For a moment, she was silent as she tapped a finger on her armrest.“So, you don’t have mine anymore?”
The pause between her question and what should have been my denial was too long; in the silence she read my admission of guilt.
She gasped, angling toward me in her seat.“You do, don’t you?”
“I couldn’t delete them.”
“Them?!There’s more than one?”
I drove one handed with the lower half of my face hidden behind my other hand, as if it would make the embarrassment easier to manage if she couldn’t see it.“Not a weird creepy amount.I haven’t looked at them in years.”
“Oh, I have a creepy amount of you.”
I straightened, completely forgetting any of this was awkward.“You do?”
“Apparently you’re a nudes prude, so probably.”
“Is it like a full frontal, or just dick pic?”
“I’ve got you at every angle.”
Yeah, there was no hope for the pants and concealing my growing hard-on.
“Am I the only exception to your rule in here?”Her voice trailed off as if the answer was of no consequence.
“You’re the only exception everywhere.”
There was a beat of silence, before she asked in a voice barely louder than the music, “Why couldn’t you delete them?”
I wouldn’t be able to delete the Mona Lisa either, was too corny to say, but it was the first explanation that came to my mind.There was more than naked pictures in my password protected photo album of her.A photo of her laughing so hard I knew in real life no sound was actually coming out.One of her rolling her eyes at me.And the last one, was of her sitting on the beach with her eyes closed as the breeze blew back her hair, the setting sun casting its rays on her skin.The freckles on her nose the same color as her vibrant hair.
Yes, the pictures of her naked were sexy and made my body ache for her, but they revealed different elements of her as well that I couldn’t just ...delete.
“If I showed them to you, you’d understand,” I finally said.
I turned into my driveway and parked under the carport.The windows in our units were dark.We walked to the front porch, and I followed her up the steps.My coat hung too big off her shoulders.I held my arms tight across my chest waiting for the fog to clear from my glasses enough to see her properly.On the plus side, the cold had distracted my body enough that I was no longer posting a tent.
There were the muffled sounds of Furgie barking and whining behind Alicia’s door.
I leaned back against the railing as she released Furgie into the front yard.
“Aren’t you freezing?”she asked, but it couldn’t dispel the weight in the air around us.
“Yeah,” I answered.
She pulled her phone from her pocket.“Why don’t you go inside?”
Despite the cold, my palms began to sweat.But loving her in secret was killing me.I couldn’t keep skating around the truth indefinitely; I had to at least nudge us toward her knowing—toward me saying ...
“Because you’re not in there,” I mumbled, scraping the toe of my boot at a patch of ice clinging to porch.
“Oh no,” she breathed.
My blood ran colder than the air freezing my lungs.I forced myself to look up at her, even though it felt like she’d dug my heart out of my chest with two syllables.I thought I was prepared for my heart’s potential to break, but of course I wasn’t.
Who could be?
What was the point of her flirting?Was this some elaborate revenge scheme?To convince me to open up, just to reject me in the end.
