Page 86 of How to Hide in Plain Sight
“Yes?”
“Stop.”
I stop.
“Turn around.”
I hesitate. Then I rise, slowly, like a gymnast standing on a balance beam. I turn.
Manuel is there. Right there. Right behind me. I have to tilt my head to look him full in the face. My chest seizes. He’s so tall. I forget how tall he is. When we lie on the ground, heads on the same level, just as we were in the Fort, just as we always were before puberty dragged us in two different directions—it’s easy to forget.
Manuel exhales. His breath makes a little grey cloud in the space between us.
I shiver.
“You cold?”
I nod. I am.
He reaches for the bottom of his sweatshirt. I think he’s going to take it off and give it to me. But the sweatshirt is big, big enough for two grown adults to fit inside. Which is exactly what it does; Manuel lifts the bottom and pulls it up and over my head. Then we’re both inside a cotton cave, the two of us, and his body is warm and his T-shirt is soft. I giggle. I wrap my arms around his soft T-shirt. I shimmy upward until my head pops out the neck hole. The coldair hits my face, but again I feel it only as I would in a dream. I keep my cheek glued to his chest. Now we’re really stuck. Two heads in one hole. I giggle again.
“What are you laughing about?”
“Nothing.”
“Nothing?”
I take a deep breath. I clutch him tighter. Nothing is not nothing. Nothing is something. Nothing is the culmination of a decade of friendship. Its logical conclusion. Or maybe its destruction. I don’t know. I can’t know. But I realize, in this moment, after four years of doing everything in my power to avoid ending up exactly where I am now, that if I don’t at leasttryto find out if there’s something more between us, I’m eventually going to lose my fucking mind.
I tilt my head back and meet his eyes. He sees it. He sees that nothing is something.
He leans down.
When our lips meet for the first time, the moon is so bright I can almost see my reflection in its surface.
Almost.
—
I’VE IMAGINED WHAT IT WOULDbe like to kiss Manuel Garcia Valdecasas many times. By accident, usually. A wayward daydream here and a repressed impulse there. That’s the thing about OCD; at any given moment I could simultaneously push down the fear that I wanted to kiss my older brother and the reality that I wanted to kiss my best friend.
But this?
This is real.
You might think it would be weird to make out with your best friend. That it would feel wrong, or there’d be no romantic sparkwhatsoever. And you know what? You’d be right about one thing: itisweird. It’s weird to kiss your best friend. It’s weird to be wrapped in his arms, the ones you spent your entire life punching like sacks of flour. Your body buzzes with bizarre vertigo, with drunken electricity. You become more and more intoxicated the longer his lips are on you. The farther they travel. It’s weird. It’s weird how good it feels. It’s weird how badly you want him not to stop.
But the weirdest part of all is how quickly the past falls away. How seamlessly he goes from being your best friend to something more. The memories and classifications and limitations that slotted him into the role of Purely Platonic—all of that, gone in an instant. As if you might open your eyes and find an entirely new person above you.
So I do. I crack my eyes open, just a little, just to check. Just to make sure I’m not losing my mind. And I’m not. In fact, just after I open my eyes, Manuel does the same, and we find ourselves in the unfortunate position of locking eyes while so close our pupils cross.
“Freak,” I mumble into his mouth. “Stop staring at me.”
He laughs.
Let me tell you something about the Fort: it’s small. Very small. In fact, you never truly realize how small a space is until you try to make out with someone enormous inside it. When Manuel lifts my body beneath him, to turn over or shift onto our sides, I’m acutely aware of the way his legs scrunch at the knees, the way his spine curls to make itself as compact as possible. We could go back, of course. Back to where there’s more space. Back to our cabin, to my bed. Back to a world in which we were just friends.
No, thanks.
