If you couldn’t tell already by B’s recount of our love story, I’m persistent when it comes to what I’m passionate about.
I can still remember every singular moment of that first taste of each other, from the way my sneakers sounded hitting the paved trail to the steady rhythm of my breath as I ran. It seemed like the universe slowed down time when I looked up from my feet and saw them — Jenna and B — running side by side before B pulled out a little in front.
She thinks I didn’t see the exact moment when she noticed me, but it was impossible to miss.
I felt her eyes on me like warm hands, like an embrace from an old friend and a kiss from a stranger all at once.
Those slate gray eyes pierced me right through the chest, enough that I pressed my lips together against the sting of them. I smirked a little when those eyes wandered the length of me, and I gave myself permission to do the same — taking in her wild and unruly hair, the freckles speckling her cheeks, the lean, athletic build of her body, her toned little stomach peeking out between the band of her black shorts and white tank top. I remember her legs more than anything, how she was so short, and yet they seemed to stretch on for days, and my eyes caught on her neon pink sneakers for just a moment before I snapped my focus back to her eyes.
Or, it would have been her eyes, if she hadn’t turned around to mouth something to Jenna.
Keep in mind that I was as stupid boy back then, so while now I would have realized the plan of attack should have been to slow to a walk and try to talk to them as they flew past, back then, my peanut brain thought it made more sense to accidentally run into her.
I’d drastically underestimated how much of a punch that little thing could pack when she slammed into me.
Or how much of a backboard I was, since I sent her flying straight to the ground.
Still, the plan did work in a way. Because though she was on her ass, she was looking up at me — those peculiar gray eyes — and when I smiled down at her, offering my hand to help her up, I knew she felt it, too.
I didn’t know what it was, to be clear. I knew it was something — new, unfamiliar, exciting. But again, I had teenage boy brain.
Which is exactly why everything happened the way it did in those next few minutes, setting off a domino effect of bad timing and things — people — getting in our way.
B slipped her hand into mine, feather-light and unsure, her eyes as wide as silver dollars.
“You okay?” I asked, subtly checking her for bruises or bleeding. I wanted her to answer before I tried to help her stand.
But she didn’t respond.
She didn’t so much as breathe as she looked at me, which I know now was because she was apparently stunned by my handsomeness — her words, not mine. But at the time, I read that little quirk of her brow and lack of response as rejection.
I read it as her not being interested, not even a little bit.
I read it as my mere presence offending her.
I read it wrong.
“Oh my God, are you fucking blind?!”
Jenna was the first to speak to me, and then she promptly shoved me away from B, stealing her hand from mine and hoisting her up.
B was still a little off-kilter when Jenna turned on me, those little blue eyes of hers narrowed. “How about you brush that long ass hair out of your eyes and watch where you’re going, huh, champ?”
Jenna crossed her arms then, popping her hip to the side, and that’s when I noticed her.
Tan and curvy, long blonde hair, a spicy attitude rolling off her in heat waves that both terrified and amused me. She cocked her brow at me when I didn’t answer, and so I arched mine right back.
And for just a split second, Jenna’s shield yielded, and I saw the faintest blush on her cheeks.
“Hi,” I said, reaching out for Jenna’s hand this time. “I’m Jamie.”
“Well, Jamie, maybe you should make an appointment with the eye doctor before you run over another innocent jogger. And you owe Brecks an apology.”
Jenna nodded toward B, who cringed and shrank away from me.
Again — at the time, I read this as her being so disgusted by me that she physically grimaced. I didn’t know the story of why she hated her name, that it was hearing Brecks as her introduction that had her nose crinkling like that.
I smirked at Jenna first, and then tried that smile on B as I said, “I’m sorry. I should have been watching where I was going.”
With that last word, I arched my brows a bit, because B and I both knew it wasn’t me who had been turned around mouthing something to my friend and not watching the running path.
But then again, she didn’t know I’d run into her on purpose…
“It’s fine,” B murmured, her cheeks tinging pink.
I tilted my head then because that blush threw me off. I wondered if I’d read the situation all wrong, if maybe she was interested. I tried to find the answer to that question in her eyes, but then Jenna cleared her throat, and my attention snapped back to her.
So, you see, B was right about a few things when she told you about the first time we met. But she was wrong about one very, crucial point.
I didn’t see Jenna first.
I saw her.
I just didn’t think she saw me.
• • •
Trying to explain what happened in the following months is like trying to understand the concept of how large the universe is.
Dating Jenna was easy. We just… fit.
She was the captain of the cheerleading squad and I was on the basketball team. We looked good together. We felt good together. And as a teenage boy, there was nothing more I could ask for than to have one of the hottest girls in school as my girlfriend — and to get all the perks that went along with that.
And yet… I still wanted more.
More meaning B.
She came with dating Jenna, part of the package, and at first, I assumed I’d have to win her over since I was relatively certain she hated me after that first interaction on the running trail.
What B didn’t tell you in her side of the story is that she was rather prickly with me in those first couple of weeks. Any time I would show up to walk Jenna to her next class, or we’d hang out by my Jeep after school, B would find an excuse to leave.
But not before throwing me a dirty look for good measure.
I thought she hated me, thought I wasn’t good enough for her best friend, maybe, or that I smelled or something.
It wasn’t until that evening on our surfboards — a happy accident that I later realized was one of the biggest moments of my adolescent life — that I wondered if that was just how B was.
Reserved. Careful. Hesitant to trust.
When she told me about her name, about why she never wanted anyone to call her by it, I understood why.
My attraction to B didn’t strike me like lightning. It didn’t hit suddenly and all at once. It bled into my skin, my muscles, my bones, my soul like an assassin in the dead of night.
It was slow, and calculated, powerful and deceiving.
And once it had its hands on me, I was forever in its grip.
We both knew we were walking a dangerous line. I felt it in the way she looked at me, the way she flushed when my knee touched hers at the football games, the way she couldn’t bear to watch when Jenna was in my arms.
And like the selfish little hormonal prick I was, I didn’t want to stop it.