He nods eventually and moves toward my door, stopping to look at my board of photos one more time. He tugs one loose and pinches it, holding it close to his face for a long second before tossing it on the floor between us.
“You tell me we look like friends in that photo,” he says, leaving me with a short, challenging glare. He pats his hand on the edge of my doorframe as he leaves my room and peers over his shoulder.
“I’ll show myself out.”
I remain frozen until I hear the click of the door downstairs. My space still smells like him, my skin still vibrates from the place his hand touched my skin, my heart still pounds so hard I feel it in my throat.
My phone vibrates in my pocket and I pull it out, knowing I’ll see the image of Hayden’s smile to show that he’s calling. I glance at the screen just long enough to swipe to answer, then fix my eyes on the Polaroid of me and Tory at last month’s school carnival. I paid ten dollars to smash a plate of whipped cream into his face to raise money for the basketball team, and I got to keep this photo as a memento. Have I never really looked at it before? Or was I just ignoring it all along.
“Hey, Abs. Sorry it’s so late. Our session was . . .” He pauses to let out an exasperated breath. “It was kinda brutal.”
“I heard,” I say, the words coming out on autopilot, the logical answer rather than the smart one. My attention is on the photo Tory tossed to the ground. I kneel and pick it up, turning it right-side up so I can absorb the way we’re looking at one another. His face is covered in cream—minus the two holes I wiped for his eyes because I felt bad—and the enormous smile formed by his laugh. I’m laughing hard, too, truly happy with red cheeks and a dot of cream on my nose. The evidence is in the nuances; not only our display of happiness, but the way our hands happened to be wrestling with one another, threaded together so comfortably in a perfect fit. His eyes are soft and affectionate, looking at me not like the girl he makes sure to hit on at a party, but like the girl he stares at in class.
“Abby? You there?”
I stand with the photo and move back to my board, startled into movement by Hayden’s voice. I push the sticky side back against the board, putting it back in its place.
“Yeah, sorry, I was balancing my phone while doing something else,” I say. I’m vague.
“Oh, I asked how you heard?” There’s a bite to his question and I wince, realizing what I said.
“June and I were texting. Tory stopped by her house.”
I just lied. I lied and I feel like shit for it, and at the same time I am terrified that Tory won’t back up my lie and I don’t even have his phone number to call him and tell him to. I don’t fix it, though. I leave that lie where it is and let it buy me time.
“Oh,” he answers, the quiet after his short response