Page 55 of Sizzle

Seeing her here, our eyes conveying so much without breathing the words we both want to say, reminds me of a night long ago. Another instance where I felt her slipping through my fingers.

Everyone in my graduating class is driving through town with their windows down, music blasting. They’re underage drinking at bonfires on the edge of their parents’ properties. Occupying their last night of high school existence with teenage debauchery as if their lives aren’t precious and fleeting.

As if they’ll live forever in this moment.

Me? I’ve been walking this trail for an hour, trying to see past this season I’m in. Trying to suss out what is next for me and how I can get what I truly want because it seems out of reach.

Sneakers scuff the red dirt of the canal path I’ve trod since I was a child, coming out here to fish or run around like an explorer with my siblings. The Delaware River trail is as familiar to me as my heartbeat, and coming here to clear my head as the sun sets is the only thing I want to do the night before I’m officially done with high school.

In two months, I’m supposed to go off to college. I’m supposed to leave my hometown and everyone I love to adventure into the unknown, and goddammit, I don’t want to do any of it. I want to stay here, on the land I was born to tend, with my family, in the small town that has become my paradise.

I want her, too, but that’s looking less and less likely with each passing hour.

Gabrielle Murphy has avoided me for so long that I’m not sure she’d recognize my face even though she sees it in her classroom every day. Tomorrow, though, at two p.m. on the dot, she no longer has to act like I don’t exist. She no longer has to pretend that I haven’t been cosmically drawn to her from the moment we first saw one another.

Tomorrow, everything could change. But this pit in my stomach tells me it won’t happen.

The sun is below the trees now, and darkness floods the trail, which doesn’t scare me. The forest song of bugs and nocturnal animals coming to life is almost a comfort.

Another sound hits my ears, that of footsteps, and it’s not odd that someone else would be out on the trail right now. It is, however, odd they’re this far out. I must have walked miles from town at this point, my thoughts consuming me and taking over any physical discomfort.

Turning, I nearly fall on my ass. Because it can’t be possible, she’s out here doing the same thing as me, at the exact same moment in time.

“Gabrielle.” I breathe, almost as if it’s a question of whether she’s real or a mirage.

The woman stops in her tracks.

She’s real. Not a fantasy brought to life by my imagination.

“You can’t be here.” It flies out of her mouth, and she slaps a hand over those full lips as if she didn’t mean to say it aloud.

I quirk an eyebrow. “This is a public canal path I’ve been walking way longer than you’ve ever lived here. So yeah, I can be here.”

“Liam …” The tone of her voice tells me that’s not what she meant, and we both should know that.

“Yeah, yeah, you want to keep pretending I don’t exist. Or that this thing between us doesn’t exist. I get it.” I’m so tired of not talking about this that I just let my tongue loose.

For this one night, this couple of minutes alone in the dark on a path that no one else will probably stumble across, I give myself permission to say everything I think.

“There is nothing between us,” Gabrielle whisper-hisses, looking around like someone might overhear us.

I throw out my arms. “There is no one here. No one to hear me when I tell you that I think about you all the time. That I think about what we could be all. The. Time. That I don’t give a fuck about three years, and that by tomorrow, it won’t even matter anymore.”

“If you really think that, you’re more immature than I thought,” she shoots back, hitting below the belt.

“Keep telling yourself that I’m just some idiot. Some off-limits kid. Because deep down, you’re scared. You’d rather follow the straight and narrow than explore this. Which, come tomorrow, will be perfectly okay to do. I’ll be out. You’ve fulfilled your duty of avoiding and acting as if I don’t exist. What you’re really scared of is that after tomorrow’s ceremony, there won’t be a reason you can keep avoiding this chemistry.”

“Will you stop it?” she hisses once more, even though the look in her eyes tells me I’m right.

I know I’m probably coming on too strong, have been for a while, but I can’t explain this. Most days, I wish I met her one year down the line. Maybe in college, where it would be perfectly normal for the two of us to fall into a relationship and never look back.

“No. No, I won’t stop, Gabrielle. Because you know just as well as I do that there is something here. Something you’ve never felt. I may not have lived as long as you or seen as much of the world, but I’m a practical person. I can recognize when something is standing right in front of me. I felt it the moment we first saw each other. The ground shifted. You had to have felt it, too. So what’re we going to do about it? Because after tomorrow, we have every right to see if we can make the earth tilt a little bit more.”

My gaze searches her face, and I watch the war in her eyes as she debates what to say. Just as I think she might answer, an owl hoots in the distance, and the spell is broken. Gabrielle’s eyes go wide in the dark, and then she turns and begins to run, actually run, in the opposite direction.

I’m left standing on the trail, my heart on my sleeve, waiting for her to take it.

I just have to trust the universe that after graduation, I can talk her into giving us a real shot. That after tomorrow, everything will change.

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