by Sarah Sutton
The world was off-kilter, abruptly turned on its side. I was walking in a dream, fully convinced of its reality, only to wake up and finding everything different. The perfume. I’d worn the same, spicy perfume because I knew Jeremy liked it. And that was the only reason Elijah knew.
“I didn’t know it was you when it was happening.” The volume knob on my voice broke, and my words were quiet. “I thought—I thought you were Jeremy.”
The words weighed strangely on my tongue. After fantasizing about kissing him all this time, confessing the truth sounded strange. I had thought that Elijah was Jeremy. But it didn’t feel right anymore. It was hard to believe that a time existed where the mere idea of Elijah’s mouth against mine would’ve caused a whole hodgepodge of disgust in my stomach. Things had changed so drastically.
Elijah’s cheeks were flushed, either from the cold creeping in from outside or from the moment between us—I had no way of knowing. But I entered his personal space, his breath warm against my skin. A handful more lashes rimming his right eye than his left. A freckle below one eye. A beautifully crooked nose. A face I had memorized.
“I thought you were Savannah. She wanted to play that stupid game, wanted to do something fun.”
One beat passed, then two. Long enough for me to wonder if he’d ever speak again, or if I was going to live sitting here in this cab, watching Elijah’s mouth in fear I’d miss any words falling out.
And then he did go on, speaking fast. “I knew you hit your head, and I…I thought about it being you in the closet. I entertained the idea. I think because deep down, I already knew. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What if it had been you? Not Savannah. You.” Elijah did this little thing with his mouth then, lips twitching as if he was about to smile but then thought better of it. “What if it’d been the best kiss of my life and I’d been kissing you?”
I was outside my body, experiencing everything secondhand. His words were the ones I’d been waiting to hear, aching to hear, and my insides twisted as they finally, finally were spoken aloud. The emotion was so overwhelming that I closed my eyes.
Elijah reached around me to brush his fingers over my hair where I’d hit the shelf. The touch was hesitant, as if nervous, unsure of himself. A cool shock ran down my spine at the touch, causing me to shiver. My body swayed toward him, the desire to reach for him unbearable.
“I’m not Jeremy,” I heard him say, the words achingly soft. It was almost like I could feel him, inches away from my face, the heat of his lips close to mine. It was a sixth sense. When he spoke next, I felt his words everywhere. Under my skin, inside my bones. “It’s just me.”
And then Elijah kissed me.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming, I’m dreaming. I had to be dreaming.
Because Elijah Greybeck—Elijah Greybeck—was kissing me out in the open. No blindfolds, no dark closets.
Instinctively, I grasped the edges of his coat and pulled him to me, so afraid that at any second he would break it off and walk away from me, from us, forever. That made no sense, though, because the gentle hand at the back of my head guided my mouth to his.
I pressed closer, over the console of the truck separating us. We met each other halfway, jackets crinkling as they touched. He might not have played sports, but he had an artist’s hands, oh so gentle with the work they praised and adored. I savored the touch, skin zinging with an electricity that only built and built.
Elijah’s hand struck at the console until it flipped up, exposing the extra seat in the front. He pulled me closer and I moved willingly, leaning further, further, closer, until there was not even an inch separating us. All the hardness of him, his angles and his muscles, pressed into the softness of me. I kissed him deeper, my teeth slipping against his bottom lip in my desperation to get closer. It was more of a need than a want. A desperate, desperate need.
“Rem,” he gasped against my lips, the word so low that I wasn’t even sure it counted as a word at all. One of his hands grazed the skin underneath my jacket, five cool fingers on my fire-hot hip. A flame in the snow.
There would never be a time or place that I could get enough of this—I was drowning in his touch, in this moment, gasping for air and just barely getting enough. I was a snowflake caught in a snowstorm, blown around in the blizzardy wind, destined to finally fall and melt into everything else. I was lost; I was found.
