“It’s probably nicer if you’re actually into the person you’re dancing with.”
Immediately, I realize it was the wrong thing to say. Shit. He stiffens. It lasts only a second, but it’s enough to drop us out of time with the song.
“Yeah. I’m sure it is.”
I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek. I wanted to stop the current of emotions threatening to pull me under, but clearly I went too far. I should tell him I’m not imagining anyone else at all. That I’ve grown dizzy with the scent of him. That it would be impossible to think of anyone but him when we are touching like his, when his hand is spread across my back, when my lashes brush against his neck every time I blink.
“I mean,” I backtrack, stepping on his toes and muttering an apology. “Not that I don’t like dancing with you. I just—”
“I get it.” Without warning, he lets go of my hand. “You were right earlier. We should get going.”
“We—um—right.” I stumble over the words, over my feet, which struggle to move on their own. The mood changed so quickly it gave me whiplash, the temperature in the room dropping from balmy to subzero. I grab for my phone to anchor me. “There’s another Howl update.”
We’re still in the lead: 13 for Neil and me, 9 for both Brady and Mara, and 8 for Carolyn Gao.
“Good job, Brady,” Neil says with a low whistle.
I’ve also missed about a dozen notifications in my Two Birds group chat.
COLLEEN
Can anyone close for me tonight?? My kid threw up at a sleepover, and I have to go get him
Anyone?? I’ll give you all my tips from today.
All the other employees have responded that they can’t do it, that they already have Friday plans they can’t get out of. The most recent message is from Colleen again, just my name with three question marks.
“After the floppy disk, we’re down to two. The view and Mr. Cooper. For the view, we should really do Kerry Park. It’s my favorite spot in Seattle,” Neil is saying as I debate how to reply to the message. He must notice I’m distracted. “What is it?”
“It’s work,” I say. “Two Birds One Scone. My boss needs someone to close up the café tonight, and I’m the only one who’s available. Do you mind if we make a quick stop there? It’ll take ten minutes, I swear.”
“Oh. Sure, okay.” There’s a chilliness in his voice I’m pretty sure isn’t entirely related to this detour.
I shouldn’t have implied I wished he were someone else. No one would be thrilled to hear that while dancing with someone, even if that person is their sworn enemy. I’m cursed to never say the right thing around him—but I’m starting to wonder if I have any idea what that right thing is.
It’s the yearbook incident all over again. Was I so worried about the kind of friendliness a “yes” would connote that I leaped to “no”? Is my subconscious trying to protect me from getting too close, or am I really that scared of what acknowledging these feelings would mean? Because it’s clear now—they mean something. If I’ve learned anything from romance novels, it’s that the heart is an unflappable muscle. You can ignore it for only so long.
Neil picks up his backpack. All of a sudden, I can’t bear the thought of leaving this place. Not the school or the library itself, but this moment. With him.
But I force my feet to follow his as we creep back outside, the door locking automatically behind us. We don’t talk as we make our way to my car, and it’s only once we’re in the semi-light of the streetlamps that I open my mouth to speak.
“Thank you,” I say, reaching out to graze his bare arm with my fingertips. He’s cold too. “For all of that. Though I doubt the actual prom was quite as extravagant. They probably had the generic brand of Skittles.”
What I don’t say is that somehow I’m positive this was better than prom. I can barely remember how I imagined it. Sure, the PHSB and I would have danced, but we would have been dating for a while. Would it have been as exciting as dancing with Neil for the first time? Would I have shivered when his hand dipped to my lower back or when his breath whispered across my ear?
Thank God, he half smiles at that. “Only the best for Rowan Roth,” he says, and then I’m spiraling again.
In the light, his freckles are almost glowing, his hair a golden amber. Everything about him is softer nearly to the point of appearing blurry, like I can’t quite tell who this new version of Neil McNair is, leaving me more uncertain than ever.
AN INCOMPLETE LIST OF NEIL MCNAIR’S FAVORITE WORDS
- petrichor: the scent of the earth after it rains (English)
- tsundoku: acquiring more books than you could ever read (Japanese)
- hygge: a warm, cozy feeling associated with relaxing, eating, and drinking with loved ones (Danish)
- Fernweh: a feeling of homesickness for a place you’ve never been (German)
- Fremdschamen: the feeling of shame on someone else’s behalf; secondhand embarrassment (German)
- davka: the opposite of what is expected (Hebrew)
10:09 p.m.
“THANK YOU SO much,” Colleen says as she unties her apron. “I would have closed up early, but we had a last-minute rush.” She lists the remaining tasks: wiping tables, washing dishes, and wrapping up any remaining pastries for tomorrow’s day-old bin.
“It’s no problem. You know I love this place.”
Neil leans against the pastry case, scoping out the goods. If Colleen wonders why he’s here, she blessedly doesn’t ask.
Colleen grabs her purse. “We’ll miss you next year.”
“I’ll be back on breaks,” I insist. “You know I can’t resist those cinnamon rolls.”
“That’s what all the college kids say. But then they get busy, or they want to spend time with their friends, or they move away for good. It happens. Whether you come back to work or not, there will always be a cinnamon roll with your name on it.”
