knuckles. Then he’s motionless. Expressionless. I’d rather not speak, or remember it at all, but—I have to say it. Tell him.
“Sleeping with Spence,” I say.
His eyes, so straightforward and honest a second ago, go distant again. He picks at his thumbnail, jaw tight. When he finally says something, his voice is so soft I have to lean forward to hear it.
“Yeah . . . you . . . uh . . . what was that about?”
“Aside from me just being idiotic?” I sigh. “I was . . .”
Drunk. Scared. Hurt. Feeling out of place. Crumble lined. All true, but . . . “Trying to hurt you.”
He’s had his head bent over that fascinating nail, but now he looks me in the eye, his voice flat and hard as his eyes. “Mission accomplished.”
My stomach clenches.
I felt stupid about what happened with Alex. I ached about how things ended at Cass’s party. I was ashamed about Spence.
But in this moment, it’s as though I have never truly experi-enced, or cared about, any of those emotions before, as though the volume has been cranked up on all of them to the Nth degree. I’ve been dumb with boys. Thoughtless, casual, stupid.
But I was mean to Cass.
All this time I thought what stood between us was what he did to me. How I couldn’t and shouldn’t forgive it—him being that guy. When all along I was ignoring what I did back to him.
How I didn’t want to admit that I’d been that girl.
I feel my nose tickle, tears prick the back of my throat. My voice is thick. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
It’s quiet all around us. So hushed. I can hear my own heart.
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His head’s ducked. I can see the flicker of his pulse in the hollow of his throat, marking out the seconds of silence between us.
Then, slowly, he raises his head, takes his thumb, touches away my tears, smiling just a little, and I know this time it is a romantic gesture because my mascara is long gone.
“Me too,” he says.
I take a deep breath, as though I’m about to leap off a bridge.
That’s exactly what this feels like—catching my breath, hold-ing it, leaping, sinking down, trusting something will propel me back to the surface.
“So . . . I hurt you. You hurt me. Any chance we can get past that?”
Cass looks down for a moment, takes a breath. I hold mine.
“Well . . .” he says slowly. “You’d have to promise . . .”
I nod.
Yes.
I do.
I promise.
“. . . that you really are past the lobsters.”
I smile. “Lobsters? What lobsters?”
Cass laughs.
I wait for him to lean forward, but instead he inclines back, raises an eyebrow at me.
My turn again.
After everything, still, it takes every single bit of courage I have to do what I do next. But I take it, use it, and tip forward to kiss first one dimple, then the other, then those smiling lips.
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Chapter Twenty-nine
The sky’s gone clear, washed with stars that glitter like mica.
The night feels clean and peaceful. Cass is walking me home.
Of course. We’re both tired and yawning by now, quiet, but a whole different quiet than on the walk to the beach, or back to the Field House. Strange how silence can do so many different things.
We’re close enough that I can feel the warmth radiating off his body, but not touching, not holding hands the way we had up the hill. I find myself waiting for that again, for him to take my hand. Something that simple. A bridge between us.
Instead, he tips his head to the deep bowl of the night, where the clouds have already scudded away. A tiny light glitters in the distance, flickers. Fireflies. Like stars around us.
“The first maps were of the sky,” I quote.
“That’s right,” he says. “You remember that?”
Yes.
“That you had your theories on why. You thought they’d have been too busy escaping the mastodons, or whatever, to look up and want to draw what they saw.”
“Maybe it reminded them there was more to life than mastodons?” Cass says.
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I move a little closer, graze the back my hand against him.
But still, nothing.
More to life than what you are scared of. I reach out, this second time, no mixed messages, interlace my fingers with his.
I don’t know if Cass knows that pulling off my shirt was easier for me to do than this . . . or apologizing about Spence.
But I think he might, because his fingers tighten on mine.
Now we’re crunching up my driveway. The lantern outside the door is tipped crazily to the side, one orangey bulb lit, flickering, the other burnt out. I can hear Nic’s voice in my head, “Gotta fix that. ” And Dad getting on him for not having done it already.
Cass leans down, turning to me. I feel a buzzing in my ears.
One ear, actually. He brushes his hand next to my cheek, into my hair, pulls.
“Ow!”
“Sorry.” He opens his hand, smiles. “Firefly. You caught one.”
The dark spot on his palm stays there a moment, then gleams and lifts into the sky. Then Cass pulls me slightly to my tiptoes, as though I’m much shorter than he is, as though I weigh nothing at all, and kisses me thoroughly. “G’night, Gwen. See you tomorrow.”
It’s Christmas.
Or it feels like it.
The instant my eyes snap open, I get that jolt of adrenaline, that tight thrill, the sense that this day can’t help but be mag-ical.
Except that waking up on December twenty-fifth on Seashell 310
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