Briar laughed, leaning against the wall. ‘Should we make a list of things we’re not talking about?Noah, Harper, summer 2015, me selling the camp, you caring about my mom more than me… What am I missing?’
She was lightening the mood, and Alice was grateful for it. Whatever was happening between them couldn’t survive under pressure. And lately, any time they were alone, Alice felt like she could hardly breath with the weight of it.
‘I’m sure we can find things to add to the list,’ Alice said, turning back to the wall. ‘It didn’t seem like you loved me talking about Tess.’ She glanced sideways at Briar, wanting to see her reaction.
‘Exes,’ Briar said, eyes crinkling in amusement. ‘Added.’
‘Hmm, what else?’ Alice asked, turning to Briar fully. She was closer than Alice had realized, and the flutter of Briar’s eyelashes made her forget what she was saying. ‘Um, the other night?’
Briar glanced down at Alice’s mouth. ‘Yeah. Definitely not.’
Neither of them moved. The air felt charged, like all Alice needed to do was lean in and she would get exactly what she wanted. What they had agreed not to do again.
Alice turned back, painting over the same section again and willing her heartbeat to return to normal.
‘I’m glad we had this talk,’ she said, still tense. ‘When I leave at the end of the summer, I want to count myself as made up with you. And Noah.’ Her voice went up at the end of the sentence, inflecting it like a question.
It was the wrong thing to say. Whatever softness had been in Briar’s expression before was gone now.
‘I’m honored to have made it as a stop on the Alice Hughes apology tour,’ she said.
Alice didn’t know how Briar had managed that – to go from someone she knew better than herself to a stranger in a millisecond.
Chapter 20
Alice
In honor of their first non-disastrous week of camp, Alice and Briar hosted a poker night in their cabin.
Alice arranged a spread of snacks they had confiscated throughout the summer: bowls of barbeque-flavored crisps, chocolate-covered pretzels and matcha-flavored KitKats. As she did, her eyes were drawn to the other side of the room, where Briar was stirring hot chocolate on a burner. She was flushed from the combined heat of the summer evening and the bubbling pot in front of her, and she looked perfect. Alice wished she could take a picture to capture the moment and bring it back to London with her.
Briar opened a bag of marshmallows, popping one into her mouth. The white powder stuck to her lips in a way that derailed Alice’s thoughts entirely. She watched in equal parts horror and awe as Briar licked her fingers clean.
‘What?’ Briar asked innocently.
‘Nothing,’ Alice said, shaking her head. ‘You ever have one of those moments where you think, in hindsight, you really should’ve realized you were gay sooner?’
She refrained from mentioning that she meant all the times she’d watched Briar eat marshmallows and had a funny feeling in her stomach. At the time, she’d attributed her queasiness to Briar’s seemingly endless capacity for sweets. Now she recognized the want for what it was, an ache low in her belly.
Briar shot her a funny look. ‘All the time.’
‘Like,’ Alice ploughed on, determined for Briar to not figure out what had prompted this train of thought, ‘our obsession with the middle school English teacher who was definitely a lesbian.’
‘Ms. Monroe,’ Briar said, smiling fondly as Alice reminded herself not to stare at the dimples in her cheeks. ‘Man, she wasreallyinto the gender roles in Shakespeare.’
‘And that phase we had where we would only watch foreign movies that just happened to be gay,’ Alice added, thinking about their legs tangled together in Briar’s bed, watching movies on her laptop.
‘Well,’ Briar said sarcastically, ‘that wasobviouslybecause we were incredibly cultured teenagers, and not for any other reason.’
‘Do you remember when they scissored inBlue is the Warmest Colourand we had to immediately Google if that was a real thing?’ The scene had fascinated teenage Alice, and she hadn’t been able to stop thinking about it for weeks afterward.
Briar laughed. ‘Yeah, because I’d just come out and needed to make sure I was an expert in all the gay shit in case people came to me with questions.’
‘Are you guys talking aboutBlue is the Warmest Colour?’ Noah’s voice came from the doorway, and Alice turned to see him and Harper there. ‘The movie you made me watch with you like five times the summer before senior year, even though I fell asleep every time?’
Alice had felt a spark of magic the first time she’d watched the movie with Briar and proceeded to try to recreate it again and again without success. She’d wondered what was wrong with her for the longest time, that watching a movie with her boyfriend didn’t feel as good as watching it with her best friend.
‘You just didn’t appreciatefilmthe way we did,’ Briar teased.
