He chuckles, shaking his head, letting go of my hand and sitting calmly back in his seat. “Damn, Nancy Drew, it’s a free country. You can do anything you want. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I wait, watching him. If the pulsation in his temples is anything to go by, he doesn’t feel as low-key as his words would have me believe. It’s like he’s pulled on a mask of douchebag indifference.
Good, I tell myself.
Yet there’s this small part of me – okay, it’s not so small – that sort of wants him to fight for this moment.
The reason I stopped him before he kissed me was that I’m not sure I’ll be able to control the pace of it. The whole point of this camp is to squash his heart like he did to me all those years ago. But the helicopter ride has distorted things.
It’s getting tougher and tougher to care about what happened all those years ago.
But Adam’s warning resounds in my mind.He isn’t good to women.
He could be using me.
“Okay, well, fine,” I huff, more snappish than I mean to be. “I’ll see you around.”
“Wait,” Harry says when my hand is on the door.
“What?” I sigh.
His lips shudder. He smiles, genuinely smiles, like he used to when we were kids. “I had a great time today, Grace. I think we ought to do it again sometime.”
“What, like a date?”
He shrugs. “If you wanna label it, sure.”
I toss my hair, my ponytail whipping around. “I’ll think about it.”
I climb from the car and pace across the parking lot, heading for the dormitory wing. I pass a few people playing a casual game of soccer on the field, their voices rising into the air as a few insects buzz around, humming.
I take out my phone and go to my blog administrator’s page, the inspiration for a post striking me like an instruction.
My Day at the Climbing Center: How Helping People Makes Us Better.
I barely look up as my thumbs fly across the phone’s touchscreen keyboard. Working on my blog is better than pining like a lost fricking lamb after Harry.
It feels good to write something positive, to relive the climbing center experience through prose.
