Page 34 of Dreaming of Dawson

“So, how do you get here? How do you get home?” he says, facing me again, and stepping just a little closer. It’s not close enough to crowd me, but it’s close enough that I have to crane my neck to look up into his darkening eyes.

“I walk,” I say.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes. I like it… especially the walk home. It’s refreshing.”

“You’re kidding. Are you telling me you’ve been walking home every night, all by yourself?”

“Yes.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he says, although he doesn’t raise his voice.

“What would have been the point?” I ask and he tilts his head, like he’s trying to work out the meaning of my question.

“I could have given you a ride,” he says.

I shake my head. “No, you couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because by the time I leave, you’ve had too much to drink.”

He steps back, his eyes widening. “You noticed?”

“Of course I noticed.”

Chapter Eight

Dawson

I stare down at her, trying to take that in, even though my brain seems to be working even more slowly than usual.

“Who else knows?”

“No-one,” she says. “Certainly no-one’s mentioned it to me. As far as I know, I’m the only one here who’s aware of it. You hide it well, Dawson.”

“Not well enough.”

I turn away, hanging my head in shame. I didn’t think anyone knew, but if it had been Karl, or Maggie, or Vanessa, I don’t think it would have mattered to me as much as it being Macy.

And what makes it worse is that I just opened up to her. I’ve never done that before, except maybe to Tanner. Even with him, though, I’ll hold back. I’ll change the subject if necessary and flip it around to him and his problems. He does the same with me, and we both know when we’ve had enough. That’s the advantage of having been best friends for so long.

I can’t say that about Macy, though. She barely knows me at all, and yet she got me to talk, and although I’m not gonna say it was easy, I felt better for it. Part of me wanted to say more, too. More, not less, for the first time. Part of me wanted to say that, even if Stevie and I had made a good team at the start, it didn’t last. The problem was, that would have involved telling her howit felt when Stevie left. It would have meant telling her about the humiliation and the demeaning sense of not being good enough. And I couldn’t do that. I didn’t want to see the disappointment in her eyes… like I did just now, when she told me she knew about me drinking.

She coughs, and I turn around, looking down at her. The disappointment has gone. Now, she just looks concerned, and undeniably beautiful… as ever.

She’s undeniably kind, too. I worked that out even before this evening… before she listened, and understood, and didn’t judge.

It’s something that just seems to radiate out of her, in everything she says, and everything she does. Like those notes she leaves for Karl. She doesn’t need to do that. He’s quite happy to make her a sandwich or a salad before he goes home, but he came out of the kitchen one day last week, not long after he’d arrived, and strolled over to the bar, carrying a piece of paper.

“Who’s M?” he asked, and I frowned at him. “It’s not Maggie. I know her handwriting, and in any case, she wouldn’t write to me, would she?”

“What are you talking about?”

He thrust the piece of paper at me and I glanced down, reading…

‘Karl,

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