Page 24 of Drawn Together

Eighteen

Word of the day: cafuné

Definition: the act of tenderly running your fingers through the hair of someone you love

My feet tuck under my butt as I squish down in the tiny hall closet, like a ninja waiting on her enemy's arrival. We are three bottles of wine down between the six of us and someone—I don’t remember who, but I have a feeling it was Stephan—had the excellent idea of us playing ‘sardines.’ Which, as they described it, is basically backwards hide and seek, where one the person hides and everyone else searches.

When someone finds you, you both have to hide until everyone is eventually back together.

We have already done two trial runs, but Margot was hiding the first time, and when Lennon got close to her hiding spot, she started hysterically laughing and shouting that she had to pee.

Then there was Stephan, who hid behind the living room curtains and the game was over before it could even begin.

Lennon said, “The smartest in the room needs to do it.” And just as I turned to point at Fletcher, everyone else pointed at me. I tried to argue, but Fletcher shook his head and pushed those round frame glasses up his strong bridge. “Flora, no question.”

Hence, the closet.

Feet keep shuffling back and forth and when Noah says “Has anyone checked the hall closet?” Margot responds, “Duh, I checked there first.”

She didn’t. She checked the half bath beside me and said, again, she had to pee. I think at least one bottle of the missing wine was due to her.

The door cracks open, and I jump in my skin, knees tucked to my chest.

Fletcher smiles, and it’s a goofy one. All wobbly and silly, and it makes me giggle. He dips down to the ground beside me, feet pulled in tight. He looks so young like this.

“Hi,” he whispers.

“Hi,” I whisper back.

The others’ voices slide down toward the nearest bedroom, so Fletcher leans forward to close the door before settling in to wait.

This closet is far bigger than any of the ones in our apartment, but it’s still a closet, so when the sides of our thighs graze one another, my arms erupt in goosebumps.

“They talk so loud,” he whispers.

“Because of the wine?”

“No, it's like this all the time.”

“Oh,” I snort.

Fletcher reaches a hand up, grabs a lock of my curls and twists it around his fingers, pulling them through the tight coils. It bounces back toward me at the end, and he watches it, fascination in his dilated pupils.

So, this is what Fletcher looks like tipsy. All warm and fuzzy, grainy edges, and wobbly smiles.

“Do you think if we stay in here for an hour, they’ll eventually fall asleep?”

“I think you severely overestimate their power to stay awake after drinking.”

“Thirty minutes?”

Feet go rustling past, a little slower this time.

“Five minutes, tops.” Fletcher whispers loudly, and I don’t know why, but it makes me chortle.

Sitting in a hall closet with my newest best friend, a shoe rack poking my side and the arm of a leather jacket grazing my head, I feel like I’m being pulled into this whole other world.

Like, I finally caught a glimpse of maybe what college was supposed to be, instead of studying alone in my dorm for an art final or taking every weekend to go back home to work in my parent’s shop.

No extracurricular, no friends, no fun. Was this what everyone else was experiencing, though?

Was this what Austin found in his friend group when I wasn’t around?

Was this everything I missed out on during the years that were supposedly the ‘ones I would miss forever,’ according to our class valedictorian?

I soak in it, resting in the joy, the youth, and the giddy feeling of being in a closet with a boy who smells like rain and cloves.

“You make me feel young again.”

Fletcher’s mouth ticks. “You’re twenty-five.”

“Yeah, but you make me feel like it.”

“I think the wine has gotten to you.”

“I think you’re right, but I stand by my statement.”

That boyish smile grows, and there’s the dimple. Hello, old friend. Fletcher’s glasses are drooping low enough to where his eyes meet mine, just above the frames, and I like how they rest. I want to keep them right there.

I am so caught up in said eyes I don’t feel Fletcher fingers wrapping around the sleeve of my sweater. He tugs at the end, and I glance down.

“What is this?” He lifts the fabric up to both of our eyes. “This texture?”

“Wool.”

“Like a sheep?”

“I think so?”

“So cool,” he whispers.

Tonight is full of confessions, apparently, because with Fletcher’s fingers pulling at my sweater, I mumble out, “Austin hated wool.”

“Who’s Austin?”

“My ex.”

Fletcher’s shoulders slump, my sweater dropping with his hands. “Huh. Weird to think about you having a boyfriend.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“No, sorry.” He slaps his forehead a little too loud and we scoot closer, like if someone were to open the door right now, we would be too tiny for them to find us. He whispers harshly, which isn’t much of a whisper. “That came out weird.”

It did. But oddly enough, I get it. I don’t think I can picture him with a girlfriend.

A woman on his arm, telling him goodnight, or watching him read.

Drinking his gross drinks and eating his gross pizza.

They probably would send each other emails about their undying love and make out in libraries. The thought is…icky.

“I get it.”

“You do?”

I nod. “Totally.”

“When did you break up?”

“October 31st two years ago.”

“Oddly specific,” Fletcher notes.

“He left me at a Halloween party; we were both a little drunk.”

His nose scrunches, glasses settling back where they belong. I like this look on him. I think it’s the closest I’ve seen him to angry.

“Sounds like an asshole,” Fletcher mumbles.

“I think that’s what’s so hard. He was never like that with me before. I had twelve years of friendship with this sweet boy who used to worship me like…an Egyptian would a cat.” I have a distinct memory of him literally begging me just to kiss him once.

“Nice.”

