Diana and I were at the diner, drinking cup after cup of watery coffee. Diana looked down into her mug, her hair falling over her cheeks. “Stop, Markos. It was one stupid day.”
I wanted to reach over and brush Diana’s hair behind her ear, but clenched my hands around my mug instead, burning them. “I should’ve gone to the carnival with you. I should’ve been fucking normal.”
“It was too weird. Your brother and Kay . . .”
Later I had asked Cal if he was dating Kay, and he’d laughed and said no. But he’d gone to the carnival with her like it was no big deal. Why the hell couldn’t I do the same thing?
“Goddamn Ari and her goddamn money,” I said.
“Don’t blame Ari. She’s going through stuff, too.”
“Is that what I’m doing? Going through stuff?”
Diana didn’t answer, which was its own answer. I had to blame someone for how bad I felt, for how stupid I’d acted, and there was Ari, “going through stuff.” It couldn’t have been me being an asshole for no reason.
“Do you think Ari got it somewhere else? The money, I mean?”
“I doubt it.”
It had been less than a week since Ari had asked me for five thousand dollars and told me she’d spent what I’d given Win, and though it was embarrassing to admit, it still bothered me. Actually it would’ve been embarrassing to admit to anyone but Diana. I could vent to her about it all day and she wouldn’t mind.
“It pisses me off that she thinks she can come in after however long and ask me for something like that. It’s like she thinks because Win loved her, I owe her something.”
“There’s got to be something else going on,” Diana said.
“Like what? Gambling addiction? Bad real estate investment?”
“She must’ve really needed it, that’s all. Maybe it had something to do with New York.”
“You give her way too much credit. She’s barely talked to you at all this summer.”
Diana raised an eyebrow. “You know the reason Ari and I became friends in the first place? She told me this a few years ago. I was the only one in fourth grade who didn’t ask her anything about her parents, ever, but who still stuck around. The last thing she wanted to do was talk, and I was always too scared to bring it up, so we’ve been best friends ever since.”
“You . . . don’t seem scared anymore.”
Diana looked up at me sharply, and I held my breath and leaned carefully back in my seat. Casual. Arms resting on the back of the booth.
“I mean,” I said, and forced my voice not to shake. “You’re not the worst person in the world to talk to.”
I couldn’t stop myself from making eye contact and then I was falling into the big dark pit, disappearing, but in a good way.
“Thank you,” she said, but it sounded strange and far away, like sonar underwater, pinging in the darkness: There I was. There she was.
I couldn’t speak.
Ever since the bonfire I kept seeing her, day after day, and I still didn’t touch her. It got to the point where I wasn’t pretending to myself that I didn’t want to anymore. Sometimes when I was with her I started staring at her—any part, really, like a shoulder—and I went into a total fucking fugue state just thinking about that shoulder, how soft her skin must be and the two freckles and how the shoulder is close to the neck and her mouth and her breasts and how it might taste or how she might shiver if I kissed it right. I mean I was gone. Brain wiped. Desperate.
But I didn’t do anything. Maybe the not doing anything made it worse. Maybe this was what it was like for guys who were homely or only talked about video games—maybe they went around hungry all the time, so that by the time they talked to a girl for real they were too starved for touch to get a word out.
I could talk to her—god, I talked and talked like an asshole. But the longer it went on the more it felt simultaneously like I had to kiss her and that I’d never be able to. And yet instead of doing anything about it—either kissing her, which I was reasonably sure she wanted, or cutting her off and hanging out with someone else, which I knew I didn’t want—I kept calling and picking her up and watching TV and getting smoothies.
It was pathetic.
And—okay. I’ll be honest, even though this was the most pathetic thing yet. It wasn’t entirely true that I hadn’t touched her. Nothing serious had happened, but when it was night and we were in my basement watching a movie, we sat next to each other on the couch and we—I can’t believe I’m saying this, please avert your eyes—we held hands.
HAND HOLDING. I HELD DIANA NORTH’S TINY SOFT PERFECT FUCKING DELICATE WARM HAND.
DAMN IT!
So we went to the diner, because I knew if I sat in the basement with her hand in mine again I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the movie and I wouldn’t be able to be anything but a weak coward, so it was better to be out at the diner where talking was what’s expected.