I fucking kissed her and she kissed me back!
She wanted to kiss me. This almost feels like a high school crush even though we’re both twenty-year-olds in our third year of university. But the giddiness of kissing the girl I’ve fallen for still feels the same. Except, while my teenage self was filled with nothing but nerves, this time around I feel a sort of coziness.
We’re now sitting at a bench on the pier, looking over the very same beach. I don’t want to break the silence between us, but we’ve literally said nothing else since that happened.
All we did was grab sodas—I’m halfway through a water bottle while she’s slowly sipping a cherry Coke, to no one’s surprise—and place ourselves on this bench.
One minute we were talking about our biggest secrets and the next…nothing but the sound of silence fills the space between us.
A silence that one of us has to break. And it might just be me even if it’s with something stupid.
“What do we do now?” Like this. Yeah, that’s a question I just asked.Way to fucking go, Ryder.My nerves are bouncing inside my head like a crazy table tennis ball because I am truly speechless.
We both are.
“It’s only one, right? We've still got time,” she responds, her gaze still aimed at the beautiful view in front of us. Though my eyes only focus on her.
“That’s not what I’m talking about, Diana.”
She sighs, shifting herself so that her entire body faces me. Her hair still has some bits of sand and I reach my hand out to dust it all off. Diana doesn’t say anything for a while but once I move my hand away from her hair, she speaks.
“Maybe we should just start walking,” she suggests before standing up from the bench. Wow, she’s desperate to avoid this topic, isn’t she? “What?”
Oh shit, I must have been staring.
“I’ve never been here, you know,” she continues. “Might as well see what this pier has to offer.”
“Okay.” I stand up from the bench and follow her.
We pass a couple of the restaurants before finally reaching the farther end of the pier, away from the screaming kids on the rollercoaster and wannabe rappers. Diana leans forward on the railing, soda still in hand, twirling the top of the bottle between her fingers.
“I don’t know.” Her eyes are trained on the top half of the bottle she’s fiddling with. “I’m not exactly sure, to be honest. It’s a little scary.”
“Scary?” I arch a brow.
“Not knowing what to do next,” she clarifies. “I mean, I went from calling you an overgrown child, which I’m sorry about, by the way, to now and—”
“Let me guess,” I interrupt, dismissing the small apology. “It’s terrifying?”
She nods and her hazel eyes finally stare into me. “Very. It’s easy when I can just figure this all out on my but I can’t now.”
Diana takes a breath to continue but I hold my hand up. “Sorry, but can I stop you right there, again?”
“Yeah.”
“All on your own? That seems exhausting,” I remark.
She shrugs helplessly. “I’ve managed to do a lot on my own. It’s not that hard.”
“But you don’t have to. You should never feel that you have to do everything on your own, no matter what. If you want to, that’s a whole different scenario.”
“I can take care of myself, you know,” she argues.
“There’s no doubt about that,” I agree. “But there’s a lot of people in your corner who would do anything to help you.Includingme.”
Her eyes widen slightly.
“Do you know the one thing I admired about you most?” I ask her. “That you wouldn’t visibly judge me and it made telling you stuff a lot easier than it would with someone like Jake. Or even my sister.” And those two have known me longer than Diana. I don’t tell either of them about how it feels to not do something for myself.
