We both say sorry quickly, like we’re strangers on a blind date. Like I didn’t hold his head while he cried a week ago, or like he hadn’t carried me across a beach against my will last Saturday. And then we both say, “What are you sorry about,” speaking at the same time all over again.
We laugh and look out of our windows. Then I think we both feel badly about laughing, so we look at our laps. If he thinks anything like I do, I bet he still feels a little guilty having any kind of fun without you.
“You first,” he says.
I sigh because I don’t know what to say or where to start. I pull my sleeves over my shaking hands. “I didn’t mean to jump; you just surprised me, that’s all.”
I want to tell him that he can touch me whenever he wants. I want to reach out and put his hand back on my leg.
“It’s just that…that night—” I say. And I stop. In my mind, the truth has been spinning since I woke up this morning. I was with you when I should have been with her. I want to kiss you, but something about it feels…not wrong. But not right, either.
He says, “Autumn, I know,” as if I said the thought out loud. Then he actually looks a little nervous.
“I feel the same way, but whatever this is…with us? It isn’t going away.”
We’re still sitting in my driveway, and if we don’t leave soon, we were going to be late for school. The car’s running, but instead of shifting into drive, Dante turns the keys the wrong way and kills the engine.
“I’m shit with words” is what he says next. “But you know how things have been. You know probably better than anyone, and I don’t want you to think that this”—he moves his hand back and forth in the space between us—“is just some fluke like that fight with Perry. Just something I’m doing because my head is fucked. I like you. I’ve liked you for a while. I liked you before…”
I look up at him, and he’s looking at me, like he’s never seen me before. The tops of my ears go all hot, and I’m terrified that I’m blushing like an idiot on top of having just jumped out of my skin when he touched me.
He drums his fingers on the steering wheel, and I watch them fly up and down. I still haven’t said anything, and I think my silence is getting to him. He lets his hair fall over his eyes and cheekbones, so that when I look back up, I can only see the lower half of his face: a bit of his nose; his square jaw; black stubble; pink lips.
He looks at me again with those molasses eyes, and because I don’t know what he’s going to say or do next, my heart beats so hard that I can hear it in my ears.
He reaches out again and tucks some of my hair behind my ear, and he leaves his hand there, in that soft place right behind my jaw. But this time, even though I know he can probably feel my racing pulse, I don’t move away.
“It feels kind of freakishly right, doesn’t it? Us?” He says, “It feels like it should have been this way before now.”
I feel myself nodding, and I feel my hands growing as warm as my face, and I feel like I need to kiss him or cry.
“We can take it slow,” he says. “I just…I don’t want to make you do anything you’re not ready for. Or anything you don’t really want to do.”
I bite my bottom lip. “Have we met? I never do anything I don’t want to do,” I say.
When he grins, I put one of my hands over his and unbuckle my seat belt with the other. I lean across the emergency brake and then kiss him with my eyes screwed shut so tightly that I can’t see anything that might make me hesitate, like his cheekbones, which are insanely high like yours, or the still-bruised skin below his eye, or like my house, which is just beyond the window, where my parents could have been watching.
When I pull away, I keep my hands and eyes busy with my seat belt and then, once Dante starts the car again, with the radio. I can barely look at him because I can’t believe any of what’s happening.
You know that I’ve only ever kissed two other boys, but I’ve never felt what I feel when I kiss Dante.
By the time we pull into the school parking lot, my breathing and heart rate have slowed down to something closer to normal. And when I sneak a glance at Dante, he’s watching me already and grinning a real grin. I reach for my bag, and he kisses my cheek, but I turn toward him, hoping he’ll kiss my lips instead.
I zip up my puffy jacket and try not to catch my reflection in his side-view mirror. Even now I don’t know what he sees.
I’ve never felt very pretty. Next to your strong Latin features—your bronze skin, your wide brown eyes, your plump lips and wild hair—everything about me seemed too subtle. I was always beside you, so I got used to it. And I was all right with fading into the background; with letting you have the spotlight because more often than not, you shared it with me. But when your brother looks at me, with the same skin and eyes and lips as you, part of me wants to be beautiful. I want to be curvier and brighter and lovelier in any way I can.
But at the same time, the other part of me—the part that’s looking back at him? That part feels like what I look like doesn’t even matter because, for whatever reason, Dante sees me.
I’d like to say that when he looks at me I feel like the prettiest girl in the world, but something about him makes it so much more than that. When Dante looks at me, I feel like the brightest star in the sky. And I don’t know what to do with a feeling like that.
“Will I see you at lunch?” I ask him, even though I don’t want to wait that long.
“I’ll meet you at your locker after first period,” he says. I guess he doesn’t want to wait either.
I grin. I feel my lips curve up, and I can’t believe I’m smiling.
“She smiles,” Dante says. And he touches my hair before he walks away.
I guess I do, I think. But then I want to tell you what’s just happened and remember that I can’t. I stop smiling and start talking myself out of crying.
