I think I already know what he’s getting at and let me tell you, it scares me, so I ask, “…what?” just in case.
Logan’s smile grows into a full-on, goofy grin. “Do you really want to know?” he asks.
I’m not sure I do, but I’m feeling rather daring today so I say, “Yeah. Yeah, I do.”
Nodding, Logan takes a step back and looks at me, then at the huge stack of balloons in the bathroom. “Well,” he says, gritting his teeth, “remember I warned you.”
And then he bends his knees, rocks his legs back and forth once, twice, three times, before he finally leaps into the bathroom. I watch with a mix of horror and fascination as his body flies through the air, and then he lands on the front half of the balloons.
There’s a loud popping sound, and about one-third of the water balloons explodes at once.
A wave of pure water leaps out at both Logan and me.
I scream and Logan shouts as it comes down on us, and then we’re both totally drenched in water and I start laughing and laughing. Logan’s shirt clings to his stomach so that I can see the outline of his abs, and his hair is completely soaked. I feel myself shiver because I am just as covered with water as he is and oh my god did he really just do that in a hotel room? My whole body comes alive, my heart leaping around in my chest like a pinball, and I just smile. Everything around me is soaked--the floor, the suitcases, the books I left there.
I turn to Logan, who is beaming at me, and there are still a ton more balloons left in the bathroom and we know what we have to do.
“I hate you so goddamn much,” I say through my smile, my face totally soaked. I’m already shivering from the cold and I’m sure he can see a perfect imprint of my body, but I don’t even care. I can’t believe that just happened.
“It’s just my glasses,” Logan says, staggering to his feet. “Glasses are automatic signs of badassery.” Then, he stumbles over to me, lowers his head, and says, “You ready for round two?”
I glance from him to the bathroom. At some point, our hands lock. His is totally cold and wet and yet it feels so incredibly wonderful for him to touch me. “Hell yeah,” I say, take a breath, and with my hand clutching his, we leap into the tower of water balloons.
While I’m in midair, I have this sudden realization that Logan had this all planned out from the start. That he set it up so I would come with him to the convention, so I would do these things with him, so I would enjoy myself and feel close to him. But the thought escapes me as quickly as it comes because before I have time to think, my body collapses onto a huge stack of water balloons. I feel them break below me, feel the force of them coming apart, and then I’m completely drenched in water. Drops slide down my hair and I look at Logan who is even more soaked now and then I let out a huge grin and he lets out a huge grin and I’m pretty sure this is vandalism considering we’re in a hotel room, but none of that even matters because I’m doing this with him.
There are still more water balloons left so we back out of the bathroom, hold hands, count to three, and then leap right back into the pile without even thinking. More water explodes onto us and now I can see a perfect imprint of his body. We repeat and repeat the process until all of the water balloons are gone, and I just keep laughing and smiling because I haven’t had this much fun with someone else since… ever.
Finally, after something like ten minutes, all of the water balloons have been exploded. The bathroom is a mess of water and random balloon shells and the rug outside is totally soaked, and I feel a rush of excitement coursing through me.
I stare into the empty bathroom in disbelief. “That was…” I shake my head. What was it? Incredible? Amazing? Totally stupid? The most fun I’ve had a long time? I settle on “…unusual.”
He laughs. “Usual is for boring people. Now let’s clean this shit up.”
We spend the next hour picking up the balloon shells, soaking up most of the water with our towels and praying it doesn’t leak, and we change into new clothes after we dry ourselves off and take a number of trips to the lobby to dispose of the balloons.
When we finish cleaning, Logan leads me back to the hotel room. I remind myself how much I hate him, how he abandoned me four years ago, but even that doesn’t feel like enough anymore.
And I know that’s the problem.
“Now,” he says after a while, leaning against the hotel room door. “I showed you mine, so you show me yours.”
The second the words leave his mouth, my body stiffens up and I start to protest, but he just rolls his eyes.
“I mean,” he says, “I showed you something I like to do. Now you show me something you like to do.”
All at once, the knot in my chest evaporates and I gulp in a deep breath, but a part of me also feels… disappointed?
Dammit, self. You can’t be thinking that.
“Oh,” I manage to say, blushing hard, and Logan just smiles at me.
“Pervert,” he says, and I shoot him a murderous look.
“So.” I distract myself by wringing the water out of my hair. “You want to know what I like to do in my free time?” He nods like it’s the most obvious thing in world, which it probably is.
“O…kay,” I say, and then I look at my feet the instant I meet Logan’s expectant gaze. I feel so completely pathetic for it, but I realize then that I don’t know what I like to do with my free time. Ever since Ben died, besides thinking of pranks and writing poetry and reading the Two Roads blog and pretending to hook up with random guys, I don’t exactly do much. I can’t tell Logan that, though, can’t admit that while he’s living his life and getting past Ben’s death, I’m still forever wallowing in the past. I can’t admit to him that despite the numerous times I called him friendless, I’m the true loser in this relationship.
(I hate that I just called it a relationship.)
After a few seconds of hesitation, I choose to show him the blog. “Well,” I say. “There’s this poetry blog I really like reading.”
