“You don’t have to get it,” I tell her. “You just need to trust me.”
I know I’m asking a lot of her, but it can’t be done any other way. She can never know just how much she’s done for me, and what I took from her to get it.
She huffs, looking up at me with a smile that makes me weak in the knees as she wipes away her tears.
“I’m going to do it,” she says, adding a silly little nod to emphasize her words. “I’m going to college.”
She chuckles, shaking her head as if she couldn’t believe herself, suggesting that this might be the first time she actually believed in her dream as she said it out loud.
“We should celebrate!” she announces, turning to me with an expectant smile. “Will you make me a drink?”
I reciprocate her excited beam with a raised eyebrow. “You’re eighteen.”
She rolls her eyes. “It’s not like this would be my first, Jayson. Malia and I have tried her mother’s wine several times. And we made Gin Tonics once. Oh, I loved those!”
A hopeful request is flickering in her green eyes, silently asking me to walk down a dangerous path with her.
I don’t know what she sees in me. A friend? A counselor? A father-like figure? I’m less than seven years older than her, but at our age, it may as well be more than a decade. Until a few weeks ago, it wasn’t even legal to think about her the way I do—and I’m sure that the attraction is one-sided. Whatever she sees in me has very little in common with the way I desire her.
Yet, she’s the one who keeps coming to me.
“Oh, come on, please!” she pleads. “All I ever hear is no, no, no. I thought you were different. And we have something to celebrate!”
There is no we when it comes to her and me, but her words wake a sinister hope inside me. A hope that I should abandon as soon as I taste its sweet allure.
But I don’t.
Instead, I walk over to my bar. I reach for reserve gin from Nolet, the finest I own.
I pour us a drink, and then another. I watch the color of her cheeks change, I watch as her eyes lose focus and her gaze turns hazy—and I don’t back away when she seeks my touch.
She calls out for me.
And that evening, I listen.