This kiss—it was so incomparable to the kiss with Jeremy, so much better. Each nerve tipped on its end and frying, splitting into two and reconnecting. So good that it was nearly painful.
Yeah, so much for thinking that our previous kiss was just a fluke.
I couldn’t help but smile against his mouth as he broke away, my lips tingling and aching and swollen. My fingers curled through his hair, my other hand at the back of his neck, not letting him stray too far. “That was—I don’t—”
“Yeah,” Elijah breathed, offering a gasping chuckle. A whisper of a touch trailed its way down the side of my cheek, a streak of cold against hot. My lids fluttered closed for a moment. “I think we agree.”
My brain still stirred, dwindling down from the high that I’d dragged it upon. The high that included Elijah’s hands, his lips.
Nobody pinch me.
Elijah’s lips broke into a beautifully carefree smile above me, teeth shining and all, and it nearly busted my chest apart to see it. I realized how incredibly rare it was to see a grin like that from him, and I’d never noticed until now.
He pulled back to trace a fingertip across my temple.
“I can’t believe this is happening,” I admitted a little breathlessly. Man, Eloise was going to flip when I told her. I could practically imagine her eye roll and “I told you so!” I ran my free hand through my hair, feeling my fingers shake. “Why didn’t you say anything sooner? We could’ve skipped all of this back-and-forth nonsense.”
“This isn’t entirely my fault,” he protested, flicking my nose. “You could’ve said something. You’ve known longer than me. Since that night, you’ve known. You should’ve told me.”
I laughed a little bit, and it sounded crazed. Like I was drunk. Like I was high. Maybe I was. Maybe kissing him was my drug. “Yeah, right. Your girlfriend would’ve strangled me.” No way I could’ve risked it, made a fool of myself by confessing my feelings and watching him still choose her.
A sudden stillness worked through my body, stopping my racing heart, cooling my skin. The haze that had been clouding my vision dissipated in a slow ebb, in a way that almost felt like I was waking from a dream.
Elijah’s knuckles brushed along my jaw. “Why did your face get so serious?”
“Why are you telling me this now?” I asked slowly. “Why now, why not yesterday, last week? If you’ve known since then, why now?”
Elijah’s eyebrows pulled down a little bit. “I—I don’t know.”
“Are you only telling me this now because of what happened with you and Sav?”
It was a dark place my mind went, that he was only kissing me since things with his girlfriend were on the rocks. But I couldn’t stop the thought from repeating itself once it popped up, and there was no way I couldn’t not ask.
I stared into his eyes, waiting for his rosy lips to part and words of affirmation to come out. Heck, I would’ve even taken him teasing me.
The coldness in the cab became frigid at once, like Mother Nature had turned the temperature dial to negative seventy, leaving us to freeze. I realized then that my breath had begun to fog in the air. Elijah opened his mouth, but no words came out.
“You’re only telling me this because you’re fighting with Sav,” I whispered, horror, pain, humiliation, all bundling together to break apart my chest. Tears clouded my vision, causing the image in front of me to blur. “Because you’re mad at her. You’re only doing this because—”
“No,” Elijah said quickly, eyes widening. He readjusted his grip on my fingers, preparing for me to pull away. “No.
It’s—that’s not—that’s not why, Remi. Not completely.”
I felt like I was going to be sick, right there in front of him. Sounded an awful lot like it’s not what it looks like. Wasn’t that the cliché saying?
For a moment, everything was frozen. In the next, I moved.
I ripped my hand from his and scrambled for the driver’s side door, hopping out as quickly as I could. For once, my shoes were sturdy against the ground.
“Wait—Remi!” he called just as I slammed the door shut, probably clambering after me, but I started running. “Wait, please—”
Whether Elijah followed me, I didn’t know; I didn’t turn around to check and didn’t hear him continue calling after me. I hurried onto my front porch, putting all my weight behind pushing the door open.
I felt the door break before the chunk of broken jamb fell to the floor, clattering at my feet. The door swung inward with tremendous ease. From where she still sat at the kitchen table, Mom jumped, gaze flitting up at the commotion. She immediately took in my expression and set down the snowflakes.
