“Yes,” he says softly, his forehead creasing as he peeks up at me through his glasses, bending down to place my bag gently next to my old bed.
“They didn’t bother you?”
He shakes his head, standing up straight.
“And you’d tell me?” I ask gently, biting at my lip as I crane my neck to look up at him now. “If they said something, right?”
“Yes,” he whispers, “I would.”
Wrapping my arms around myself, I nod, taking his answers for what they are instead of looking too deeply into them. That’s something I’m bad at. Something Landon used to get fed up with the longer we were together. Sometimes, I used to think that maybe I deserved the way he treated me because I was so annoying. I felt like I was constantly doing something wrong.
“I was going to shower and head down,” I eventually say. “You can stay and take a nap, if you need to.”
“I’m okay,” he urges. “I’ll clean up and go down with you.”
“Okay.” I give a small smile.
“Okay.”
It’s not until he leaves my room that I realize my heart was pounding the entire time.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
TATUM
Friday, December 24th
Iknow Maeve is worried that her brothers said something to me outside, but they were actually nice. Not that they didn’t still have time to, of course. They could very well be buttering me up to interrogate me later, but that wouldn’t bother me, anyway. It’s nice to see how much her family cares about her.
It’s hard to see the privilege you have of people caring about you enough to annoy you with certain things if you’ve never gonewithoutpeople like that, so I couldn’t blame her for worrying about how things went out there with them.
Blame her forcaringabout me, in some shape or capacity. That’s what that is, right? If she didn’t care, then why bother worrying whether or not her brothers tried to intimidate me?
I think I ask myself that question a million times as I take a hot shower, which feels so good after a long week of driving. I hadn’t realized the tension in my shoulders and the slight ache in my lower back until now, but at least I had the weekend to rest and relax.
But who was I kidding? I knew there wouldn’t be any form of relaxing, not when it felt like this just being around Maeve now. This anticipation was about to kill me.
As I finish up my shower, I’m quick to dry off and get dressed, eager to see her again. Eager to see what will happen tonight at dinner, to see what it’s even like tohavedinner as a family. My childhood meals consisted of whatever snacks I could find in the pantry myself, and then ramen noodles when I was old enough to figure out how to use the stove. Even then, we hardly had food in the house at all.
Settling on jeans and a long-sleeved crewneck, I shove my glasses on and head out to the hall toward her room.
My knuckles rap against her door, three small knocks to let her know I’m ready when she is to head downstairs. As I go to lean against the wall next to the door, ready to wait for her until she comes out, the door swings open, and Maeve stands on the other side in only a towel. Her hair is damp, with baby hairs sticking to her neck and forehead, and I try ineptly hard to keep my eyes there. To not think about how high the towel rests on her thighs.
Holy crap.
She leaves the door open for me as she walks back toward the bathroom, and I have to will my legs to move correctly in order to follow her.
“I just have to get dressed and dry my hair,” she says as she wipes down the fogged-up mirror above the sink, picking at her skin and observing herself for a moment before she turns to look at me.
I clear my throat. “N-no problem.”
As she cracks the door, I keep my distance, taking a careful seat at the edge of her bed. Something in my chest lulls me to look up at the cracked door, peek at her, but I don’t. I keep my eyes trained on my hands fidgeting in my lap.
Theres’s that tension again.
I don’t know if she feels it, but I don’t think I’ve stopped since that kiss. It’s a lingering…heaviness. Something I know I can never act on, not because I don’t want to, but because I would never be confident enough. I don’t have it in me to be the guy that makes the first move, that puts himself out there. I just can’t be. I don’t know how.
All I know is that every nerve ending in my body, every fiber of matter that makes meme, is different because of her. There was the me from before who didn’t know Maeve, and there’s me now, who couldn’t imagine what life was like before I met her. It’s funny how someone could affect every aspect of your life like that.
