Page 66 of Haunt Me

“It’s soul.You pierce my soul.”

“You pierce my soul,” I correct. “I am half agony, half hope.” I look at her, and she is shaking with laughter, wiping tears from her cheeks.

She looks so freaking cute and happy my heart hurts. I, on the other hand, am dead serious. If I get started on that letter, I won’t stop. I’ll recite it all. I’ll mean every single word. I will melt at her feet.

“I can go on,” I threaten. “I’ll recite it right now, don’t press me, man.”

The moment I call her ‘man’ as if she is my best dude friend, everything changes.

The tension bursts in my chest, evaporating. Eden snorts loudly, collapsing on the cold ground in a fit of giggles, and I explode with laughter. We roll around in the frozen leaves, gasping for breath, hands gripped tight, legs all tangled up, giggling until we have no air left in our lungs.

“Wait,” I gasp at one point, looking down at our joined hands. “Isn’t there an Austen dude who says‘are those your hands or mine? I can’t tell the difference’?”

“It’s Angel Clare,” Eden says in a whisper. She has stopped laughing and is just calm now. Happy. Tired from all that breathless joy. “He’s inTess of the D’Urbervillesby Thomas Hardy. Also known as, ‘you’re way off’.”

“Oh, right.”

She is staring at our hands too. Her fingers are tiny and pale, mine freshly-calloused from playing the guitar. I press her knuckles hard, and she presses mine back.

Of course I was way off. Who could concentrate on Angel Clare and Tess of the D’Urbervilles when Eden is here next to me, breathing, laughing, alive?

“Of course, it’s Angel Clare,” I say, as if I have any idea what the heck I was talking about.

I feel her smile.

And then I say, “And it’s us, too.” Before the words are out of my lips, she gets up to leave, but I’m used to her flight response by now. I leap up and catch her around the waist, playfully tackling her back onto the ground. “You aren’t going anywhere,” I tell her softly. “We are like that, whether you’re scared of it or not.”

She stops struggling, goes still in my arms. My breath comes short as her eyes find mine.

“I am scared of it,” she admits, and my heart is singing because she admitted it, in a way. That she feels it. That we are like that.

That she knows I worship her.

“You are scared?” I repeat, as if in a trance.

“Terrified,” she says, her eyes still on mine. She isn’t blinking, her pupils dilated. By fear. And also by something else.

I lean down and I don’t kiss her.

And then I tell her I love her, but not out loud.

She is not the only one who is terrified.

…

I never know what to expect from this girl.

She just sits there, day after day, nose buried in her book, but it turns out that she is paying attention to me as well. She sees everything I do, and more importantly, everything I don’t do.

“You haven’t been studying,” she says one day.

The frost on the tree branches is beginning to thaw. Spring is here. I have never noticed how the seasons change before this. Slowly, but right on time.

“Don’t feel like it,” I reply.

“Your feelings have nothing to do with it,” she says, “not if you want to get into college.”

She sounds like one of my professors, which is freaking me out a little bit, but ok.

---