She breathes out a laugh and stares at her clasped hands in her lap. The wheels in her head turn.
“You know, I used to have a crush on you,” she says in a low voice. “Did you know that?”
“Well, yeah.” I swallow. “You said you were going to marry me when you were eight.”
I grin, remembering her always being around me.
But then she replies, “I don’t mean when I was eight. I mean, I did then, but also later too.”
I don’t look at her now. The lines on the road rush underneath my car, one after the other.
“When I was thirteen and you left,” she tells me, “and still at fifteen and sixteen.”
We cross the bridge, and I watch her pull out a penny and let her arm whip out into the night, tossing the coin over the side.
I guess I should’ve known about the crush, but I just thought she was a bit lonely, like me.
She fills her lungs with fresh air and exhales. “I shouldn’t have put pressure on you to be here, or to be someone I imagined as a kid.” Her eyes soften. “It was unfair.”
It’s not.
I want tomatter to her.
“Friends?” she says.
I can’t look at her, the ceiling of the car seeming to come down on my head. I want to be who she imagined. Exactly who she imagined.
It’s like she’s woken up from a dream to the disappointment of reality.
My eyelids flutter, searching for something to say. “Unless your favorite movie is stillThe Shawshank Redemption,” I grumble over the needles in my throat.
“Oh, okay,Fast & Furious,” she teases.
“The Matrix, thank you.”
We smile at each other as she points for me to take the hill, and we cruise through Weston, bypassing Green Street down the road on the right.
Yes, her film preferences are a little more sophisticated than mine, but her choices produce far too many emotions for me to go through more than once a year. I guess my taste was shaped by her brothers. Jax raised me onMission Impossible. Jared loved martial arts films. And Madoc loved old school action.
“In fact,” I tell her, “You need to see both franchises again. Got a TV yet?”
She directs me right and points to the house on the left. “Yes.”
I park, looking up at one of the many massive brownstone townhouses of Knock Hill. I drove around this town many times in college, but I didn’t think anyone lived here anymore. Three stories, worn wooden door, ornate stairwell up to the front door.
It must’ve been beautiful back in the day.
I follow her up to the house. “I’m going to log you into my streaming accounts.”
“Fix the settings in there while you’re at it,” she fires back. “I don’t like that TruMotion, or whatever it’s called.”
She unlocks the door and steps inside. I start to follow her, but something catches my attention, and I see Farrow Kelly standing at the window of the brownstone next door, shirtless and smoking a cigarette.
He lives next door?
I turn away.Great.
“I’ll be back,” she calls out, heading up the steps.
