Page 6 of Choosing Her

crossy

As a hockey player, I was used to face-planting. It was a part of the sport and something I could deal with easily. What I wasn’t used to was a girl grabbing the front of my shirt in her fist and pulling me down with her as she fell backwards.

My shirt tore. I scraped my hands and arms on the cement. But worst of all, I landed on top of her—and I’m pretty sure I accidentally grabbed her in a way that was wildly inappropriate.

She groaned as I pushed myself off her as quickly as I could, trying not to hurt her anymore than I already had. As she sat up slowly, I held a hand out to help her up.

“Sorry,” I said. “Couldn’t see in the dark.”

Her hand had started reaching up to grab mine until she heard my voice, but then she froze, her fingers hovering just inches from mine. As I was about to ask if she was okay, she said, “Crossy?”

And I would recognize that voice anywhere.

Suddenly, I wanted to close the gap between our hands, knowing exactly what it would feel like—the sparks that would run up my arm, her skin that was always softer than anyone else’s, the way her nails would graze my skin.

But I didn't close the gap and neither did she. She let her hand drop back down to the ground and pulled herself up on her own, stepping into the moonlight and letting me see her in full.

I’d seen Rebecca Saylor in a variety of outfits.

There was the mini-skirt on the night we met.

The variety of bikinis across the summer.

Our school uniform that she wore better than any girl here.

And my all-time favorite, her horseback riding clothes that hugged her body in all the right places.

But tonight was the first time I ever saw her in pajamas.

They weren’t anything crazy, just a pair of flannel pants and a tiny top, but the second my eyes landed on her outfit, I couldn’t pull them away.

There was just something about Saylor that pulled me in, made me unable to think or breathe in her presence.

It was exactly why I needed to move on from her—but when she stood there looking like that, it seemed impossible.

“What are you doing here?” Saylor asked flatly.

That was the only way she spoke to me nowadays, like she wanted to keep some emotional distance between us.

I wished I could say I didn’t understand why, but unfortunately, I understood why she needed to keep the space.

She wanted to make sure I couldn’t do anything to hurt her again.

If only she knew that I never meant to hurt her in the first place.

“The guys and I were just out for dinner,” I said.

A piece of the truth, even if it wasn’t the full thing.

But how was I supposed to tell her that I was on a date?

Even though our history was long over—started and ended all within a twelve-hour period—I didn’t know if she would take it well to hear that I was going out with someone new.

Not only for her own sake but for her sister’s too.

Not that Naomi hadn’t moved on, but I’d always gotten the sense that girls had this established pact to hate the ex-boyfriends for moving on, no matter the situation.

I ran my eyes over her again, looking for a clue of what she was doing out here.

Her long brown hair fell around her face, completely un-styled, which wasn’t her usual look, and she was wearing ratty flip-flops that showed off the purple nail polish on her toes.

I grinned to myself as I wondered whether she’d picked that color in support of Hartwell during one of our recent games—not hockey, I was sure, since she hated it with a passion.

She didn’t look like she was dressed to be going out anywhere, which only left the explanation that she was going from one dorm to the other.

The thought of her spending time in some boy’s dorm, dressed in only her pajamas like she was, made my heart ache in a way it had no right to.

I’m not supposed to care about her like that anymore.

“Nice outfit,” I said. She put her hands on her hips, drawing my attention to the small strip of skin between the bottom of her shirt and the top of her pajama pants.

The skin was paler than the rest of her, like she hadn’t managed to tan it during the summer.

My eyes drifted back up to the tan lines over her shoulders, remembering all those moments in the summer I’d seen her laying in the backyard in that blue bikini she seemed to love so much.

At the time, I’d told myself I wasn’t looking, but with how clearly I could see it in my mind’s eye now, I knew I had been.

“Better than yours,” Saylor said, looking pointedly at my chest. I glanced down and saw the way the black fabric had torn where she grabbed it.

