Page 32 of The Incredible Kindness of Paper

Oliver

Sixteen years ago

By the time they were in high school, the other kids had gotten used to Chloe’s exuberance and penchant for making her own very colorful clothes.

She was so well liked, in fact, that she was on the student council, and she’d set a record for Valentine’s candy gram sales through her dedication and charm at the card table set up next to the cafeteria.

Two days before Valentine’s, Oliver was at her house, in her bedroom, helping with final assembly of the candy grams.

“Remind me, how did I get roped into this?” Oliver said, as he opened up yet another glassine bag and dropped in two red Hershey’s kisses, two silver ones, a packet of heart-shaped strawberry gummies, and a fifty-percent-off coupon for a scoop of Cupid’s Arrow ice cream from her parent’s shop.

(Chloe and Oliver had come up with the flavor—it was raspberry with a marshmallow swirl and dark chocolate chunks.)

“Because you love me,” Chloe said with a nonchalant shrug, her charm bracelet jingling against her wrist.

But there was something about the way she said it. A soft tremble in her voice, a subtle undercurrent of uncertainty that no one else would have caught. Except him.

Could it be?

Oliver suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe. His chest tightened and his heart pounded, and he was drowning, but in a paradoxically good way. Everything he had taken for granted before—up, down, air, friendship—was being rewritten.

He’d loved Chloe from the very first letter he ever received from her and had steadily tumbled heels over head deeper and deeper into that love, year by year. But he hadn’t known if she’d felt the same way. If they were best friends, or if they could be something more.

And now, in that long, suspended moment between breaths, he saw that something more in Chloe’s gaze.

He leaned across her bed, across the field of candy grams, and reached out to cup her face.

“Oliver,” she breathed. But she didn’t move away, only met his eyes with a reflection of the same hope and fear that rattled inside him, that they might be going down a path from which they could never recover.

He brushed her bangs from the freckles on her cheek and held them to her temple with his thumb.

“I really do love you,” he said softly.

And then he brushed his lips against hers, a whisper they could melt into, because even though he’d never kissed anyone before, he knew this first one mattered, that they were remaking themselves—still Clover, but also a sum greater than their two parts.

“Tell me we can be like this forever,” Chloe said, her mouth so close, he could feel her words against his skin.

“We can be like this forever,” he said.

But it was the only kiss they would ever get.