I raised my eyebrows. “Are we fighting?”
“I don’t know,” he said, holding the door open. We crossed the sidewalk to the Jeep and climbed inside. “You tell me.”
I thought about it for a second, about the night in the restaurant and how he’d totally shut down on me as soon as I said Allie’s name. “No,” I said after a minute. I reached into the grocery bag and fumbled around until I produced one fat pomegranate. “I think we’re good.” Then, taking a deep breath and cracking it open with my thumbnails: “Do you miss her?”
Sawyer hadn’t been expecting that from me, that was for sure. I hadn’t been expecting it, either—normally I was the one who didn’t want to talk about painful stuff—but it felt like one of us had to say it. I looked up and watched six different expressions play over Sawyer’s face: surprise, sorrow, something I thought looked a lot like guilt. Finally he settled on mild irritation. “Of course I do,” he said, in a voice like on second thought maybe we were fighting after all. “Seriously, what kind of question is that?”
I shrugged, defensive. “Well, I know—”
“We were in a fight when it happened,” Sawyer interrupted roughly. “So.” He shrugged once, all shoulders like he hadn’t wanted to admit that and was annoyed I’d gotten it out of him. He didn’t look at me as he put the car in drive. “Take from that what you will.”
I blinked. “Fighting about what?” I blurted before I could stop myself. For all the mental energy I’d spent on the idea of Sawyer and Allie together, I’d never pictured them arguing. I thought of the night he’d kissed me, the sense I’d gotten like there was something he’d wanted to say and hadn’t. “I mean, not that it’s any of my business, I just—”
“Whatever.” Sawyer shook his head, decisive. “It’s not important. Talking about it doesn’t change anything.” A beat later, though, as if maybe he’d reconsidered: “Do you miss her?”
“I—” I broke off, tried to think how to explain it. This was my best friend since preschool we were talking about: the girl whose snack and math homework I’d shared since before I had memorized my own phone number, who’d buried her cold, annoying little feet underneath me during a thousand different movie nights and showed me how to use a tampon. She’d grown up in my kitchen, she was my shadow self—or, more likely, I was hers—and now she was gone forever. I wondered again how much Allie had told him about why she and I had stopped being friends.
“Yeah,” I said to him finally. “Yeah, I miss her a lot.”
Sawyer nodded, visibly uncomfortable. Talking about it doesn’t change anything, he’d said; normally I would have agreed wholeheartedly, but there was something about Allie that was different. It seemed to me she was sitting in the car with us, flesh and blood and her feet up on the backseat, complaining about the radio. I wondered how it was possible that Sawyer didn’t feel that way, too.
I was working up the guts to push him a little bit further when he pulled over suddenly, the Jeep grinding to an abrupt stop on the side of the road. We were still four or five blocks away from the restaurant.
“What are you doing?” I asked, a little shrill.
He laughed and shrugged and just like that we were normal again, like he didn’t like the trajectory of the conversation and had decided to bend it to his will. “I’m going to eat my damn pomegranate.”
“You’re out of your mind,” I said, but I dug into the bag again and handed it over. I felt Allie slip out through the back door, leaving Sawyer and me alone in the car again, just the two of us.
“Possibly,” he agreed. “How do I eat this?”
“Just bust it open and eat the seeds.”
I watched carefully as he did it, was relieved when he smiled a moment later. “Tastes like fruit punch.” He ate thoughtfully for a moment, then: “So how come you don’t have a boyfriend?”
I almost choked. “What?”
“You heard me.”
“Who says I don’t have a boyfriend?”
He raised his eyebrows. There was a day’s worth of stubble on his chin and pomegranate juice on his bottom lip. “Do you?”
“No,” I admitted. I picked a bit at the skin of the pomegranate, digging at it with my nail. “But give me a little credit, at least. Theoretically, I could have one.”
“Theoretically, you could,” he agreed. “But why don’t you?”
“Because I’m cold and unfriendly.”
Sawyer laughed, slung one arm behind the headrest of the passenger seat. Out the window, cars whizzed by, dozens of strangers going about their business, totally oblivious to whatever it was that might be happening inside Sawyer’s Jeep. “No, you’re not.”
“Oh, I am,” I said. “Ask anybody. An ice queen, even.”
“No, you’re not.” He was serious now. “You just hold yourself back, is all. It’s kind of … intriguing.”
“Right,” I managed, shaking my head.
“Why can’t you take a compliment?”
“Why do you ask so many questions?” I fired back.
“Why do I make you blush so much?”
“You don’t!” I put my hand to my cheek. Sure enough, it was burning hot beneath my palm. “Crap,” I said, embarrassed. Still, I shifted my body toward him in the passenger seat, pulled one knee up to rest my chin on. I wanted to see where this conversation was going.
“Ice queens don’t blush,” Sawyer said matter-of-factly, like he was pleased with himself. “Ergo: You’re not an ice queen.”
I rolled my eyes. “How scientific.”
Sawyer shrugged. “It’s just logic. So who do you like?”
“Who do I like?” I laughed, knowing he enjoyed making me uncomfortable. Enjoying it myself. “What are we, in sixth grade?”
“Humor me.”
“I don’t like anybody.”
“Nobody?”
“Nope. Ice queen.”
“Stop saying that. I don’t believe you. Everybody likes somebody.”
“Okay,” I said, hoping the deep breath I took wasn’t audible. “Well, then, who do you like?”
“No fair,” he said. “I asked you first.”
I shook my head. “I am not having this conversation with you.”
“You’re blushing again,” he said cheerily, extracting a few more seeds from the pale rind of the pomegranate. Out the window, the sun shimmered white. He put one sticky hand on my cheek and tilted my face forward, confident, and when he kissed me it was sugar-sweet and magenta, like something I’d lived near all my life but never tried.
“Ice queen,” he muttered when it was over, like he’d set out to prove his point and been successful. “I don’t buy it, Reena. Not for a second.”