“Thanks for meeting me,” he says.
It strikes me as a funny expression. Thanks for meeting me on the High Line tonight? Or, thanks for meeting me for the first time days ago? For unconsciously organizing your life to bump into mine?
I smile back softly, wanting to thank him for meeting me too, though I know it’s not the meaning he intends. He confuses me. Or, rather, the feeling I get when I’m with him confuses me, especially now. The undeniable tug of my heart toward him is wrapped up in the pain of breaking up with Matt. I don’t know what’s genuine connection and what’s simply the shock of being without the person I expected to be with. I do know his invitation lit up my phone right when I needed someone to talk to and someplace to go besides my empty hotel room.
“This place is unbelievable,” I say finally, the one non-confusing thing I can get out. “I didn’t even know it existed.”
“I thought you’d like it.” He nods in the direction of the path, and we walk. We enter a stretch of thin-limbed trees, branches dusted with snow, the city on one side and the river on the other. It’s perfect, dreamlike, this out-of-context winter wonderland. “I sort of had an epiphany today.”
I watch his profile out of the corner of my eye. With the wind blowing in our faces, his hair is swept back on his forehead. His gaze bounces around like he’s taking in everything around him, continually caught on something new—the couple kissing on one of the modern lounge chairs, the lit-up interior of an apartment’s opulent dining room overlooking our path, the violin player busking under the bridge.
“I know that in the dictionary sense of the word, we are hardly more than strangers . . .” Fitz begins.
“Matt and I broke up,” I say abruptly, cutting him off. Fitz skips a step, then stops and blinks at me with those piercing blue eyes. I don’t know why I blurted out my romantic status in the middle of his speech, but I realize it’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. Maybe part of me just had to tell someone. Or maybe part of me had to tell Fitz.
Fitz’s stunned expression drifts into a grin, which he immediately flattens. But he fails, and I can’t help rolling my eyes.
“I know what you’re thinking,” I tell him.
“No, you don’t,” he replies hastily. “I know you think I’m into you—”
“I know what you’re thinking,” I repeat, “because I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t thought it myself.”
This shuts him up.
“Now, did you want to finish that denial, or do you want me to continue?” I ask.
“I’m good,” he says.
“There’s something between us,” I start. “Which I do not get, because you’re honestly kind of annoying and you’re not really my type and I don’t even know you, which I keep forgetting.”
Fitz’s face glows, like he didn’t hear anything after “something between us.” In hindsight, I probably should have predicted he wouldn’t.
“I feel it too,” he says.
“What?”
“Pulled to you,” he replies, his eyes full of emotions written on top of each other until they’ve become indecipherable. Hope and hesitation and dread and doubt and certainty. I swallow, fearful of how quickly this conversation is careening toward an edge, and of what waits below.
“But Matt and I broke up because we didn’t see our lives going in the same direction,” I say decisively. “I want to explore, learn what’s out there, and find out who I am in the process. Matt didn’t want anything to change. Do you see what I’m saying? I can’t just pick up with someone who’s exactly the same. Go through that again only for it to end when one of us is brave enough to admit it can’t work.”
Fitz nods. “I read The Great Gatsby today,” he says simply, like this is a logical reply to what I said.
I’m thrown. “Okay . . .”
“I don’t want to always be looking back,” Fitz goes on. “I don’t know how much time my mom has, but I don’t know how much time I have either. I can’t live my life wishing things were as they’d been, missing a home that’s no longer there.”
Hiraeth. I remember the word from the conversation we had while driving into New York City yesterday. Yesterday, which feels like a lifetime ago.
He steps closer to me. “Because if I spend every minute wishing everything would stay the same, I’ll lose so much more than the past.”
His declaration strikes a harmony with the noise in my head and my heart, the dull roar I’ve found impossible to drown out this entire day. The pain of Matt leaving is awful, but right now, it begins to fade. I study Fitz, the gentle narrowness of his face, the unreadable line of his thin lips, the features it’s hard to believe I’ve only known for five days. There’s a look in his eyes, a characteristic exactness to his words, an undeniable spark between us. They quiet the whole world.
“I’m not asking anything of you, Juniper,” Fitz starts again.
I pull myself together enough to glance pointedly at how close together our feet are. “No?” I raise an eyebrow.
“It’s not that I don’t want to ask,” he clarifies. “I definitely do. It’s only, you just got out of a relationship, and we don’t exactly make any sense. The only thing I want is to tell you I’m not going to waste the rest of this trip. I have four days of this college tour left. I’m going to see more schools, and if I fall in love with some of them, I’ll apply. All I’m asking is if you’ll see them with me.”
The harmony narrows to a single note, pure and perfect. In the echo, I’m left recognizing I didn’t expect this from Fitz. He’s stepped enormously far from his comfort zone, into territory he wouldn’t have dared even last week. He’s facing huge, frightening things, and he’s staring them down the way not everybody would. “I think that’s really brave,” I tell him truthfully. His expression softens.
“So?” he asks. “Will you come with me? I’m traveling with my brother, and we could go wherever. Or if you don’t want to, you could send me a list—”
“I’ll come with you.”
He looks surprised. “You will?”
I ask myself the same question, half shocked that the answer has already flown from my lips. I will? The more my impulsive response rings in my ears, the more right it sounds. I run through the logistics in my head. I’d planned our trip in order to be home in time for Matt’s mom’s birthday dinner on Sunday, which I obviously won’t be going to now. If I’m smart with my money and careful with my parents, I could extend my trip a couple days.