“No, I don’t think you’re going to say amazing. I think you were going to say enormous and gross and misshapen, like something you dug up that might one day come alive and destroy humanity.”
“Dude, you can come up with all the great movie premises you want, I’m never going to give in to such a blatant fish for compliments. Compliments that you do not need, I might add. I mean, of the two of us, you are not the one who spent high school feeling like the blob.”
She turned back to him, still laughing.
Then stopped dead the second she saw his face.
He was serious, somehow. Really deadly serious.
And he kept on being serious, all through his next little speech.
“Yeah, but you totally get now that I never meant any of that shit. Whereas I know for a stone-cold fact that my size still completely freaks you out. In my dorm room you couldn’t get away fast enough—and the same thing just happened here. As soon as you realized how close I was you swam away. You even turned as soon as I stood up, like my body burned out your eyes.”
“I was just trying to get out of my jeans,” she said.
Then she wrestled with the buttons, to make it look like the truth. She even got her arm out of one sleeve of her sweater, to back it up—but could see it was having no real effect. He looked almost morose. He’d submerged every inch of his torso, as though her eyes on him were just a little too much. Her eyes on him, Tate Sullivan, the guy who’d once made her attempt to cut off her love handles with a pair of scissors.
It was incredible, unbelievable, infuriating.
Yet the ache to tell him otherwise remained.
“And besides, your body doesn’t burn out my eyes, Tate. I doubt it could ever do that to anyone, considering you’re a six-foot-five-inch athlete in the prime of his life.”
“What difference does being an athlete make?”
“Oh come on. You know what kind of difference it makes. Just look at the way girls drool all over your hot bod constantly. I swear to god the other day some babe tried to take an up-skirt picture of you, even though you weren’t wearing a skirt. Last Tuesday this incredibly hot cheerleader asked me if I would be interested in getting you involved in a threesome. And when I told her that we aren’t even doing a twosome, she said: ‘Come on, no one on earth could spend that much time with him without at least sucking his cock.’?”
“Yeah, but that’s not the same. They all like the gigantic meat head and the enormous pecs and the total lack of any visible neck. They find it super hot, whereas you kind of gag over it.”
“And their opinion is the one that matters. Mine doesn’t.”
“Feels like it does though. I don’t want you to find my body gross.”
Now he was almost up to his neck in the water.
Apparently, hiding his nipples wasn’t enough.
“I don’t, Tate. I really don’t find it gross at all.”
“Boring, then. Boring and stupid.”
“I don’t think muscles can be boring and stupid.”
“No, but they make the people who have them look that way. They make you look like a big, lumbering oaf or….” He paused, clearly struggling. Though it was only after the next part that she realized why, exactly. “Or like some brainless lunkhead,” he finished.
And then it hit her, hard and right in the heart.
That was what she had called him.
“Oh, like that means anything coming from a brainless lunkhead,” she had said, shaky and over her shoulder, while running away. But even so, it was there. And more important, it had affected him. It had affected him so strongly that he still remembered it now. She had thought he would just shrug it off, that it would mean nothing to him, but it had.
It was making him hide right now, his face the only thing visible above the waterline. And when she drifted close, he was the one who backed away. He was the one who seemed shy now.
“I was just trying to get back at you, Tate.”
“I know that. I know. I don’t think you did anything wrong. It’s just now I can’t help wondering…is that how you see me? Do you still see me that way sometimes? Like at the party, I caught you looking at me. And your expression seemed to say ‘Oh look at that dumbass with his dumb jock friends.’?”
“Probably because that’s what I did think—until you came over and were as cool to me as you were in the library. Because you know I was still afraid then. I still thought that maybe you would just switch back to the guy you were before, now that it wasn’t just you and me. But can you blame me? This guy, the one I’m talking to now, the one who admits mistakes and says sorry and has epic conversations with me about Dirty Dancing…I’ve only just met him. I don’t have four years of experiences with him to lean into.”
“I wish you did. I wish I hadn’t wasted so much time in high school.”
“In what way do you think you wasted your time?”
She expected him to hesitate then. To give her a chance to prepare herself for what was coming.
But he didn’t. He just came right out with it, like he’d always had it locked and loaded.