Page 14

He rubs the back of his neck, eyes intense. “Shit, Jess. It’s so damn good to see you,” he ends on an exhale. He’s looking at me as if he’s been searching for me every single day of the past eight years we’ve spent apart.

And I’m sure that’s what I’ll be telling our kids someday, when I tell them the story of how we found each other again after all these years and fell madly in love—for the second time in a lifetime.

But that thought strikes me down as if I’ve been hit by a bolt of lightning, because:What if he already has kids?

In reality, I know next to nothing about this man standing in front of me. Not anymore. For all I know, he could already have a wife and kids, and a nanny and a dog and a white-picket fence, and a big, giant house and a who the hell knows what else, but I can’t stick around and find out. And his hands are in his pockets, and I can’t see if he’s wearing a wedding band on his finger. And I should have dug deeper when I saw him online, except that I couldn’t bear to do it then either.

But that’s okay. I take a deep breath.It’s okay. Because I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know how much happier he is with his life without me in it.

My god,this was such a mistake. Standing here with him, soaking in every little detail and difference between the Greyson I used to know and this stranger in front of me, who doesn’t feel anything like a stranger at all. Seeing his smile and letting it wash over me. Hearing his voice. The way it’s changed and deepened after all of these years.

It’s too much. It’s all too much, and I can’t do this.

I fumble with a hasty goodbye and make a quick exit, running the entire two blocks back to my house, iced mocha long forgotten. Tears stream down my face, my neck, my arms.

Such a mistake.A lapse in judgement that twists and churns my stomach with the pain of regret, with all of the mistakes I made back then, too.

Because that’s the thing about mistakes. Some of them you learn from, and some of them you grow from, and some of them even make you a better human being in the end. But sometimes we spend our entire lives running from the ones we can never escape.

Thirteen Before

SOMETHING I HADnoticed about Greyson pretty quickly…was that he made me laugh. A hell of a lot more than I was used to. And it was the real kind of laughter, too. The kind that plants a tiny seed of light inside your soul and lingers there for a while. It was just so easy for him, so effortless, to dig through the muck and climb right up and over my walls and casually take a seat next to my heart as if it were no big deal.

And the funny thing is, I didn’t even notice it at first—how happy I was around him. I just knew that I was drawn to him, that there was nothing in this world I’d ever liked more than the way I felt when I was with him.

It’s how I’d managed to keep my attraction to him to myself since the night he’d drawn the friendship line in the theoretical sand between us. Because surprisingly enough, whatever it was that we did have, it wasn’t worth losing because of how badly I wanted him.

I kept reminding myself of this as I watched him worrying his lip between his teeth.

He was sitting across from me, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, his eyes glued to the notebook that sat on the table between us. We were in the library working on our poetry assignment, and I was having the hardest time keeping my eyes off of his mouth.A mouth I was going to draw the shit out of later.I could fill an entire sketchbook with those lips alone, really.

He had no clue, though, seeing as how he was the only one of us two actually focused on the assignment in front of us.

“This is shit, isn’t it?” he asked suddenly, looking up from his notebook.

I shrugged. “I mean, yeah, sort of. But like, unicorn shit. All pretty and glittery on the outside, but when you get down to it…it’s still shit.”

He laughed, andmy god,the way he laughed. Deep, and throaty, and genuine. I wanted to swallow it up and keep it as my own.

It kind of felt like mine, though. Because he’d laughed at me, at what I’d said, and he hadn’t once taken his eyes off of me the entire time. He still hadn’t. And as his green eyes penetrated mine, I couldn’t think of a single reason why I shouldn’t try to kiss him.

His laugh drifted into a sigh as he leaned back in his chair, running his hand through his hair, effectively pulling me away from that thought. “We’re never going to finish this,” he said.

I didn’t tell him that I was totally okay with that, that I liked the time it forced us to spend together—alone. I shrugged instead, saying, “Our views on it don’t exactly mesh well, but we’ll figure it out. Eventually.”

We both smiled at that, our eyes drawn to each other’s as we waded into a comfortable silence. That familiar fluttering began making its way through my body, starting at the core of my stomach. Those looks of his were going to kill me. Everyone has a breaking point, and I was way too close to mine.

As if he sensed it, he broke the contact, looking down at his things. “Can I take you somewhere?” he asked, tossing his stuff into his backpack.

Fucking duh,I almost said, but managed a slightly saner, “Sure.”

“Cool. I just need to stop by my house to grab something really quick.”

“Sounds good.” I was pretty sure I’d made a decent enough attempt at seeming calm and collected on the outside, but on the inside? I was screaming in excitement while simultaneously waving sparklers and doing cartwheels through the neighborhood of my mind.

Because,Greyson’s house!

I was going to see where Greyson lived. Maybe see where he slept. Maybe steal something of his that smelled like him to cuddle with at night.