Page 44 of I Would Stay Forever
As Dean answered their question, I felt my phone buzz in my pocket and I sneakily pulled it out, hoping Mum wouldn’t notice because sometimes she could get on our case about having phones out at the table.
Zoey
Did I see you sitting with Dean at the soccer game today??
Yesterday’s lunch date really paid off huh?
It was followed by about five of the side eye emojis. I rolled my eyes, then checked that nobody was looking at me before I texted back.
Lavender
He is my brother’s best friend you know
And yesterday was NOT a date
Zoey
Suuuuuuure it wasn’t
I saw how close you two were sitting tonight. That was not a brother’s best friend type of sit.
Lavender
I don’t even know what that means
“Who are you texting?” a voice asked in my ear. I jumped and dropped the phone. It would have clattered to the floor if Dean wasn’t fast in catching it. Somehow, nobody else around the table seemed to notice the commotion. Dean slipped my phone back into my hand, then raised his eyebrows, clearly reminding me I hadn’t answered his question.
“It was just Zoey,” I whispered back. There was no way I was going to tell him what she’d said, but I knew he was going to ask, so I added, “She was just wondering if Parkhurst won the football match tonight.”
He scoffed at my use of football instead of soccer but didn’t comment on it, nor did he comment on the obvious lie about Zoey. He knew as well as I did that she would never text me about something so boring. And a moment later, Mum announced that it was getting late and we should probably head home, stopping Dean from asking anything else if he was going to.
“Which car do you two want to drive in?” Mum asked the twins, who were the only two without their own cars. It was the least cost-effective way for us to get here, but since Sebastian, Dean, and I had all driven to school separately and then Mum had to drive the twins to the game, it was how it turned out. Imogen immediately came to my side, saying that Sebastian drove like a maniac and she couldn’t do that a second time in the night. I laughed.
“You just don’t appreciate how fast I get us from point A to point B,” Sebastian said.
“I appreciate being alive,” Imogen countered.
“I’ll go with Sebastian,” Ainsley said. “We can race home.”
“Does it count as a race if you know you’re going to win?” Imogen asked.
As we started out into the cool night air, Imogen and Ainsley each hooked an arm through mine, so we walked in a line to the cars. They were both stumbling into me while I walked in the middle and tried to stay upright rather than knocking back into them. You would think they were drunk the way they were acting, but they were just happy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen them in such good moods, but I knew it had to be before Dad left.
When we got home, I was too exhausted to do anything but just head straight upstairs and collapse. My bed was beckoning me, but I knew that the moment I lay down, I wouldn’t be getting up again, so I sat in the chair by the window instead, taking a moment to relax before I got ready for sleep. I hadn’t sat there with a plan to watch the Novak’s house, but it was hard not to notice the moment Dean’s bedroom door opened and the light turned on.
My eyes locked on Dean’s figure standing in his doorway. He was looking over his shoulder, chatting to somebody—Nora or his parents, I guess—and pulling off his jacket as he did so. A minute later, he stepped inside his room fully and kicked the door closed behind him.
I always felt a little bad spying on him like this, especially since he never seemed to look into my room—either that, or I just never noticed. Our houses weren’t quite matched in height, with his window being slightly lower than mine so I assumed it was because it was more natural for me to look down toward his room than for him to look up. I wasn’t sure if I’d feel better about spying if I knew he did it too, or if I would just keep my curtains closed all the time.
He pulled his shirt off next, then disappeared in the direction of his closet, which wasn’t visible from my window. He walked back into view a minute later, now dressed only in pyjama bottoms. I was so used to his evening routine by now that I knew he would be leaving to brush his teeth, which he often did wandering around, coming in and out of his room a few times. He surprised me, though, by sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling out his phone.
I watched him curiously, the way his dark hair fell on his eyes, a slight hunch of his shoulders as he sat down, the way he was looking at his phone with single-minded focus. I wondered who he was texting. A girlfriend, maybe? Sebastian had never mentioned Dean having a girlfriend, but that didn’t mean she didn’t exist. I hoped it wasn’t that though because the mere thought of him having a girlfriend made my stomach twist painfully. I wished I could ask him, like he’d asked who I was texting in the restaurant, but how could I when he didn’t even know I could see him?
I waited a couple of minutes longer before I felt like I was a Peeping Tom staring in on his life, and I closed my curtains. I went through my whole nighttime routine, trying to push any thoughts of Dean or what he was up to out of my mind. I collapsed on my bed and went to plug my phone in—something I’d been careful to do after the horror of yesterday morning—and quickly scrolled through my notifications in case there was anything important I missed. Zoey had answered my text and I’d missed a FaceTime call from Molly while I was at the soccer match, but the notification that really caught my attention was more recent than any of them.
Dean
Thanks for hanging out with me at the soccer game today. Would have been lonely without you