“What’s wrong?” She got to her feet. “Remi?”
It was one word—my name, my simple name—but that was all it took for me to let loose a strangled sob. The reverberation cracked from my chest as the reality of what just happened set in, and I hurried over to her, tracking snow and water all over the floor.
Her arms wrapped around me as I collapsed into them, unable to hold anything back.
My dreams were soundless and empty, and when I awoke, I felt much of the same. The inside of my chest held a hollow hole where my heart used to be, and the pain came back in an almost instantaneous wave.
After everything registered, panic set in.
I kicked off the covers and stumbled to my feet, nearly falling to my knees in my haste to get to the hallway. My jeans felt tight on my legs, the waistband eating into my stomach from sleeping in them all night. “Mom!” I called, voice still rough with sleep. “Mom, how did I fall asleep?”
As I reached the hallway, I saw her. She was slumped at the kitchen table, her arm knocking over a container of glitter, spilling it onto the table. Dozens of snowflakes lay scattered around her, some even on the floor. Her eyes were shut in a blissful state of sleep.
Now my heart ached for an entirely different reason. As I counted the snowflakes, I found she’d finished the number I needed. With all the ones I’d completed and the ones Mom had finished last night, I had a total of 150 glittery, sparkly, wintry snowflakes. Perfect decorations for a snowflake dance.
“Thank you, Mom,” I whispered, bending down and pressing my lips to her forehead, something she did to me many times before. “Thank you, a million times. I love you.”
I ran back to my room to get ready for school, my heart thumping heavily in my chest.
Even though I’d woken up without my alarm clock, I made it to the bus stop just as the yellow slug pulled to a stop, its doors opening wide. I stumbled on, my stack of snowflakes pressed securely against my chest. Nothing would happen to these babies. For so long I’d called them “stupid snowflakes,” but not anymore. I’d give my life before I let anything happen to them.
And no, that wasn’t too dramatic.
Grisham Street was one of the first stops in the morning, so the bus was relatively empty. As I settled into my familiar section in the back, the one with doodles carved into the seat in front of it, I found myself unable to sit completely still. This was the seat Elijah and I used to share before he started using Terry’s truck. It made me feel even worse.
The nerves that stewed in my system had my stomach churning. I pressed my cheek against the cool glass of the bus window, not caring how unsanitary it might be. It felt grounding, and that was just what I needed.
Even though I had my snowflakes done, I knew this day was going to suck. I’d have to walk into school and sit next to Elijah in homeroom, pretending like nothing had happened.
But everything had happened. And I didn’t know if I could look at him ever again.
I leaned harder against the window, rocking as the bus ran into potholes, using the pain to distract myself from crying.
I stopped by Mrs. Keller’s room first to give her my snowflakes personally, but she wasn’t there. Instead of risking leaving them on her desk—this was my green light for graduation, after all—I sealed my snowflakes in my locker and went directly to my first period class fifteen minutes early, keeping my head down. Though I so badly wanted to find Eloise, I wasn’t going to risk running into Elijah in the hallway, walking in with Savannah.
Though the noise rose to its peak that morning, no one spoke to me in the hallways, which was a blessing. As I settled into my usual seat and laid out my pencil and school planner, I felt the nervous jitters of my pulse begin to pick up.
Time slowly passed and more students filtered into the room, finding their seats. He was going to walk in any second. Until, that is, Mrs. Maples called my name. I felt like I was about to have a panic attack. “Remi?” she said, and I looked up to find her hanging up her phone. “They want you in the office.”
Me? What did they want me for? And before school even started? My mind raced with possibilities. Maybe Principal Martinez saw how poorly I was doing in art and she just wanted to go over my grade. She probably just didn’t know about the extra credit assignment.
I gathered my stuff, trying to slip out as quickly as possible, but couldn’t manage to get my heartbeat under control.