“I mean…” I sigh, and suddenly words seem so hard.

“Did you love him?” He asks, quietly.

I hesitate in my answer, because I don’t think I’d want to know his answer if these roles were reversed. Regardless, Fletcher takes the opportunity to respond for me. “Of course you loved him. You love everyone, regardless of if they deserve it or not.”

My smile is sad—a little pathetic, and a lot reminiscent.

“When you see some jerk of a guy cheat on his girlfriend, it’s never too shocking because they seem like the type.

But Austin was never that kind of guy. He was sweet.

He bought me flowers and candy and would sing me to sleep, even though he had a horrible voice.

I think that’s why it hurt so much. I never expected it. ”

Fletcher nods. “Ahh. I think I get it.”

“It’s like it would be so easy in life if we could just add up all the good on one side and all the bad on the other and find out which way the scale tips.

But instead, we just have to use our judgment and understand that good people do good things and good people do bad things.

And bad people do good things and bad people do bad things.

I don’t think there’s one right answer to what is right or wrong. ”

“Yeah,” Fletcher hums close to my ear. “I agree with you, but I still think he’s an asshole.”

I smile and open my mouth to answer just as my phone lights up in my lap, the entire room bursting in blues and yellows. Sloane is trying to Facetime, and the thought of her seeing me locked in a closet with a man right now is a less than appealing thought for tomorrow, so I decline it.

“Is that her?” Fletcher points at the contact picture spread on the screen. “Your sister?”

I smile and turn the device for him to see better. “It is.”

“You have the same eyes.”

“That’s about all we share beyond blood relativity.”

“I see some similarities. Tiny nose. That little curve of your lips is the same at the top. How it’s like two mountain peaks side by side.”

He’s noticed my lips?

“What do your parents look like?”

I unlock my phone and pull out my family photos to let him scroll through.

He smiles at the picture of Sloane on my shoulders in the kitchen as she tried to turn off the smoke alarm after baking a batch of chocolate chip cookies gone wrong.

There’s another of my dad and I on the boat—it was technically Austin’s family boat, but it felt like ours, too.

He’s holding up a massive fish, and I am plugging my nose, asking him to throw it back.

More of Mom and I when I was a toddler, always in her arms no matter where we were.

Dad always says it took me forever to start walking, because Mom would never put me down, just toting me along everywhere she went.

“I can see them both in you.” He pauses on a family portrait right after Sloane was born. We’re in a field of daisies, on a checkered blanket—summer dresses and a blue polo shirt and smiles happily worn by everyone, even Sloane.

“You can?”

He types something out, and before I can ask what, he tosses the phone back to me. “Pretty.”

My entire face is burning hot.

Fletcher’s…really, really nice to look at right now.

My eyes can’t stop trailing his, all dark brown with little flecks of green and honey hazel—like sunlight pouring over a deep forest. I work my way around his face: his nose—strong and a little crooked holding his glasses just right—the sharp curve of his jaw that flexes and moves every time he talks, the slightly uneven eyebrows, and the unruly mop of hair on his head and the way I long for nothing more than to run my fingers through it.

Has he always looked this…Fletcher? Slim and lean and veiny, all Adam’s Apple and big hands.

Everything about him just swallows me whole—the way his legs bend in this closet, his jeans.

The button on his jeans. The belt buckle that I caught a glimpse of when he first sat down and that I have been avoiding eye contact with ever since.

The smell of him, like he just walked a mile in the rain to get to me.

Every piece of this man is encompassing my senses, and the strange part is, I don’t think it’s the first time this has happened.

The blanket on the park's ground. The way his hands wrap around a mug when we get coffee. The horrible bike riding and the way he makes me laugh, and even the way he frustrated me from the day we met. Fletcher’s always taken up space in my mind, but maybe this is the first time I’ve allowed him to stay there.

“Flora?”

“Hm?” I am locked in on the way his abdomen is folding, stomach clenched in, and shoulders slumped over.

“You’re staring.”

I glance up and he’s staring, too. My eyes, my ears, the column of my throat down the round cut of my sweater. The tiny holes in it that reveal what I wore under his shirt earlier tonight. His eyes are bouncing, just like mine, and maybe it’s not the first time for him, either.

“So are you.”

“Yeah,” he nods, “I am.”

I open my mouth and shut it. What do I say to that? Look away? Have your fill, young mage? Look at me and stare and gawk, because that’s all I want to do to you right now? I am bubbly and giddy and warmer than I’ve been since moving here, and I want nothing more than to just keep looking.

Fingers reach, grabbing one tendril of my curls, and he studies it, then me. And just like that I’m suddenly jealous of all his paperbacks for experiencing what it’s like to be held and known so intimately by Fletcher Harding.

My mouth hangs open, like a gaping fish hung to a wall, and I have…nothing to say here.

“You’re so quiet.” His eyes are filled with doubt and worry and wanting and more. I don’t need a mirror to know mine are the same in this tight space between us. “Where are all those big words you’ve been saving up?”

“They’ve seemed to have left me.”

“Me too, I think,” he whispers, so low I almost wonder if I fabricated the next words myself.

“So pretty.”

I want to ask if he means me or my hair he’s holding or my family pictures or maybe my stupid flowery phone case, but I can’t. Because in a flash of light, the door flies open and there’s Margot who shouts, “I FOUND THEM!” to which everyone else groans, including Fletcher.