I want to tell her I won’t be one of those people, but the truth is, there’s no way to know.
Colleen leaves us alone in this small café. During the car ride, I couldn’t stop thinking about the dance. I was so wrapped up in it that I relinquished music privileges, letting him play a Free Puppies! song he claimed was their best. But I could barely hear it.
Being that close to him in the library muddied my feelings. I tried to rationalize it: I’m exhausted, and the game has turned me delirious. My mind is playing tricks on me, convincing me I feel something for him I’m positive I didn’t feel yesterday. Or my body was craving closeness to another person’s. I’m a writer—I can make up a hundred different reasons.
The things I said, though, about wishing he were someone else—they hurt his ego. They must have. But I don’t like us like this. I didn’t like it after the assembly this morning, when I refused to sign his yearbook, and I don’t like it now. Or maybe it’s that I like this too much, and that’s even scarier. Neil is softer than I realized, and I’m a barbed-wire fence. Every time he gets too close, I make myself sharper.
“What should we do first?” he asks.
I reach into the pastry case. “Well, I am having a cinnamon roll. And you should too.”
It’s not a perfect spiral, because as Colleen is fond of telling us, imperfect-looking food tastes the best. I hold the plate near Neil’s face, letting him inhale the sweet cinnamon sugar. Before he can take a bite, I snatch it away.
“Icing first,” I say, heading back into the kitchen.
All I want is for us to be normal after what happened in the library, and my brilliant plan is to ignore it. I cannot like him this way. It’s the opposite of destroying him, and even if that’s no longer my goal, until about seven hours ago, he was my enemy. He’s Neil McNair, and I’m Rowan Roth, and that used to mean something.
I open the refrigerator, the cold a welcome blast against my face, but it doesn’t slow my wild heart.
“Cream cheese icing?” he asks, a teasing lilt to his voice.
“I’m never go
ing to forgive my parents.”
“I for one appreciated the Rowan Roth Fun Facts.” He leans against the counter, and it looks so casual. Maybe the dance loosened him up, which is ironic because it only tied me into knots. I haven’t felt this tense since my AP Calculus test, and maybe not even then. “Like Kevin fever. That was gold.”
I groan. After I rejoined the dinner table, my parents told him all he could ever hope to know about the Riley books and their lives as writers, including how they used to complain they had cabin fever when they holed up in the house on deadline. When I was younger, I thought they were saying “Kevin fever,” and one day I asked, thoroughly worried, if Kevin was okay.
“I’m not afraid to use this as a weapon,” I say, holding up the tub of icing. “And hey. If you want to talk embarrassing parents, we should talk about how your mom knew exactly where I’m going to school.”
“The school sent out a list. My mom is very invested in my education.” He nods toward the icing. “And I think you’re bluffing.”
Only because I’ll rinse out this tub afterward, I dip my index finger inside, and before I can overthink it, I dab icing onto his freckled cheek.
For a moment, he’s frozen. And then: “I can’t believe you just did that,” he says, but he’s laughing. He reaches into the container and swipes an icing-coated finger across my eyebrow. It’s cold but not unpleasant. “There. We’re even.”
Our gazes lock for a few seconds, a staring contest. His eyes are still bright with laughter. I’m not about to turn this into an all-out food fight, not when the library dance is still so fresh in my mind. That just sounds dangerous.
Then something frightening happens: I get the strangest urge to lick the icing off his face.
This is fun. I’m having fun with Neil McNair, whose face I want to lick icing off of.
Thor help me.
“Somehow I get the feeling this is the opposite of what we were supposed to do here,” he says, reaching for the roll of paper towels behind him.
With the back of my hand, I wipe icing off my eyebrow, trying to ignore the hammering of my heart. In one swift motion, I grab a palette knife and spread icing on a much safer place: the cinnamon roll. I slice it in half, the sugary cinnamon oozing out the sides.
His eyes flutter closed as he takes a bite. “Exquisite,” he says, and I feel a little thrill, as though I baked it myself. I don’t even have the urge to make fun of his word choice.
“You eat. I’ll wash these dishes.”
He frowns, setting his plate down on the counter. “I’ll help you.”
“No, no. It’s my job. This is why they pay me the big bucks.”
“Artoo. I’m not going to sit here watching you do the dishes.”
I polish off my half of the cinnamon roll. I guess we’d get done faster, and it would be weird for him to just stand there watching. So he turns on some Free Puppies!, insisting this is their best song, but that’s what he said about their last three songs. And then together, we wash dishes.
He even sings along in this unselfconscious way. He has to change registers to get all the notes, which sometimes happens in the middle of a line, and it cracks me up every time. Most people wouldn’t feel this confident singing around someone else. I can admit the band has one good song. Fine, maybe two. And maybe I join in when “Pawing at Your Door” comes on, and we belt out the chorus together.
This is officially the weirdest day of my life.
“Seriously, thank you,” I say for the tenth time, hanging a frying pan on the drying rack. “Is this what being friends would have been like?”
“Washing dishes and eating cinnamon rolls and talking about being Jewish? One hundred percent,” he says. Soapsuds climb up his caramel-dotted arms. “Think about all the movies we could have seen, all the Shabbat dinners we could have had together.”
