Page 32 of Petals and Plot Twists
“Allison, please don’t,” I say. “There’s nothing going on. There is never going to be anything going on.”
“I don’t understand,” Allison says. “It really looked like something was happening.”
“It doesn’t mean anything toher,” I say. “It’s just friendly. It has to be, because she’s right in the middle of this big dating experiment thing, and I’m not a part of it.”
“A dating experiment?” Allison asks.
I glance at the door behind her. Sophie will probably be back any minute. “It’s a long story that I’m sure she’ll tell you if you ask. The point is, she isn’t interested in me like that. She never has been.”
“But you still are, aren’t you?”
My jaw tightens.Still.Allison is the only person in the entire world who knows exactly how I feel about Sophie. My senior year, when Allison was a junior, I decided it was time to finally shoot my shot. I had no idea what to do or how to do it, so I went to my sister for help, and together, we came up with a plan. I ordered a cake from a local bakery decorated with the words “Will you go to prom with me?”then spent three hours making a simple cypher out of letters and numbers, explaining to Sophie how I felt about her. How I’dalwaysfelt.
I had never done anything so bold, and I was sick for days leading up to the Saturday when I was finally going to ask her.
But then, Friday night, while the cake was already in my refrigerator, Sophie texted and said she was coming over to tell me the “best news ever.”
She’d been asked to prom.
By Jack Larson, the captain of the swim team and the one guy in the entire county who could beat me in the two-hundred-meter freestyle.
I pasted a smile on my face and told her how happy I was for her, then, once she left, I threw the entire cake in the trash.
Sophie and Jack went to prom together and dated through the end of high school, but they broke up not long after.
Allison pushed me to try again, but I’d already decided it wasn’t worth the risk. Even though Sophie never knew I planned to ask, and it was probably my fault for waiting so long, prom still felt like a rejection, and it wasn’t one I wanted to repeat. Our friendship was good. Great, even. Why screw it up? So I boxed up my feelings and tucked them away and left them alone until I moved into The Serendipity.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “She doesn’t see me that way, and she never will.”
Allison scoffs. “She definitely won’t if you never tell her how you feel. It’s not fair to her, Peter. You can’t be mad that she isn’t reciprocating if you aren’t being honest with her.”
Down the hallway, the toilet flushes, and I shoot Allison one final warning look. “Please don’t say anything to her,” I say, and Allison rolls her eyes.
“Who do you take me for? But I still think you’re being dumb.”
Sophie doesn’t even come back into the room before she and Allison leave to get coffee, and I try not to read into it. Was she freaked out by what happened? When she jumped away, she seemed like she didn’t want Allison to get the wrong impression.
And then she practically ran to get out of here.
Was she running from me?
And if Allison hadn’t come in when she did, what would have happened next?
Chapter Eleven
Sophie
Okay,so it’s fine, right?
Friends hold friends’ hands all the time. That’s all that was. Just friendly, totally benign handholding.
Handholding that made my breath catch and my skin tingle and my heart flip somersaults in my chest. But that’s fine!
All of this is absolutely fine.
“You’re awfully quiet over there,” Allison says as we make our way down the sidewalk. The weather is nice enough that we decided to walk the half mile to Cookie’s Coffee House, something I’m grateful for because I could really use some time to clear my head.
“Am I?” I say as I step around a puddle. “Just enjoying the sun.”
