Page 67 of Once Upon A Small Town Secret
She tips her head back and looks up through the leaves. “How do you feel?” she asks.
“Scared,” I say. The word is ugly and simple and true, and it doesn’t kill me to say it.
“And… sure. Which is confusing. I keep thinking about my dad and all the ways I don’t want to be him.” I exhale. “And then I think about the screening and the ultrasound, and I don’t care how scared I am. I’m going to be there.” I look at my hands because I can’t look at her. “Even if you don’t want me hovering. I’ll hover from a respectful distance.”
Her mouth curls. “I’m not big on hovering,” she says. “But I’m also not big on being alone.” She nudges a pebble with the toe of her shoe and watches it skip down the bank. “I don’t know how to want both and not feel like I’m contradicting myself.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I say, and hope to God I’m not making a promise I can’t keep. “Or we’ll screw it all up. But at least we’ll do it together.”
She laughs, quick and bright in the dark. I feel a little jump in my stomach.
We sit in silence, listening to the sounds of the river rush past.
I can feel her next to me without touching her. I can feel myself wanting to touch, to tuck a strand of hair behind her ear, put my palm on the back of her neck where skin meets soft hair, press my mouth to her lips and tell her it’s all going to be okay.
The desire for her is not subtle either. Six weeks and change haven’t done a thing to minimize my wanting her. If anything, the wanting is more, sharper, from everything we haven’t let ourselves do since.
I keep my hands on my knees. I’m not an idiot. Sleeping together again right now would be like striking a match in dry timber and then acting surprised when the house goes up in flames.
She tips forward, elbows on her thighs.
“Do you think he’ll hate us?” she asks suddenly, and it takes me a second to realize she means Jason. “If he does, we’ll manage. But… do you think he will?”
“I think he’ll be angry,” I say. “At me for not telling him, at himself for not seeing it. But hate?” I shake my head. “He doesn’t do hate. He does loyalty and stubbornness and lectures. He’ll do those. Then he’ll do what he’s always done and love you so hard you want to punch him for it.”
“And you?” she asks in a small voice.
I sigh.
“I’ll take whatever he hands me,” I say. “If that’s an earful and a week of not looking at me, I’ll take it. If it’s a punch, I’ll take it. And if he never wants to see me again…” I huff a short breath.
“I’m not proud of the way we started this, Paige. It’s not a mistake, especially not now. But he might not see it that way.”
She studies the water, then me.
“Okay,” she says. “Then, yeah, we’ll deal with it when we get there.”
A moth flits low and the hair at my forearms lifts. We sit there long enough for my back to remind me my age and for the rock to feel like… well, a rock under my ass.
When we finally stand, I’m surprised at how reluctantly I do it. We take the path back, steps falling into the same rhythm, my porch light pulling us home.
At the bottom of my driveway we stop.
“I’ll text my mom,” she says. “See if tomorrow works. If it does, we’ll figure out a time when no one’s home.”
I nod. “I’ll be there.”
She looks at me in the porch-light half-dark.
“I keep thinking about today,” she admits, so soft I almost don’t catch it. She clears her throat. “Thank you.”
I swallow. “You were the brave one,” I say, and then immediately wish I’d chosen anything else, because brave doesn’t seem like an adequate enough word for what she is.
My eyes flick down to her lips, and I see hers do the same.
“I should go,” she says.
“Yeah,” I say. “Text me when you get home.”