“It looked better before you tried to pull it off me,” I said. “You know, if you wanted to see me shirtless, you could have just asked.”

Saylor narrowed her eyes. “No thanks. I’ve seen it before and it wasn’t all that impressive.”

I put a hand to my heart and staggered back likeI’d been stabbed. “You wound me, Rebecca.”

“Call me Rebecca again and you’ll learn what it’s like to live without knee caps, Caleb .”

Being called by my first name didn’t bother me as much as it bothered her, mostly because it was what almost everyone outside of Hartwell called me.

Even Naomi had always called me Caleb. Crossy was just a name I’d gotten from the hockey team, since we all went by nicknames from our last names.

Levi Barrett became Bear. Michael Valentine was Tino.

Jace McIntyre was Mako. And Caleb Cross became Crossy.

When I’d met Saylor at the party, the nickname had just slipped off my tongue without me thinking.

It was like my mouth had decided for me that this girl was important enough to call me Crossy, before we even knew each other.

Behind me, Tino and Mako switched from singing Piano Man to singing O’Canada at the top of their lungs.

It was so loud that I honestly expected someone to stick their head out of the dorm windows and yell at them to shut up.

I glanced at them over my shoulder and noticed that Bear was now standing between the other two, looking like he was trying to extricate himself without getting kicked by their bizarre walking.

When I turned back to Saylor, she was watching them too, with a grin on her face.

It was so unusual for her to smile in my presence that I knew I had to jump on this opportunity.

“Want to join us?” I asked. “Still over an hour until curfew.”

It was remarkable, really, how someone could go from smiling to scowling so quickly.

Part of me wondered if I’d actually imagined the smile altogether.

Maybe I’d taken a memory from ten months ago and placed it on her now, wanting to let myself believe the girl who liked me was still in there somewhere.

Not that I thought there was any chance of her liking me romantically again.

I was pretty sure dating her sister ruined that possibility.

But I hoped that there was some piece of her willing to move past my actions following the early hours of New Year’s Day.

I hoped that she might be able to forgive and forget, if only so I could let myself move on from the guilt.

“In your dreams, Crossy,” she said.

Even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to be flirting with her, the words came out before I could stop them: “Trust me, Saylor, you’re always in my dreams.”

I regretted saying it pretty much as soon as the words were out of my mouth.

The way to get onto friendly terms with Saylor was definitely not by flirting with her.

But after being set up on so many dates in the past two weeks, I felt like my brain’s default setting was flirting and it was incredibly difficult to turn it off.

“Shall I tell my sister about that?” Saylor asked.

The jab landed exactly as it was intended, stabbing me in the gut.

It was funny how much had changed in the months since I’d lost contact with her.

There was time, back before I met Naomi, that I’d wanted to find Saylor and see if we could rekindle what we’d had at that party.

It was the wondering about it that was the worst, the question of if we could get it back.

My mom didn’t think it was possible to go back.

When I’d told her that I met a new girl and thought I might be giving up on finding Saylor, she said it was for the best. Her motto was that the only good parts of a relationship were the magical early days, when everything they did was perfect and you felt like they could do no wrong.

But it disappeared quickly as you realized the person in front of you was nothing compared to the imaginary version of them you made up in your mind.

My dad was the opposite. When I told him that I was looking for Saylor, he thought it was a good idea because sometimes, you have a gut feeling about a person.

He said that my mom was obsessed with the honeymoon phase of dating, but a long-lasting love was so much deeper and a different form of magic.

I guess that was why the two of them couldn’t make it work.

They’d broken up before I was even born and now, I couldn’t even remember a time he hadn’t been married to my step-mom, Stacey.

The two of them acted like the angel and devil on my shoulders when it came to Saylor.

There was my mom, telling me not to chase after her, because once I finally caught her again, I would realize none of it had been worth it after all.

But then there was my dad on the other side, telling me that maybe she was actually the love of my life, and I couldn’t know until I found her again.

