Page 80 of Honey Pot

“Cael.” I forced my eyes open, ripping myself from the memory and facing the blue fire behind his eyes. “I can’t.”

“Fuck.” Cael stepped back in the grass, putting a good foot between us and rolling his shoulders out.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I wanted to, God, I wanted nothing more, but it would mean too much to him and to me. I couldn’t suffer through the heartbreak again.

“It’s fine, Clem,” he said, but I knew it wasn’t.

He inhaled tightly, his neck straining as he fought to hold back what he really wanted to say to me. Kneeling down in the grass, he dug into his backpack andpulled out a blanket. He laid it flat in the long grass and sprawled out on it like nothing had passed between us.

“I hate that you do that,” I said, settling down next to him.

“What?” He rolled his head back and let it hang between his shoulders.

“Move on so fast.” I kicked off my shoes and wiggled my toes as I rested back against the blanket. “When someone expresses frustration toward you, it’s like you absorb it and forget about it. Don’t you…” I stopped, baffled that he didn’t seem to trip up over anything. I huffed out my inability to express myself. “You’re allowed to get mad at people!”

He stared at me for a moment, his lips curling into a smirk. “Mama would hate that.”

“Hate what?”

“Wasting time on being upset.” Cael shrugged his strong shoulders and rolled back off his elbows into the blanket to stare at the sky. “I can’t control how you feel, Clem,” he said as I watched him. “But how would screaming and fighting against your feelings work?”

Cael raised an eyebrow at me as his head rolled to the side, “it would only make us both feel shitter than we already do about all of this. I’m trying to make more time with you, Clementine. If you want to spend it fighting, we can, but you have to promise we spend the other half of the time fucking.”

“You’re insufferable.” I shake my head.

“You missed me.” He smiled with his eyes closed. The words buried their way into my heart and stung; he had no idea just how much. “I have something for you,” he said.

“See.” I laughed and rolled onto my stomach as he dug into his jeans pocket.

“Holding on to every hard feeling for everyone else is what got me into this mess in the first place, Plum. I can’t do that again.” There was a deeper meaning to what he said, but I was sick of being the one who started the fights.

“Close your eyes,” he instructed, and I did.

“If your surprise is trying to kiss me…”

“Shh,” he whispered. “Hold up your arm.”

I felt the string hit my wrist and before I even opened my eyes the tears stung at the corners from his gift.

“Different girl, different bracelet.”

Gone were the faded, ratty shades of pink. Wrapped around my wrist was a thin braided bracelet of purples, the same as before, but different and new. He had gotten better at the knots… I supposed he would have. Expecting a thirteen year old boy to thread a perfect bracelet had been a silly expectation. It was precious and heartwarming, but it felt like a thousand tiny paper cuts as his fingers brushed my wrist and pulled away.

“Thank you, Cael.” I smiled. “But now yours is old, and mine is new,” I teased through the sadness.

“Same boy, same bracelet.” He held up his wrist to show off the tattered bracelet, still somehow hanging on strong. But I didn’t think that was true anymore. He was different. He just refused to admit it, so he was determined to hide in our past.

CODY

“Do me a solid?” I slid onto Silas’s desk, almost knocking over his cup of coffee.

“No.” Silas put his hand over the cup to stop it from spilling on his things as he turned his eyes up to me. His hair was pushed back off his face in waves of chestnut and streaks of gray and he was wearing a pair of glasses that I had never seen before, and that I would most certainly tease him about later, but right now I needed a favor.

“Oh come on, you owe me!” I said.

“For what?” Silas didn’t laugh, he didn’t even smile. He pulled off his glasses and tucked them to the side and his brows pinched together in the center as his annoyance with my presence grew.

“Probably…for…something.” I shrugged and started to fiddle with the pens on his desk until two fell to the floor and he tossed me another dirty look. “Sorry.” I scooped them off the floor and set them right. “Just one thing, please?”

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