Then I hear, feel the rustle of fabric as he moves his leg against mine too, this pressure that confirms what’s happening is absolutely deliberate, and we are hip to hip and thigh to thigh and knee to knee. He brushes my knee once with his thumb, a quick little swipe.
That swipe deserves its own romance novel.
“Okay?” he asks, and I don’t know if he’s asking if I’m okay, if what we’re doing is okay, or okay as in am I ready to go, and I’m not. I’m not. It’s cold, but I could light a fire with how it feels to be this close to him. Yes, this is okay, but it’s also not nearly enough.
All I can do is nod. Suddenly his hoodie feels too warm. I’ve mourned what we lost by not being friends, but what if we’d become friends and then something else? Maybe we’d have shared all our firsts. Learned together, explored together, and beyond the physical, we’d have helped each other on those rough days. This entire night, I’ve been defending my emotions because I couldn’t admit the reality: that I have real feelings for this boy. There are so many things I didn’t know about him, like that he is a fan of children’s books and his favorite word is ‘tsundoku’ and he alters his suits himself. He cares about his mother and his sister. He cares about me, Rowan Roth, the girl he’s been trying to destroy for four years.
I’ve never experienced something earth-shattering, like Neil said. But I have a feeling that if something happened with us… it might be.
And that possibility is what pulls me like a magnet toward my former nemesis, Neil McNair, who is looking at my mouth like he has just discovered the perfect synonym for a word that doesn’t have any.
And maybe it’s what pulls him to me too.
“Rowan, right?”
A voice shatters the darkness, and Neil and I spring apart before our lips meet.
“Hey, girl, was that you onstage at Bernadette’s?” A girl who looks to be in her midtwenties is standing a few feet from us, a beanie hiding her hair, the lamplight glinting off a septum piercing.
“H-hey,” I croak out. “Yes. Yeah. That was me.”
My cheeks are ablaze, as though I’ve been caught doing something I wanted to be private. If she saw what we were maybe about to do, she didn’t notice or isn’t letting on. I can’t even look at Neil, who’s frozen next to me.
A foot of space has suddenly materialized between us on the bench. Like he was worried about getting caught too.
She breaks into a grin. “I loved your piece. I’m addicted to romance novels, but none of my friends really get it. And there you were, reading a romance novel at an open mic and owning it.”
Wow, I’d love to have this conversation literally any other time.
“Thank you. Thank you so much.” Thank you for ruining what might have been the most romantic moment of my life.
“I just had to tell you,” she says. “Hope I see you at the next one!”
“Yeah. Hope so.”
She waves and skips off into the night.
The left side of my body is cold, and I’m shivering again. I want that Neil softness from five minutes ago, but now he’s a statue, iron spine and concrete shoulders. We were about to kiss. I didn’t just imagine it.
Finally, Neil comes to life. “We should go,” he says, leaping to his feet, dusting off his pants. “We have to be at mini golf by eleven thirty.”
“Right,” I manage. I stand on wobbly legs.
Neither of us says a word the entire walk to my car.
HOWL CLUES
A place you can buy Nirvana’s first album
A place that’s red from floor to ceiling
A place you can find Chiroptera
A rainbow crosswalk
Ice cream fit for Sasquatch
The big guy at the center of the universe
Something local, organic, and sustainable
A floppy disk
A coffee cup with someone else’s name (or your own name, wildly misspelled)
A car with a parking ticket
A view from up high
A tourist doing something a local would be ashamed of doing
An umbrella (we all know real Seattleites don’t use them)
The best pizza in the city (your choice, but you will be judged)
A tribute to the mysterious Mr. Cooper
11:26 p.m.
WE’VE HAD A lot of awkward car rides today, but this one is silent. Neil is staring out the window, chin propped on one hand. I want to play my melancholy music. I want him to tell me the etymology of the word “heartbreak.”
The ache in my chest has only intensified since we left the bench. He learned to hide so much of himself after what happened to his dad, and based on the way he’s turned stoic, he’s still excelling at it. And fuck, it’s crushing. I don’t like it at all, not the tightness in my chest or the pressure building behind my eyes.
I swear he was leaning toward me too. Unless, now that we have distance from the open-mic adrenaline, he’s realized what a colossal mistake we nearly made. Maybe he’s glad we were interrupted. Regrets what almost happened. Six hours ago, I would have been horrified by it too—or would I have been? When did this really start for me? Because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t today. When I dreamed about him? Has it been dormant since that short-lived freshman-year crush? No, it couldn’t have been. This is something new, the way I feel about him, but it’s old and familiar too. I tease him about his suits, but I love them, don’t I? And the freckles. God, the freckles. I am trash for his freckles.
He keeps glancing between his watch and the clock on my dashboard.
“It’s three minutes fast,” I say.
“We’re going to be cutting it close.”
What he doesn’t say: if we hadn’t gone to the open mic, if we hadn’t lingered on that bench, if we hadn’t almost kissed, then we wouldn’t be threatening our Howl status.
“There was a spot back there,” he says as I make a loop around.
“It was too small.”
My driving is safe but frantic, especially after the fender bender this morning, but I swear, we get hit with every red light, which blesses us with more time to sit in silence. Neil sighs, then coughs, then sighs again, seeming to prepare himself to say something he never finds the words for.
“Late,” he says under his breath when I put my car in park near the downtown mini-golf course.
Don’t cry. “We can’t be.”
“You can’t exactly argue with time. If we’re late, we’re late. It’s just a fact.”
This snippiness catches me off guard. This isn’t even how we spoke to each other the past four years. There was always a respect there. I don’t know what this is, but it makes a hard pit settle in my stomach. He regrets what almost happened. I’m sure of it.
Logan Perez is at the door, armed with her clipboard. “You two are late,” she says, shaking her head.
“Only two minutes,” I say feebly, but I’m a rule-follower to my core. Late is late, whether it’s two minutes or two hours.
“Logan.” Neil stands up straighter. “It’s my fault. I made us take this weird route, even though Rowan didn’t want to. Eliminate me, if you have to. But let her stay.”