Page 48 of Choosing Her
For a second, I froze. The world tilted beneath me as everyone began to cheer and a warmth in my chest spread at the feel of Crossy’s lips on mine. His lips were soft and warmer than I expected, and while later I would worry about what mine had felt like to him, right then, I was unable to think of anything other thanI want to keep doing this forever.
I wasn’t sure how long we kissed before the fireworks exploded above our heads, lighting up the world in bright flashes of color. But still, I barely noticed. All I could focus on was this—his mouth on mine, the way his fingers flexed slightly against my waist, the way my heart pounded so loudly I was sure he could hear it.
He pulled back just enough to look at me and his lips curved into the smallest smile.
“Happy New Year,” he murmured. I barely had time to whisper it back before he was kissing me again.
CHAPTER 25
crossy
NEW YEAR’SEVE - 1 AM
When we got back inside, Saylor kept insisting that we had to take a picture. Neither of us had a camera, so we had to beg one off a guy who only said yes when Saylor offered up the cheap Mardi Gras necklaces she grabbed from someone outside.
The room was crowded and dark, so there was no good place to get a shot unless we wanted to try to fight our way back to the back door again, but I needed to leave soon and we knew that this was coming to an end. So we found a corner where I had just enough room to stick my arm out for a selfie and blindly took the first polaroid photo.
“You take it,” I said, handing it over to her. “You’re the one who suggested it.”
She smiled at the photo and I thought she may have even blushed, but it was hard to tell in the light. But then she said, “We can take another.”
“You don’t think Polaroid Camera Guy will mind?” I asked, looking around for the guy we’d taken the camera from, but I’d already lost him the crowd.
Saylor smiled cheekily. “We didn’t specify how many pictures we were going to take.”
That was enough to convince me and we took a second photo quickly. Saylor took this one out of the camera before I could then grabbed a marker from a table nearby. She scrawled something on the back and handed it over again. I looked at it carefully, curiously, and flipped it over.
Her phone number was written across the back in big numbers.
“Call me,” she said. Then held out her pinky like she was waiting for me to make her a pinky promise. “Promise me you’ll call.”
I hooked my finger around hers and said, “Promise.”
If only I’d realized then that there was no way I was ever going to follow through. If I could go back in time, I would write it on my hand or stick that Polaroid photo in any other pocket—somewhere where it wouldn’t have fallen out as I walked home to my cousin’s house later that night. Because when I stumbled inside and saw Aspen and told her all about my night, she asked me to show her the photo, and it was only then that I realized I had somehow lost it.
“Oh,” Aspen said, looking disappointed. “Well, that’s okay, right? If it was meant to be…”
I just nodded in agreement, but the next day, when we both woke up, we decided I should look for the girl. Well, first we went looking for the Polaroid anywhere we could, but when we couldn’t find it, we decided that we could look for her. I spent weeks combing through Facebook and Instagram and everywhere else searching for the nameSaylor. I figured it couldn’t be that common of a first name. How hard would it be to find? But she wasn’t anywhere. None of the profiles I found pulled her up.
I’d just about given up when two days before I left on my exchange, a friend of a friend told me there was a girl on her floor with the last name Saylor and maybe it was her. I’d told herthe few facts I knew about Saylor that I thought could be relevant—dark brown hair, brown eyes, seventeen years old, went to a party on New Year’s Eve—and she said it sounded right. So, I wrote her a love letter and I slipped under her door.
A month later, I was at a meeting with all the other Canadian students on the sam exchange as me and was getting corned by a brunette girl. I didn’t know her then, but she clearly knew me.
“Caleb Cross,” she’d said, after cornering me. “Junior. Right wing on the hockey team. Planning to become a lawyer like his father.”
My clever response had just been, “Hi?”
She looked a little familiar, with her dark brown hair and pouty lips, but not enough that I thought I knew her. For a second, I’d been worried that I was supposed to know her, but then I realized you didn’t usually greet people you’d met before by listing off a bunch of facts about them. After that, I wondered if she was some super-intense fan of the hockey team. She’d cleared up that was not the case when she said, “My name’s Naomi Saylor—and I think you wrote me a letter.”
That was the moment I realized I had royally screwed up.
“I know the letter wasn’t meant for me,” Naomi had continued. “I mean, it was pretty obvious since you were talking about this magical night and I know that I’ve never spoken to you in my life. But it was a beautiful letter and I was thinking, if you’re not too hung up on the girl you wrote it about, that maybe you and I could go out sometime.”
Listen, by that point, I had spent two and half months wondering about a mysterious girl that I thought I would never see again. That letter had been my Hail Mary, the last chance of me finding her—I didn’t even know if she was a Hartwell student or if she lived halfway across the world. So, I saw no reason to say no to Naomi. The one date turned into many and before I knew it, we’d been dating for the whole exchange.
And I didn’t know who I was dealing with until we were back in Canada and she’d invited me to her house. I’d knocked on the door, expecting my girlfriend and instead coming face to face with New Year’s Eve girl.
Talk about a shock to the system.
