Page 6 of The Way I Am Now
I have to force myself to look away, shaking my head. “Nothing.”
“Then what’s all this grinning and sighing about?” she asks, drawing a circle in the air with her finger as she points at me.
“No, nothing. It’s just that whenever I think about you, I somehow always forget how funny you can be.” Usually, when I think of her, I’m only thinking about how sad she can get and how worried I am about her. But then I’m around her and I remember almost immediately that for all her darkness, she can be just as bright, too. I bite my lip to keep myself from saying all that out loud. Because these aren’t the kinds of things you say to a girl you used to be in love with, while you’re sitting on top of an old picnic table behind a graffitied building while drunk people randomly walk by, with a smelly rock show banging on in the background.
“You think about me?” she asks, suddenly serious.
“You know I do.”
There’s a silence, and I let it sit there between us because shehasto know that I think about her. How could she even ask me that?
For once, she’s the one to break the silence. “I wanted to text you back, you know,” she says, like she’s reading my thoughts. “I should have.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It just felt like there was too much to say, or . . .” She trails off. “Too much to say in a text, anyway.”
“You can always call me.”
“Oh, definitely too much to say in a phone call,” she adds, and even though I’m not really sure what that means, I also think I kind of understand anyway.
“I thought you might be mad at me,” I admit.
“What? Why?” she bursts out, her voice high. “How could I be mad atyou? You’re—” She stops herself.
“I’m what?”
“You . . . ,” she begins, but stops again and takes in a breath. “You’re the best person I know. It would be impossible to be mad at you, especially when you haven’t done anything wrong.”
But that’s the thing, I’m not sure anymore that I didn’t do anything wrong. “I don’t know, I worried that you might be not just mad at me, but sad or, like, disappointed in me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You know, the last time we saw each other.”
She’s shaking her head slowly like she really doesn’t know. She’s going to make me say it. “How I kissed you,” I finally announce. “I thought about it later—a lot, actually. And under the circumstances, with everything that was going on, that was probably the last thing you needed. And then everything I said to you. Given the situation, it was pretty messed up, not to mention just the worst, stupid, terrible timing, and I thought maybe I made you feel uncomf—”
“Wait, wait, stop,” she interrupts. “I thoughtIkissed you.”
I don’t know what to say. I think back to my room, four months ago, and it’s suddenly a blur of hands and mouths and exhaustion and desperation and emotions running high, higher than ever, and now I’m kind of not sure who kissed who, who reached for who first.
But her laugh interrupts my thoughts. It’s loud and sharp and clear. “And here I was feeling like the inappropriate one.”
“Inappropriate?” I laugh too. “Why?”
“Kissing you after you explicitly told me you had a girlfriend—a serious girlfriend,” she adds, using my own stupid words against me. “Could’ve saved myself some shame spiraling if I’d known you were to blame this whole time.”
She’s joking around, I know, but that word.Shame. Her voice sort of snags on it, like a thorn. It’s not a casual word you use if it’s not really there under the surface. So, I know this isn’t the time to confess the whole truth about my girlfriend—ex-girlfriend—or that we broke up that night,becauseof that night.
“All my fault,” I say instead, laughing along with her. “I take full responsibility.”
There’s a chorus of cheering from the crowd on the other side of this wall, but there couldn’t be anything more exciting going on inside than what’s going on out here right now.
“Well, fuck, Josh.” She throws her hands up. “This is just classic us all over again, isn’t it?”
Classic us. I hate that I love the way that sounds.
EDEN
