It’s so hot outside, and so bright, and the air is so close and so thick. And Roya is so close.
She’s right next to me. Mint smell and warmth. Something cool bumps my wrist, and I look down to see what it is—she’s wearing the bangle again. She’s been wearing it a lot lately. She stops walking, and I realize we’ve come to the tree that I noticed before, the one that will need to be gone around. But Roya doesn’t let go of my hand. I can’t make myself look at her face. My heart is pounding and the tree is in the way and she won’t let go of my hand but she also hasn’t said—
A finger under my chin, gentle pressure. She turns my head until I’m looking at her face. “What’s going on?”
My eyes burn. “I’m really scared that you’ll change your mind.”
“Okay.” That’s all she says. She’s looking at me, and she’s so close. I wait for her to say something else—to tell me I’m being stupid, or that I shouldn’t worry, or to ask what I think she’ll change her mind about. But she doesn’t. She waits.
So I keep going. “I don’t want to start something if it doesn’t mean the same thing to both of us. I—I know that you probably don’t feel the same about me as I do about you and I just really don’t want to make a mistake. And our friendship is more important to me than anything, so if you don’t want to—”
She cocks her head. “Why do you think I don’t feel the same?”
“Because you aren’t in love with me,” I say. I immediately regret it. “I mean, I don’t mean like, I didn’t—”
She kisses me. It’s a light kiss, a stop-talking kiss, a featherlight brush of her lips against mine. It works. I stop talking. I stop breathing. I stop thinking. I stop worrying. There’s just her lips, right there, a thought away from mine. Her breath and mine, together.
“I don’t know if I’m in love,” Roya says. She pulls me closer, so close that her hair is brushing my shoulders. The big oak tree leans over us and I can’t help but wonder if I’m meant to always be closest to Roya in leaf-filtered light. I can’t help but wonder how much Marcelina already knows about us, because of what the trees have told her. “I don’t know what that means. But I want to find out. And I want to find out with you.”
“Since when?”
“Since always, dummy,” she says, bumping my nose with hers. “Since forever. I don’t know.”
“But—”
“Look,” she says, cutting me off. “I’ve been into you for a really long time. And I know that we’ve missed each other a lot. I know that we’ve both done the whole there’s no way she likes me back thing for like a hundred years. But I’m done with that, okay? We hid body parts together. If we can figure that out, we can figure this out too. I want to figure it out.” She brushes her nose across mine. “I want to figure it out with you.”
She kisses me again, a longer kiss, a believe me kiss. And I try. I try to believe her.
“I should tell you something,” I whisper against her lips. I don’t want to tell her, but I know I have to. It would be dishonest not to, and if there’s anything I don’t want to do to Roya, it’s lie. “I was going to sleep with Josh because I wanted to make you jealous. I know it’s stupid. It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. Well. Almost-done.” She doesn’t laugh. “But. I don’t know. I thought that maybe if I slept with him, you’d get mad, and we’d have a big fight, and you’d yell at me for sleeping with some guy I barely know, and then I could say, ‘Well, it’s none of your business anyway, it’s not like you’re my girlfriend!’ ” She does laugh at that, barely, just a breath, and I’m flooded with relief. “And then you would say, ‘Well, why not?!’ and we’d kiss and all of this would happen.”
“That’s ridiculous,” she says. And then she laughs again, another small, breathy laugh. A little incredulous. “And it’s probably exactly what would have happened.”
“I know.” I shake my head, and because our foreheads are still pressed together, it makes her shake her head too. “I’m sorry. It was stupid and manipulative and it was the only way that I could think of to make you see me the way I see you.”
“How do you see me?” she murmurs.
“Glowing,” I murmur back, kissing her with each word. “Brilliant. Loud. Fast. Wild. Kind, when you think no one is looking.” She laughs and her teeth bump my lip. “Magic.”
“Then I see you exactly how you see me,” she says. “Except add anxious and silly and kind, even when you think people are looking.” She considers me for a moment, then adds, “And maybe a little scary.”
I step back. “Scary?”
“A little,” she says. “You did something to Josh that we didn’t know was possible. I know it wasn’t on purpose, but. You know. He’s dead. That’s a little scary.”
It hurts to hear, but I shouldn’t expect anything less from Roya. She’s honest, but not particularly gentle. She’s not trying to make me feel bad. She’s just telling me the truth. And it’s true—I’m a little scary now. I’ve never been scary before, but I am. Just a little. I open my mouth to say something, I don’t even know what. Something that will make it okay that I’m scary. But she stops me from saying anything. She stops me in the best way possible.
For a minute—just a minute—my whole world is a curtain of Roya’s hair, and the smell of her vanilla-mint lip balm on my mouth, and the feeling of her fingers on the back of my neck. She kisses me the way she kissed me in the meadow: with everything she is, and everything I am, and something extra that’s outside both of us. She kisses me so hard that the breath leaves my lungs and my toes curl inside my hiking boots.
She kisses me like there’s no plan.
When she pulls away, there are sunflowers brushing against our hips. They’ve pushed up out of the soil in a circle around us, ringing us in bright yellow.
“I mean it,” she says. “No matter what happens, remember that I mean it. Okay? I want this.”
“I know.” I don’t know if I know, but I want to know, and maybe for now that can be enough.
21.
I SEE MOVEMENT OUT OF the corner of my eye a scant few seconds before I hear Paulie crowing. “All riiiiiight!” When I look over, she’s got both fists in the air, and her face is split into a wide grin. “Finally!”
“Break it up already,” Iris calls from behind her. Next to them, Maryam and Marcelina cackle. Roya laughs into my mouth and gives me a tiny last kiss before she pulls away.
Not a last kiss, I remind myself. Just … the last for now.
“What are you doing here?” I ask when they get closer. “I thought you were with another group.”
“We swapped with Angela and Gina and the Matts,” Maryam says. “We figured it would be better if we were all together.”
I bite my lip. “Actually, yeah. It’s really nice to all be together for this.” Roya squeezes my hand. “And since we’re all together … there’s something I should tell you guys.”