“Oh yeah?” Logan moves closer to me so that his jaw hovers inches away from mine. His lips are still soaked from the water balloon explosion earlier, but they look so soft, so warm, so close that I could reach out and kiss them at any given moment. My breath catches and my heart rate speeds up, and no matter how hard I try I can’t tear my gaze away from him. I feel the heat emanating from his body, his skin on my skin, his stomach to my stomach, and the need I feel, the deep, aching desire to just fucking kiss him already is almost overwhelming.
“Yeah,” I say quietly. “I--I’ll show it to you?”
“That sounds good,” Logan says. It takes all my strength to turn away from him, run to my backpack, and pull out my computer. I sit down on the edge of his pullout bed and he joins me, looking over my shoulder as I type in the website URL.
As soon as the page loads, revealing the Two Roads blog, I feel Logan take a deep breath.
“You okay?” I ask.
“Yeah.” He shakes his head. “Yeah… I’m fine.”
I frown, not really believing him, but I turn back to the computer anyway. “So this is the blog I spend time on,” I say to him, already embarrassed. “It’s anonymous and run by a woman who claims to attend this very conference every year. She posts original love poems every day, and they’re some of the best and most unique poems I’ve ever read.” I start scrolling thorugh the archive and show him a few of my favorites, and he smiles along with me and agrees that they are pretty epic, and we read through the poems together for what feels like five minutes but is nearly two hours in actuality. We spend the whole time laughing and critiquing the poems and comparing them to those written by famous poets and also plot how to find this woman, The Roadkeeper, at the conference tomorrow, and I think he falls in love with the blog as much as I have, which makes me so weirdly proud I can’t really explain it.
“So that’s our mission tomorrow? To find The Roadkeeper?” I ask in the middle of scrolling through the blog.
“That it is.”
/>
“You do know it’s going to be practically impossible, right? I mean, we know nothing about her.” I don’t think he’s grasping that concept very well.
“You said it was going to be impossible for us to get into the convention this morning, and look where that got us.”
“That was luck,” I say. “Also crepes.”
“And so is this.”
I sigh. “You are such an idiot,” I say, feeling the heat between us, the annoyance building up.
“And you’re such a moron,” he returns, and I feel my heart soar.
“I hate you.”
“I wish you were dead.”
My lips are right in front of his now, my chin by his chin, my hands by his thighs. My body feels on fire with him this close, and it’s such a relief to escape into our insults, into familiar territory. I think about Ben that night, about Logan abandoning me when I was so crushed, and I just keep going.
“You disgust me,” I say, smiling.
“You make me want to scream.” His gaze is intense but happy as everything bad between us rises up. We start slipping away into our own world again, my side pressed against his, my breaths coming in slow pants.
“Your life is miserable.”
“Yours is worse.”
“I wish I never met you,” I say. His lips are only inches from my face now, and I feel like one of us is going to explode at any second now.
“I’m glad I left you for those four years.”
“You are pathetic.”
“I hate you so much.”
“Have a terrible life.”
“You too.”
As soon as we finish, everything disappears. The room feels like it has been whisked away and the only thing that is left is this deep, aching desire I feel. I lower my jaw, brushing my nose to his, breathing heavily. For one painfully long instant, I think we’re going to kiss. We sit there, panting, his lips shifting and shifting in front of mine, his breath on my lips, and kissing him suddenly feels like the most natural thing in the world.
But we don’t.
We don’t kiss.
I pull back slowly, hesitantly, and the heat between us fades.
He opens his mouth to say something, to protest maybe, to charm me into pressing my lips to his, but I’m already turning back to my laptop and instead he doesn’t say a word.
After the longest time, when no one says anything, I read him my personal favorite poem from the blog, the one that reminded me of Logan, An Ode To You, From Me, From Frost.
“Frost once said that life always goes on,”
I say, and Logan watches me with an almost freaky intensity. I try to ignore it.
“That one’s song is never silenced,
So I should be fine continuing.
But Frost never met you.
He never saw your smile.
He never looked in your eyes.
He never heard you laugh,
and he never knew.
He never knew like I know.
He never knew that you are the one
that you and all of your imperfections are my moon
that you are beautiful and not just in look,
that you make me feel like I matter and that I need you,
I love you.
Life does not simply go on without you,
My song does not live without yours,
I am not whole without you.
I often want to tell Frost
that he should shove it up his ass
which may not be the best idea,
but really what is there to do?
Because Frost was a moron
and there are not two roads when it comes to you.
There is only the road that leads to your love.”
When I finish reading it, I look up at him, not really knowing what to expect. But the knowing smile that spreads across his lips is certainly not it. “Cali Monroe,” he whispers into my ear, and I feel every muscle in my body tense up at his closeness to me. “Amazing does not even begin to describe what you are.”
~
She was not supposed to get sucked in
and he was not supposed to make her feel like this:
Happy.
Valuable.
Important.
But sometimes in life, this kind of thing cannot be stopped.
Sometimes there is no escaping the inevitable.
And sometimes, just sometimes, true love triumphs in the end.
