Horrified realization flashed across his face. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Pretty sure getting laughed at is a possibility.”
He rubbed his hand across his face. “I gave you PTSD.”
“No.” I didn’t want to give him so much weight in my life. “No. I’m just... cautious.”
“Let me think.” He pulled on his fine hair, making it float about his head. “Okay, you don’t have to go straight to asking anyone out or anything. Maybe... you should reframe how you think about flirting. Don’t think of it as having an end goal, where you have to tell someone you like them, where someone could reject you and you could get hurt. Think of it as having a good time. Hanging out, chatting. Low stakes. Fun.”
“Right.” I could see his point, only... “The problem is, I’m not fun.”
He frowned. “Why would you say that?”
“I don’t know. I come off as too sharp. Too stiff. Cold.”
“So you have walls up.” He shrugged. “Everyone has walls.”
As high and solid as mine?I wrapped my arms around my kneesand pulled them to my chest. “Why is dating so easy for some people and so hard for others?”
“What do you mean?”
What did I mean? I meant I didn’t understand why this seemed so much harder for me than it seemed for everyone else. I meant I felt broken sometimes, watching how easy other people found dating, which I found painfully distressing. “One of the girls at school, Kaylee, is always sliding in and out of relationships. She hasn’t been single since we were thirteen. I don’t even know how to start. I feel like I’m standing on the outside looking in, with no clue what to do. How is this something peopleknow? How does the whole human race manage to pair off?”
He finished off the dregs of his coffee, looking thoughtful. “I guess anything new feels bizarre and unnatural at first. It’s probably easier to flirt and date if you always have and harder to start the longer you haven’t. Like Newton’s first law of motion. You need a force to act upon your body at rest.”
I stared at him. “That’s the nerdiest thing I’ve ever heard you say.”
He looked wry. “You will be shocked to hear I’m not just the good-for-nothing playboy you seem to think I am.”
I smothered a smile. “True. A good-for-nothing playboy would never use those words.”
He ignored that. “These lessons are going to be the force you need to knock you into the dating arena.”
“Great. How?”
“Maybe you’re so uncomfortable because you don’t have any practice at this, at flirting and dating. You’re not confident. If you were, you’d feel a lot better about all of this.”
I didn’t disagree; I’d readBe confidentin a hundred different dating-advice articles. But it felt like a chicken-and-egg problem: How did Igetpractice if I was too terrified to start? “So how do I magically get confident?”
Tyler stretched one arm along the top of the couch. “Confidence comes from being comfortable with something. Like, I was always comfortable about sex and relationships because my moms were open about it; talking about dating never felt like a big deal to me.”
I would rather go through another lockdown than talk about sex with my parents. “Okay.”
He placed his hand on the arm of the couch, palm up. “Take my hand.”
“What?” My heart lurched.
“Take it.”
I regarded his hand the same way I would a live wire splayed across the road. “That seems like a lot.”
“Or seems like something pretty reasonable if you want to be comfortable touching people, a standard part of flirting.”
“Maybe I’ll invent a new kind of flirting where you stand six feet away and shout at each other.”
He smiled but said nothing. His bright gaze held mine.
This seemed like a no-good, very-bad idea. Ever so slowly, I leaned across the gap of our seats and placed my hand in his. His palm was warm and his fingers cool and I’d never held hands with a boy before, except when Tyler and I had measured our hands against each other’s two nights ago. My heart beat as quickly as a hummingbird’s wings.