When I did find her, I decided I had to listen to my mom, because I was not the kind of boy to go after my girlfriend’s little sister—even if she was the one I’d wanted first.

“Saylor!” Tino called as they came up to us. I cringed, not sure whether having him here would help or hurt my case. “What are you doing out here this fine evening?”

“Well, actually…” Saylor said.

She bent over to pick something up from the ground and I realized she’d been holding a bag that she must have dropped when I ran into her.

She held the canvas bag out to me and I just stared at it, not sure what she was expecting me to do with it.

The side of the bag had line art of flowers printed on it, with the words life is good written in cursive beneath it.

I couldn’t think of a single reason why she would be handing that off to me.

“It’s yours,” she said when I didn’t budge. I looked at the bag again, even though I was already sure there was no way it was mine. The more I looked at it, the less familiar it seemed. I was sure I’d never seen it before in my life.

“No, it’s not.”

“Yes, it is,” she insisted. Then she shoved the bag into my arms, not giving me a chance to refuse it. “It’s from Naomi.”

Somehow, her saying Naomi’s name in my presence was the most surprising thing that had happened this evening.

She and I didn’t speak of her sister, especially not since we got back to school.

I thought we had an unspoken agreement not to mention the past at all, since it obviously wasn’t anything either of us wanted to remember.

But if she was acting like all of this was normal, then I guess I would too.

“Naomi’s giving me a gift? How unusual. Most ex-girlfriends prefer to never speak to me again.”

“This isn’t a gift either,” Saylor said in that same flat tone. I opened the bag to peek inside. “It’s a bomb.”

My head jerked up in surprise, not at the words, but at the fact that Saylor had made a joke. To me . Since the first time we saw each other after New Year’s Eve, she’d been dry, sarcastic, cold… but she had never, not once, made a joke.

Progress .

I looked in the bag again to see what it actually was and saw some things I’d thought I’d lost—my favorite t-shirt, my old iPod touch I’d dug out over the summer, the book I’d been reading the week that Naomi and I broke up… It all had one thing in common.

“She sent you to give me back the stuff I left at your house?” I asked.

Saylor shrugged. “She didn’t want to talk to you, none of her friends know you, and she figured we see each other regularly enough that I could give it to you without it being…” Her lip curled and she ducked her chin. “Weird.”

I’d wondered a few times whether Saylor had told Naomi anything post-break-up, but this was enough to tell me that she didn’t.

Not that I was all that surprised—telling her after the break-up wouldn’t have been much better than telling her during the relationship.

If anything, it made it all less necessary because we were no longer in the uncomfortable position of having to hide it every day.

“That’s just cold, Saylor,” Tino said, peering over my shoulder into the bag. I had to agree with him, although I couldn’t say that I expected anything different from either of the Saylor sisters.

“Why didn't you just give it to me in class?” I asked.

I’d had to move around a bunch of my classes at the beginning of the year so I could re-take a math class I’d done terribly in while I was on my exchange, and that had landed me into the same first period English class as Saylor.

I maintained that it was a happy coincidence, but she looked like she was planning to murder whoever had let me into the class.

I thought it would help us get onto friendly terms and break the Saylor Curse, so I bribed the guy who normally sat next to her to switch spots with me.

When she asked him about it, he claimed it was because he couldn’t see the board well enough from the back.

She’d snapped at him to get a new glasses prescription so she wasn’t stuck with a sycophant like me.

I wasn’t sure what that meant, exactly, which I guess meant that I needed to step up my game in English as well as math.

“She wanted to get it back to you tonight,” Saylor said. She blew away a piece of hair that was falling in her eyes. “Something about not having it on her mental conscious anymore.”

“And you wanted to see me, right?” I asked with a teasing smirk. There was a flash of emotion in across her face, something that came and went so fast that I couldn’t place what it was, and she turned away from me.

“I’ll see you in class, Crossy,” she said. She jogged back to the dorms, almost losing a flip-flop in the process. I kept waiting for her to look back but she never did.