I text Alexa to tell her about the kiss, and she texts right back and says everything I want to hear: a few “OMGs,” that Dante is “soooo hot,” that you would have been so happy for us. But I still stay in the parking lot until it’s empty. I type out a message to you.
Then I walk to first period, the soundtrack to our last summer together playing in my ears, and I try not to miss you. I sit next to Faye, and I pass her a note about the kiss and try not to wish I were pressing the folded secret into your palm instead. I try not to count the minutes until I can see Dante again.
When I turn the corner after my first class, Dante’s waiting for me, like he said he would be, smiling.
That’s when he asks if I want to go to Winnie’s after school. I say yes, thinking it will be just like every other time we’ve been there.
But it isn’t. I don’t realize until we’re three blocks away from school that his car smells a little different. I sniff the air, then lean over and sniff him.
“Why are you wearing cologne?”
He kind of blushes. Tavia, your brother blushed. Then he says, “I borrowed some, since this is our, um, first date.”
I look down at myself. I’m wearing a bright purple Alice in Wonderland hoodie with the creepy, grinning Cheshire Cat on the front, and he’s wearing an adorable, baby blue polo and cologne.
He looks at me and smiles a little. He says, “I want to take you to this show after, if that’s okay.”
“Can I think about it?” I ask him. Going to shows still feels like something that belongs to you and me alone.
“Sure,” he says.
At the diner, I feel awful. I keep patting my unwashed hair, and I pick at my food but can’t really eat it. I keep thinking that if you were here, you would have known that he was asking me out. You would have warned me, and maybe I would have told him that usually, you give girls more of a heads-up about this kind of thing. Then you would have helped me pick out a cute shirt to wear, and I might have even let
you put makeup on my eyes.
I excuse myself from the table, go into the bathroom, and call Willow. She picks up on the first ring, and at the sound of her voice, I unexpectedly feel like I want to cry.
“Hey,” she says. There’s noise in the background, so I wonder what she’s doing. College seems so far away to me right now, like it’s some country on the other side of the world that I can’t be really sure of.
“Hi,” I say, and there must be something pathetic in my voice, in that one word, that gives me away. I hear her telling people that she’ll be right back, a door closing, and then, suddenly, her side of the phone is as quiet as mine.
“What’s wrong? Are you okay?”
I stare at myself in the mirror, unsure of where to start.
I feel like a terrible sister because of the way I’m always calling and texting her now. We talked a few times a week before, but I never called her this much when I had you. I don’t think she thinks about my calls like that, like she’s my substitute best friend. But I do.
“Um, yeah. I’m fine,” I tell her. “It’s just that I’m on a date with Dante and—”
She doesn’t let me finish before she says, “Wow, he’s not wasting any time, huh?”
I don’t know what I was expecting her to say, but it wasn’t that.
I try not to sound offended when I ask, “What does that mean?”
“I’m just worried, dude. Seems like things are moving kinda quickly. I mean, you weren’t even speaking to him the last time I was in town. Plus, you both just experienced a pretty major trauma.”
She sighs when I don’t say anything.
“Don’t you think you should ease into things, just to be safe? Just to make sure what you’re feeling is real?” But she doesn’t know that Dante and I were flirting with the idea of us before you even died. She doesn’t know that while you were at the last party you’d ever go to, I was holding your brother’s hand in his dim bedroom moments away from doing more.
She doesn’t know, and since I can’t tell you first, I don’t want to tell her at all.
I want to get angry with her. I even feel the heat start to creep up the back of my neck, the way it always does when I get upset. I want to tell her that I trust my heart, that I know my own feelings, that I’m not some lovesick little kid. That even though she’s a psych major she doesn’t actually know anything.
But then I think about how fast this has all been happening. That I didn’t even know this was a date. I start to think my big sister might have a point. So I stay quiet.
I wonder what you would have said.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you about something,” Willow says, changing the subject. I lean against the sink and wait for her to keep talking. I’m slightly worried that Dante will think I left the restaurant, but I want to hear her out.
“I’m going to travel this summer,” she says. “I’m going to Europe: London, Paris, and maybe Brussels and Amsterdam. Ten weeks altogether. I think you should come with me.”
“Really?” I ask.
“Mm-hmm,” she answers. “It could be good to get away, don’t you think?”
I’m not sure. Right now, I like being surrounded by your things and your family. I like your brother, a lot. And since I don’t have you anymore, I can’t imagine going somewhere where I wouldn’t be able to see your room or your clothes or your parents if I wanted to.
“I’ll think about it,” I tell her. But mostly, I’m thinking about Dante. It’s only been a few hours of us being this new thing. But being away from him doesn’t really seem like something I’d want…ever.
“But what do I do now?” I plead. “We’re at a diner, and he has on a polo and I have on a freaking hoodie.”
Willow laughs. “Autumn, I know you’re, like, really into him and everything, but it’s still just Dante.”
Oddly enough, her saying that actually helps.