~
LATE that night, when Logan is fast asleep at my side, I pull out a notepad. I listen to each of his gentle breaths as he sleeps, his presence all calm and warm and inviting, and I feel myself smile. I love that he’s here, next to me in my bed, and I love that it doesn’t even have to be awkward or anything; when it comes to us, everything just is. No thinking. No worrying. Just each other.
So I grab a pen, lay the notepad out in front of me, and I start writing. I write the poem he wants us to recite for each other on Monday. I write all of my emotions, my feelings--all of it--and the words just flow out of me. I think about Logan, his laugh, his smile, and I write this poem to him. For him.
I’ve never really had the courage to put any of my feelings on paper before, to let my true thoughts flow out of me. Not with Ben, not with Logan all those years ago, not with anyone. I’ve always been too scared to write down how I feel about someone else, because putting it on paper means it’s real, means I’m really thinking this, means there is no escaping my feelings. But with Logan, it’s completely different. I know I have to write this down because what he means to me is not something to keep quiet. It’s something to embrace. It’s something to shout from the rooftops.
So I write and I write my poem to him until the night melts away, and I know like I know that I will wake up in the morning, or that the moon will return again tomorrow night, that what I’m feeling for Logan Waters is real.
~
THE next morning, Logan looks different. He seems less cheerful than usual, less certain of himself. His smile has faltered, but I pretend not to notice. I don’t have the courage to ask what’s wrong, just like I never did with Ben.
I slip out of bed like nothing different has happened, and we take turns getting dressed in the bathroom, then head down to eat breakfast at the hotel café.
A waitress comes by as soon as we sit down at a booth by the window, which overlooks the garden below, and she takes our orders. Logan gets a hot chocolate to drink and I make a point of insulting him for it as I order scrambled eggs.
“Well,” Logan says once the waitress leaves, sipping his hot chocolate. His hair is still messy from the shower, and it’s hard not to notice how good it looks on him. His skin seems to be glowing when he’s in front of me, too. I have no idea how it happened but it did and now I can’t look away.
I take a sip of my coffee. “Are you ever going to tell me why you drink hot chocolate all the time?” I ask, and I really am curious. I mean, no one drinks hot chocolate. Even Ben hated it.
He holds up his index finger. “Hot chocolate is a vastly misunderstood drinking resource.”
I don’t pretend to know what ‘drinking resource’ means so I nod uncertainly, dismissing it as Nerd Speak for ‘beverage.’ “That still doesn’t change the fact that it makes you look like a twelve year-old girl,” I say.
“Twelve year-old girls know how to kick some serious ass, so I’m going to take that as a compliment. Plus, they’re pretty awesome fangirls--another positive.”
I raise an eyebrow. “Did you really just compare yourself to a fangirl?”
“Maybe I did,” he says absently. He puts his mug down on the table. “Why?”
“Nothing, It’s just… fangirl? Really? You couldn’t even call yourself a fanboy?”
“Well, why not? I need to obsess over smoking hot fifteen-year-old boy singers!” he says sarcastically, enunciating “need” and “smoking hot” in such a childish way that I have to laugh.
“You are dang
erously weird,” I mutter. I don’t mean it as a compliment, but he takes it as one.
“I know I am, and you’re welcome to be frightened by me. Dangerously weird is still dangerous, so I’m basically a bad boy.”
I bite my lip to keep from smiling. “There is something horrifying about you calling yourself a bad boy. I can’t believe someone as strange as you is the boy that I fell--” I freeze, stopping myself at the last second, and my stomach constricts. Oh my god. Did I almost just say what I think I did? Oh shit shit shit. I don’t even know if that is true. It’s just my moronic subconscious talking for me.
“That you what?” Logan asks, looking almost urgent now.
“That I nothing,” I say, taking another emergency sip of my orange juice. “Sorry. I’m tired. I say stupid things when I’m tired.”
He cocks his head to the side. He doesn’t believe me. Dammit, of course he doesn’t believe me. “That didn’t sound like a stupid thing,” he starts to say, his voice becoming increasingly serious, but I cut him off.
“It was nothing,” I say firmly, giving him my best ‘drop it’ look. “It was just… yeah. Nothing.” There’s a pause, and I glance back down at my uneaten breakfast. “Why do you look so sad today?” I blurt out after a minute.
“What?” Logan says.
“Why do you look so sad?” I don’t mean it accusingly, but it seems to catch him off guard.
He opens his mouth, probably to give me some halfhearted excuse, but then he snaps it closed and sighs. And then he says, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, “Ben.”
My stomach twists.
Ben.
Ben.
It’s always Ben.
“I was thinking about that night,” he continues, not looking at me. “About… what happened.”
“Oh.” I wish I could say something more, something smart or deep or sad or heartfelt or whatever, but it’s the only word that comes to mind. Oh. It just hangs there between us, for the longest time. “I miss him,” I say quietly, and I really do. I miss his smile. I miss the way he always used to make me feel: like I matter. All warm and strong and important. I wish I could’ve been there for him after all the times he was there for me. I wish I could’ve reminded him how great his life is. I wish I could’ve given him my company when he needed it most.
Two Roads Page 18