As I made my way down the hall to the office, I kept my head down, knowing that he could walk past me any minute. Had he told Savannah about what happened? Was he even going to?
“Hi, someone wanted to see me?” I asked the secretary as I came up to the desk, glancing around.
She had her glasses propped on her nose and had to tip her head down to look at me over them. “Have a seat,” she said in a firm voice, turning back to her computer. Totally unfriendly. Although the last time we interacted, I had lied to her. I couldn’t blame her for giving me the cold shoulder. “Principal Martinez will be with you shortly.”
I sat down in one of the stiff green chairs pressed against the wall, where the misfits sat when they were waiting to get a “stern talking-to” from the big gal in charge. I felt out of place among the chairs. Even though detention and I weren’t strangers, I was never there for behavioral reasons. My detentions were almost always because I was late.
Seriously, all this anxiety had to be shaving years off my life. I was going to sue.
Principal Martinez’s door opened and she came into the office space, her eyes immediately finding mine. Her expression wasn’t at all friendly. “Miss Beaufort,” she said curtly, causing my heart to sink further. “Come inside.”
I rose on wobbly knees and walked inside the office, a place I’d only been a handful of times. To my surprise, Mrs. Keller sat in one of the two chairs placed on either side of the principal’s desk, not meeting my gaze. Was this where she’d been this morning when I went to drop off my snowflakes? What was going on?
I glanced between the two ladies uneasily. “Is this about my grade? Because I know it’s low, but Mrs. Keller and I worked out a way to raise it so I could graduate.”
“Sit down, Miss Beaufort,” Principal Martinez said, her voice, like the secretary’s, unpleasant and commanding. It sent me to the seat without another word. She sat at her own desk and folded her hands on top, watching me. They both were quiet for a long time, and it almost felt as if they were waiting for me to speak first. “Miss Beaufort, do you know why you’re in my office?”
“No,” I answered honestly. “I mean, is it about my grades?”
“It is about your grades. About your art grade, to be more specific.” Principal Martinez glanced to my side. “Mrs. Keller spoke to me of the arrangement you two had made to gain some extra credit.”
I glanced to my right, confused why Mrs. K still wouldn’t look at me. “She’s saving my senior year, honestly.”
“She attempted to,” Principal Martinez said, “at least, until you tried to take it into your own hands and change your grade.”
My eyebrows slammed together. “Whoa, wait. Excuse me?”
“Yesterday, while Mrs. Keller went on her lunch break, your grade was altered. Someone went into her grade book and changed yours.” She pulled a sheet of paper from the edge of her computer and handed it to me. “From a fifty-six to a seventy-two.”
The two grades were circled in red ink, as if I wouldn’t have been able to notice the giant jump in numbers. I blinked at it, trying to comprehend what I was seeing, what Principal Martinez was saying.
“The time it was changed was eleven-oh-two,” she went on, “precisely your lunch hour. I spoke to the cafeteria monitor, and she said that you requested to go to Mrs. Keller’s room halfway through the period.”
Now my head jerked up. “I thought you wanted to see me,” I said, adding emotion into my words. I turned to Mrs. Keller, trying to catch her eye. “I didn’t change my grades.”
She pursed her lips. “Elijah comes into the art room sometimes to work during his lunch period,” Mrs. Keller said, not speaking to me but to the air. “I leave the art room open for him and any other students during that time. Remi knows that.”
The crappy thing was that I wouldn’t have known that, not before Tuesday when I hurried to finish my sculpture last minute. But she’d seen me stay in her room when she left for lunch. “I know it looks bad,” I said, folding the paper, the numbers starting to make me feel sick, “but I swear it’s not like that. I have all 150 of the snowflakes finished. They’re in my locker, I can go get them—”
Principal Martinez cut me off by lifting her palm. “I’ve already been informed by several of your teachers of your love for tall tales, Miss Beaufort. We have a zero-tolerance policy for cheating, especially of the lengths you went to. There is no excuse.”
