Page 45 of Tilly in Technicolor
I laugh way too loudly to feign not knowing what he’s talking about. “Write?” I say, unconvincingly. “What would I be writing?”
Ollie tilts his head, mirroring me. “I’m not exactly sure, but I’ll admit I’m endlessly curious.”
My heart stutters in my chest. I’ve been hoping myself into delusion that Oliver forgot whatever he read on my laptop back in Milan. The only way I can function is by convincing myself that he doesn’t know I’ve been writing and hasn’t read a single word.
But, in classic Oliver fashion, he’s boldly and bluntly torn that dream to shreds.
“I write about my brain,” I whisper, a secret I didn’t know I was going to admit. But something about Ollie and his eyes like honey and the gentle earnestness of the way he talks to me makes me want to tell him everything.
Ollie’s gaze travels to my forehead like he can see the organ in question. “What about it?”
I let out a nervous giggle and try not to mess with my hair. “How it’s frustrating sometimes. Fun and creative other times. How its wires and circuit boards are different from neurotypicals and that changes how I see the world.”
“You talk about your brain like it’s a separate entity.”
Oh God, I really want to stop with these nervous giggles that make me sound like I’m twelve. “That’s how it feels sometimes. Like I have this unruly toddler or creative mastermind renting out a room up here,” I add, tapping my temple. “Do you ever feel like that?”
Ollie continues to stare at my forehead, and all I can do is pray I don’t have any new zits cropping up.
“I think I do,” he says at last.
He doesn’t elaborate, but I don’t need him to. He’s given me enough.
“So, did you, er, want to work together?” he asks after a moment, rubbing his palm across the back of his neck.
“Yes,” I practically shout at him, scrambling off the bed and to the doorway. He steps aside as I go through. Scanning my messy half of the room for my laptop, I find it cracked open on the floor between my bed and the wall, and I snatch it up, turning to see where Ollie’s going to sit.
It’s then that I realize he’s rearranged some of the furniture, situating the room’s small desk next to a pulled-out nightstand. He’s dragged his bed out a bit so one corner acts as a seat he’s using now, the desk chair open next to him.
My heart bounces up to my throat as I walk to the setup.He crams his knees against the nightstand, twisting his lower half so he can fit. So I can have the chair. Why does all of this make me feel like I’m going to cry?
I sit down next to him, opening my laptop and waking it up. I feel Ollie glance my way, and my impulse is to shield my screen so he can’t see my messy draft of a Babble post. But I don’t do it. I don’t hide the thing that makes me happy. The thing I love doing. I let him be a sneaky-sneak and look all he wants.
He reads over my shoulder for a few minutes, and my fingers are stiff and hesitant to write, but it also feels… good. Like instead of seeing my words, he’s seeingme.And maybe, just maybe, he likes what he sees.
Eventually, he turns to his own laptop and we slowly drift into our work, the clicks and taps of our laptops a sweet melody that’s uniquely our own. We sit in parallel worlds, the edges of our bubbles gently touching each other.
I’m not sure how long we work for but, eventually, I come to the end of what I was writing, blinking away from my screen for the first time in too long. I smile, an indulgent, satisfied smile, at what I wrote. I talked about traveling, about the stimulation and sensory overload of it. Putting in hints of the chaotic moments Ollie and I have shared on planes or trains. Even though it talks about things that are hard, it feels… fun. Like joy was pulled even from the hardest moments.
I look over at Ollie, the intense lines and angles of his sharp profile. I swallow down a small gasp when I see his screen.
He’s editing a photo of me, leaning close to the screen, lip caught between his teeth as he slides the mouse around. This shouldn’t surprise me; conceptually, I know he takes and edits all the photos Ruhe uses for their social media. But seeing him studying me so intensely, with that powerful focus centered on my face…
It has me feeling so much, all at once. Like my chest will crack from every emotion buzzing through my veins. I glance back at Ollie’s face to confirm he’s still solidly in his own world. Then I type something on my laptop. Something dangerous and scary and disastrous.
I think I like Oliver Clark.
I delete it immediately, but it doesn’t matter. The impact still stands. Those six simple words are true and have me tied up in knots.
Any hope of convincing myself that I don’t have feelings for Oliver is crumpled up into a little ball and tossed out the window.
Chapter 22Get the Butter!
OLIVER
Editing photos of Tilly has become a hyperfixation of late. Even when I’m taking pictures of Tilly—I mean, Tilly’s nails—my own fingers are itching to get to the computer, to play with settings, manipulate colors. Try to capture then convey the light that Tilly has. I work on edits way more than is necessary, and I’m worried about what I’ll do when this summer is over and I have no more reason to spend hours editing images of her.
Luckily, I get paid for this new obsession, and I hope that makes it all look less painfully creepy whenever Mona or Amina sees me working on them, which is pretty much all the time. But having Tilly sit next to me, glancing at me while I work, is a unique sort of meta weirdness even I have the social instinct to feel awkward about. There’s no stopping hyperfocus, though, so I carry on.
