The air next to him stirred. “I wasn’t sure. I wondered if…” She sighed. “I guess it stopped mattering after all that.”
It hadn’t stopped mattering tohim, and he cleared his throat against the tightness lingering there to say something he should’ve said years ago. “I’m so sorry, Finn.” Exposing this particular vein was painful, even all these years later, but he’d do it. He’d drag his blood and his guts to the surface if she asked him to. “I was so pissed at you for thinking I was capable of doing that. By the time I cooled down and realized how it looked, that you deserved an explanation about what actually happened, we weren’t…”
She picked up his unfinished thought, her voice sounding mournful in the dark. “We weren’t friends anymore.”
Friends.The word sat on his tongue, filling his mouth with a familiar bitterness. Yet hadn’t she just implied that she was put out by his dating other girls in high school? Was it possible she’d felt something for him too?
“I missed you, Tom.”
Her confession startled him, andnowhe wanted the light. He wanted to study her face, to see if she missed her friend Tom, or if she missed him for bigger reasons than that. But the power stayed stubbornly off, and her whispered words didn’t reveal what was in her heart. Still, she’d said “friends,” so Tom squeezed his eyes shut in the middle of the darkness and reminded himself of how well he played the look-what-great-buds-we-are game. He could do that again if that’s what she needed.
“I missed you too. What’s Tom Sawyer without Huckleberry Finn?” Their old joke earned him a watery laugh in the darkness, and it was enough to get him moving onto a less dangerous topic. “Okay, let’s get some light in here. Do you have candles or anything?”
“Oh! I’ve got something better.”
Her voice was back to its normal volume, and as she moved away from him, he navigated toward the windows and pulled back the curtains, allowing thin gray light from the overcast sky to trickle in. “Looks like the power’s out for the whole street.”
“It happened once before during a big storm,” she called from the hallway. “Then it was fixed in a few hours, but who knows with all this snow.”
The ambient light was enough for him to see her outline plunk something down on the coffee table in the living room. Then with a “voilà!” she switched on a camping lantern that emitted a welcoming yellow glow in a ten-foot circumference. “Battery operated LEDs. It’ll last up to a week, allegedly.”
When he shot her a questioning look, she shrugged. “That guy whose clothes you’re wearing? Richard? He likes camping, so Josie and I have some weird outdoors equipment we’ve picked up over the years.”
Boy howdy did Tom have questions about Richard the camping god, but he bit them back and took a seat in his favorite chair. Finn chose her usual spot on the far edge of the couch, where the warm light glinted off her hair. Now that their storm of angry words had ended, he wasn’t sure where that left them.
“So, uh, how’s Dylan these days?” she asked casually.
Christ, he never wanted to hear that guy’s name again. “No idea.”
“Really? I assumed you two—”
“The last time he and I spoke, I punched him in the face. That pretty well ended the friendship.”
Finn’s mouth dropped. “Isthatwhy he had a black eye at graduation?” At Tom’s nod, she jutted her chin. “Good. After what he did, he didn’t deserve either of us.”
“Yeah, by then he was a completely different guy than the one I met in kindergarten.” He answered on automatic while his brain worked overtime to process her words.
She believed him. Like a footprint in the sand that slowly filled with water, the realization trickled into the hollow in his heart that her mistrust had created. And like that, he was tempted to throw himself at her feet. Instead, he borrowed her tactic. “And what about you? How bad was it for you after that?”
Finn’s smile didn’t quite reach her eyes. “It wasn’t great. But we only had one week of school left, so I kind of acted like a ghost. And enough people knew what kind of guy Dylan was that a few were sympathetic. Still, I was glad for a fresh start at college. I considered myself reborn at UIC.”
“And were you? Reborn?”
She exhaled a laugh. “Yes. College was great. I rose from the ashes of high school like a very popular phoenix. I met Josie, joined a sorority, dated some nice boys. It was good to find out that I wasn’t permanently damaged.”
He studied his feet propped on the ottoman, this time covered in fuzzy polka dots from Finn’s warm sock collection. “I try to do right by women now.”
His non sequitur surprised him, and it confused Finn even more. “What do you mean?”
He hesitated, not particularly enjoying analyzing how his teenage mistakes had turned him into the person he was today. “It’s about more than just not being an asshole toward women. It’s about standing up to guys who are.” He shrugged. “I didn’t do a good job back then, and I made more excuses than I should have for someone I thought was a friend. Since then, I’ve tried to be better.”
She made a soft, understanding noise. “Like making sure my roommate got home safely when she had too much to drink, even though you were dead on your feet from exhaustion and malnutrition?” It wasn’t so dim that he couldn’t see her small smile.
“Something like that.” He kept his tone light, but in truth, he wanted to bask in her approval and wrap it around him like a cape. The thrill her smile created settled briefly in his heart before traveling straight to his groin.
He cleared his throat and said briskly, “So it’s option three then.”
She looked at him blankly.