Something about the way he says that last one tugs at my heart. The feeling is similar to the nostalgia I’ve felt all day, except this is a nostalgia for something that never actually happened. There has to be a word for that specific brand of wistfulness.
Regret.
Maybe that’s what it is.
We could have had this. Four years of sparring when we could have had this: his awful singing voice, his hip bumping mine to encourage me to sing along, the scarlet on his cheeks when I attacked him with icing. While I was so focused on destroying him, I missed so much.
“It turns out I’m a bad friend, so maybe you’re better off,” I say, and immediately wish I could take it back.
I pass him a plate, but he just holds it under the water.
“Is that… something you want to talk about?”
“I’ve been holding on to the idea of my friendship with Kirby and Mara, but I haven’t really been there for them lately. I’m going to try to be better, but—I might do this with a lot of things, actually. I idealize.” I let out a long breath. “Am I not realistic enough? Am I too… dreamy?” I cringe when the word comes out. “Not dreamy as in hot, dreamy as in… dreaming too much.”
He considers this. “You’re… optimistic. Maybe overly so, sometimes, like with that success guide. I don’t think it’s a bad thing, though. Especially if you’re aware of it.”
“I’ve been aware of it for a whole three hours.”
One side of his mouth quirks into a smile. “It’s a start.” He makes a move to point, but since his hands are buried in soap bubbles, he gestures to me with his elbow instead. “But are you aware you have icing, like, all over your eyebrow?”
My face flames. His eyes pierce mine, and there’s an intensity there that pins me in place.
If we were in a romance novel, he’d run his thumb along my eyebrow, dip it into his mouth, and give me a come-hither look. He’d back me up against the kitchen counter with his hips before kissing me, and he would taste like sugar and cinnamon.
I’ll give my brain points for creativity. This shouldn’t be a romantic moment. We are scrubbing other people’s crumbs and chewed-up bits of food off plates. Still, the thought of kissing him hits me like an earthquake, the tremor nearly making me lose my balance.
“Are you… going to clean it off or wait until it gets all crusty?”
Ding, ding, ding, we have a winner for the word most likely to kill the romance. Congratulations, crusty.
“Right,” I say, swiping my wrist across my eyebrow. The moment is gone—because that’s how it always is, isn’t it? What happens in my head is better than the reality. “Hand me that towel?”
* * *
Once I lock the doors, Neil makes a strange clicking sound with his tongue.
“You know,” he says. “We’re actually not far from that open mic. We have time to make it, if you still want to see Delilah.”
The air bites at my cheeks. “We shouldn’t,” I say. But we have only two clues left, and the thought of this night ending, being done with Neil… it makes me unreasonably sad. The open mic would at least increase our time together.
“Okay.” He jams his hands into his pockets and turns down the street where my car is parked.
“Okay?” I have to jog to keep up with him. “I thought you’d put up more of a fight.”
He shrugs. “If you don’t want to see her, don’t see her.”
“Is this some kind of reverse-psychology bullshit?”
“Depends. Is it working?”
“I really hate you.”
“You don’t have to do it. We can get in the car right now. But you love her, don’t you? If not today, when will you get another chance? What excuse will you make the next time your favorite author is in town, or when someone wants to know what kind of book you’re writing?” He leans in, plants one hand on my shoulder. It’s meant to be encouraging, I think, but it’s incredibly distracting. “I know you can do this. You’re the person who revolutionized garbage collection at Westview, remember?”
Despite myself, I crack a smile at that.
“So hear me out,” he continues. �
��If you don’t just do it and rip the Band-Aid off—”
“Two clichés in one sentence?” I say, and he shoots daggers at me.
“—you might wish you had. All that regret you were talking about earlier, with the success guide—here’s a goal you can accomplish now, even if you can’t cross it off some list.”
I try to visualize it—but I’ve never been to Bernadette’s, so I can’t. Maybe I’ll stumble over my words, make a fool of myself in front of Delilah. But today was supposed to be about owning this thing that I love, and I’ve already made so much progress with Neil of all people. It felt so great to finally talk about it. Freeing.
And I don’t think I’m done yet.
“You win,” I say.
When he grins, it’s bright enough to light up the night sky.
It’s kind of beautiful.
SIX THINGS ABOUT NEIL MCNAIR THAT ARE NOT ACTUALLY TERRIBLE
- He occasionally wears T-shirts.
- His knowledge of words and languages is somewhat impressive.
- He’s a decent listener—when he’s not being combative.
- He read Nora Roberts.
- He knew, somehow, that I could do that open mic, even if I didn’t.
- His freckles. All seven thousand of them.
10:42 p.m.
BERNADETTE’S IS DESIGNED to look like an old speakeasy, dimly lit, black-and-white photographs of old Seattle lining the walls. Tables and chairs point toward a small stage in the back, where a girl maybe a few years older than we are is onstage, sawing back and forth across a violin. No—a viola.
“She probably already left,” I whisper to Neil. “Or she’ll think it’s stalker-y that a fan tracked her down to get some books signed.”
Today Tonight Tomorrow Page 20