When I get back to the table, Dante’s almost done with his burger. And with Willow’s words floating through my mind—it’s still just Dante—I look at him and see someone else entirely. I still see the gorgeous boy who I’ve dreamed of kissing for months, but I also see the goofball who threw water balloons at us when we were ten. I see his dark, dreamy eyes, but the awkward twelve-year-old whose feet grew to a size eleven before the rest of his body caught up is also there. I see the sexy drummer from Unraveling Lovely shows last summer, but I can’t ignore the sweet-faced, tough kid—who chased away anyone who made fun of me in middle school—peeking out at me too.
“Hey,” I say to him. “Sorry.” I sit on his side of the booth, because, yeah, I’m wearing a hoodie, but this is Dante. Our Dante. Maybe even my Dante. He likes me, and I need to trust that.
He takes my purple hood and pulls it over my head, and I start laughing because I feel so ridiculous.
I look down at my sweatshirt. At the creepy cat smiling back up at me. When I look back up at Dante he says, “I like your shirt.”
“Cheshire Grins would be a pretty good name for a band,” I say to him.
He smirks. “If I ever join another one, I’ll tell them my girl has the perfect name already picked out.”
I try not to float away from the table because he called me his girl, but I am a balloon full of air barely tethered by a too-thin string. I grab my plate, dump ketchup on the edge of it, and take a huge bite of my burger while Dante grins and watches me.
I tell him I’ll pass on the show. That if he wants to go, he can go without me. But he shakes his head. “I’d rather hang out with you,” he says.
We go to my house instead of yours and watch a movie in the basement. We throw kettle corn into each other’s mouths, and we steal sweet, salty kisses that make my heart work like it never has before. By the time he goes home, my cheeks are sore from smiling.
If I could call you right now, I’d only want you to answer one question:
“Does dating always feel like flying?”
BRAM IS BORED so he shaves his head.
3,226 views | 8 months ago
Yara’s house is dark when I turn on to her block the night of the vigil. And as I approach her door I think I’ve made a mistake coming here tonight. I’m cool with Yara and Paige, but I don’t know these other kids, and I’m sure some of the jerky jocks I hate will be inside. But as I get closer I hear music.
My music. Unraveling Lovely is blaring through speakers that I can’t see, and it’s loud as hell. My voice is filling the dark air like thunder during a storm. I frown for a second, wondering if I’m gonna be the butt of some popular douchebag’s joke. But Yara’s expecting me, so I knock anyway. A bridge and half of the chorus plays while I wait. And I can’t help it—I start singing along. I’m belting out the longest, loudest note ever when Yara opens the door. She’s grinning like a little kid.
“You’re late,” she says in a flirty voice that tells me she’s definitely under the influence of something. I immediately want some of whatever it is she’s had, and that’s when I realize I haven’t had any alcohol since Undying Light’s first rehearsal last weekend.
“I like to make an entrance,” I say, and she laughs. I want to drink, but I know I shouldn’t. So instead of asking where the booze is, I say, “You’re playing my song.”
Yara nods without saying a word, reaches through the door, and pulls me inside by the hand.
“Logan’s here!” Yara shouts as she turns and starts down a short hallway. She keeps hold of my hand, like I’ll get lost if she doesn’t. I keep my head down, part of me wondering what the hell I was thinking coming here tonight. Part of me drinking in the music that I still can’t believe is floating through the house.
All the lights are off, and candles are everywhere. They glow from the tops of bookshelves and mantels, and there are a shit ton in the center of her dining room table. I look around and notice guys
from the football team sitting in one corner, away from all the candles. Their faces are the brightest things in the room, lit up by the screens of their phones. They nod at me as I pass instead of calling me a freak. It’s kind of nice.
I see some of the other cheerleaders—pretty, bitchy girls I kinda remember being friends with in middle school, when we were all in the drama and glee club together, when people cared less about having the right kinds of friends. I see a few other kids who I wasn’t really expecting to be here: Bram’s nerdy tutor, a guy from the debate team, Nico.
“Wait, Nico’s here?” I ask. Yara barely glances at him.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know, I know. I should hate him, right?”
“Um, yeah,” I say, not sure how much of the story she knows. But any one piece of it—the drugs, the sex tape, the night Bram died—should be more than enough.
“Bram is the one who decided to take pills or whatever. I can’t hate Nico for a choice Bram made.”
I don’t think “everyone” knows Nico is the guy from the sex tape like he said. And of course the only two friends I have in school would be two people who have every reason to hate each other—two people whose secrets I know and have to keep.
Surrounded by all these candles and all these people, I feel a little like it’s the end of the world, and by some fucked-up twist of fate, we’re the only ones left.
“I think you know everyone, right?” Yara asks as she leads the way through the flickering rooms and into the kitchen.
“Mostly,” I say. I squeeze Nico’s shoulder as I walk by him. I’m about to ask her what the plan for the rest of the night is, but I get distracted. Because as soon as I open my mouth, a new song starts to play. It’s called “Unknown.” It’s another one of mine.
It’s cold in the kitchen because there’s a window open. I’m guessing that’s why I could hear the music from outside. We stop in front of the fridge, and Yara finally releases my hand as she flings the door open. The hard rims of the dozen or so beer cans that line the door ping against each other.
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