Page 16 of When We Were Younger

"I'll give you your hands back, but my booty is staying planted right here where it is. I don't trust you not to bolt."

Fair. I shake my wrists out and then fold my arms across my chest. It’s an awkward way to hold them with a person on my chest, but I don’t know what else to do with my hands. She did let me get away with ignoring the Stephen topic for the last few days. She knows about the texts I sent him last night, but that's about it.

"I don't know, Keeks. I mean, I came all the way here. I didn't have to. It's not like I have family here. You didn't even bother me that much about the whole thing. I think there was a part of me that was ready to face it all again. I was eighteen when I left. I didn'tknow anything back then. I didn't know it would all feel so haunting. Even after all this time. And I mean think about it, you're here in town all the time. You said you've never seen him around, not once, and I run into him within the first few hours after nine whole years? That has to mean something, right?"

I take a deep breath, swallowing back the rest of what I was going to say before I word vomitallmy feelings. Like how fucking handsome he looked. How I could practically feel his skin on mine, even if we didn't touch. How I've thought about it more than a few times over the years, whether I made a mistake. I should have never left him behind as I ran.

"So, you're going to meet him for coffee today and then what? Have a holiday fling?" She asks, and I shake my head almost violently.

"No, Keeks, I'm not going after a holiday fling with Stephen. I just want to talk. Hang out. See if…" I trail off, because who am I kidding? I don't know what I want. I just know that now that I'm here, I can'tnotbe near him. My heart won't allow it.

"You should. It's been far too long since you've had a good dicking," she says, and it's the understatement of the century. It's not like I've spent the last decade dating and sleeping around. No boyfriends for this gal. I've had a hookup or two, in the most 'clothes on, hands under my sweater' sense of the word. I haven't–ahem–gone all the way since…

"Actually, have you ever had a good dicking? You andStephen only did it a couple of times back in the day. There's no way it could have been enjoyable," Kira continues, her face pinched up like she's thinking way too hard about my teenage sex life. She never understood why I wanted to wait back then. My virginity wasn't something precious I was holding on to, but sex still felt like a really big deal. My mom had me too young and she was miserable. I wanted to make sure that I was at least an adult when I did it. I wanted to be old enough to handle any consequences of my actions, and Stephen respected that.

Besides, just because Stephen and I waited until we were eighteen to go all the way doesn't mean we were total prudes. Kira might have been having sex in high school, but I was the one having orgasms.

"Shut up. We had plenty of fun in our own ways. Now can you get off me? This is a really weird conversation to be having with you straddling me."

She snickers and wiggles around some more in my lap.

"Do I make you horny, baby?" she asks in a terrible Austin Powers voice, and I bark out a laugh. What else is there to do but cackle like an idiot when your best friend is this ridiculous? We're both chuckling as Kira dismounts me, but our laughter is cut short by someone very impatiently clearing their throat.

I look up, and there are three women who look like they're in their fifties, dressed in tracksuits with matching head and wristbands. They stand over Kira and I, leering down at us in the grass.

"Can we help you?" I ask the ladies, who stare at us with pinched expressions on their faces.

"Are you the aerobics instructor?" The middle one in the purple attire asks, raising an eyebrow. I look at Kira and sort of shrug as if to say, 'I don't fucking know'. They're likely not talking to me, not when Kira’s laying there in bike shorts with her muscled calves and thighs on display.

Kira starts as she sits up from her position in the grass, "I'm a fitness instructor, but I'm not your aerobics instructor-“ but Purple Tracksuit cuts her off.

"Good. We've been waiting here for five minutes. We'd like to get class started. Now."

Kira and I both look around, but there are only two cars in the parking lot. Assuming the other one belongs to this group of women, there isn’t an aerobics instructor in sight. We could try to make a run for it. But if there is one thing that I remember about the middle-aged Bitties of Fox Hole, it's that when they put their minds to something, there is no telling them no. If they want Kira to lead them in aerobics, they will find a way to get her to lead them in some damn aerobics.

"Fuck it," Kira mutters, then pulls her phone out of the zippered pocket on her cropped hoodie. She quickly pulls up an ‘80s pop playlist and turns the volume up as high as it will go.

"Alright ladies, let's start with some marching in place," she says, and the women line up, swinging their arms and marching their feet. I look up at Kira from the ground, giving her an impressed look at her ability toroll with the punches. She glances down and shoots me with a piercing glare, and just like that, I'm shuffling to my feet and falling in line with the Tracksuit Bittie Committee as Keeks leads us through an impromptu and surprisingly thorough low-impact cardio routine for the next thirty minutes.

10

STEPHEN

"Stupid moron idiot mother fucker." I mumble to myself under my breath as I lift my wrist and check my watch. Twenty minutes. Twenty fucking minutes I've been standing in front of my closet, staring.

Well, to call it a closet is being generous.

I think to be considered a closet, it needs to have a door, or at least some sort of specified alcove that separates the area from the rest of the room. What I'm looking at is a glorified shower rod hanging over a basket of my dirty work boots. It’s weighed down by flannel shirts, a couple old hoodies and one or two button-down shirts I break out for nice occasions. I feel like the sad, lonely bachelor version of Posh Spice, for god's sake.

Am I gonna wear the little blue flannel with the hole in the pocket, or the little blue flannel with the hole in the pocket?

"This is so dumb," I say to noone, unless you count Daisy May. But even she isn't listening to me. She's over on the bed, lying on her back with her feet in the air, sleeping like she's the one who works forty hours a week to pay the bills, dog drool dripping all over my freaking pillow.

Great, now I get to add laundry to my list of things I don't want to do today.

Not that I don't want to see Dorothea. I do, I really fucking do. So much so that I took the entire morning off from work just to prepare.

I just have this overwhelming feeling that I'm going to make a complete and total idiot of myself. I've let myself imagine this moment over the years, of course. It's not like I've had a barrage of other things to keep my mind occupied, after all. That's sort of the issue, though. I've thought about it so much that it's morphed from some far-off possibility into an impossible daydream. Now it resembles a fantasy more than real life.

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