Let’s walk for blocks and blocks, I’m thinking.Let me make bad math jokes to you all day. Wait until you hear the one about stochastic calculus, which is basically me trying to pronounce it.
“You feel better?” he asks.
“I do.” I look over at the signs that have kept us company through this, our new not-game. “Anyway, these don’t have the colors we need.”
I swing my legs off the bench, stand up, and smooth my shirt down before grabbing my purse, telling him with my body that I’m ready to keep going.
“Meg,” he says from behind me, and I turn, look back down to where he still sits, his body curved forward. His face is turned up to me, his eyes serious but dancing with the fluttering shadows from the canopy of trees overhead.
“Yeah?”
“Your friend . . . I don’t believe she doesn’t want to be your friend anymore. I think she must—” He breaks off, lifts a hand and runs it through his hair, something I’ve never seen him do. “She must have something going on, with herself. I’m sure she’ll come around.”
Oh,no. It’s a big pendulum swing back. We’re probably in one-second-from-crying territory now. Reid’s quiet vote of confidence on this—even in spite of the fact that he’s never met Sibby, that he’s giving me all the benefit of the doubt, that he’s admitted, not ten minutes ago, that he doesn’t have all that much experience with friendship himself—it gives me so much comfort. I don’t even know if I believe it, really, but—God. God, it helps to hear it.
“I hope so.”
He stands then, and the movement puts us close to each other, unexpectedly so. Both of us seem to take the same quick inhale, and his hands rise to cup my elbows, as though to steady me, and I guess it’s a good thing, becausewhoa. Bothof my elbows at the same time. I feel that touch like starbursts beneath my skin, between my legs.
My eyes rise to his. His head is tipped down, the hair he smoothed back curling over his brow again. When he breathes out, I feel the fine strands of hair around my face quiver.
I feel so many things, so much more than I did this morning.
“What I mean to say is . . .” He pauses, those blue eyes searching mine. “What I mean to say is, I think anyone would want to be your friend.”
Friend.
The way Reid says this word—I want to draw and redraw it, capturing how it sounds from his lips. I want to ask him to say it again, so I can watch. So I can know if I’m seeing too much in those letters when he says them.
Imustbe, right?
Friendis not starbursts in your elbows.Friendis not face-pressing.Friendis not thinking about how a so-often-stern, sometimes-laughing set of lips would taste.
Something in my body must’ve changed, straightened, because Reid drops his hands from me, though I still feel those starbursts.Do it again, I want to say, but instead I take a half step back and fix him with what I hope is a normal, unaffected smile.
“Even you, huh?” I manage. And even though I know Reid would’ve said it more directly, I hope he knows what I’m really asking. I hope he knows I’m asking whether he’s forgiven me for those seven hidden letters.
He puts his hands in his jacket pockets. He looks at me for a long time.
“Even me,” he says, finally. And then he adds, quietly, the most perfect, special fragment, the one I know I’ll be drawing for days and days. “Especially me.”
Chapter 10
“Wow,” Lark says, staring down at the pile of sketches in front of her. “This is a lot.”
She doesn’t say “a lot” as though she’s happy about it, and given what I know about her decision-making capabilities, I suppose that’s fair enough. Maybe I should’ve done fewer treatments, or streamlined her options. But I can’t say I regret it.
Because everything laid out in front of us here? The bold, brightly colored compositions, the different iterations of the lettering Lark picked? The mix-and-match styles, the shapes I’ve formed with different letter arrangements?
All of it means I’m finally,finallyunblocked.
Almost every idea on these pages I owe to the game, to the time Reid and I spent together last Saturday after the park. With my cramps abated and a new lightness between us as we’d walked and snapped photos, my pendulum had swung strongly in the direction of “needing tacos,” and since I’d pretty much abandoned any modesty when it came to my period feelings, I’d told Reid immediately.
“I think there’s a place around here you’d like,” he’d said. Sadly, he had not touched my elbow again as he led the way.
Happily, though, “like” had been an understatement. The restaurant had been inspiration city—signs painted on the walls everywhere I looked, bold and bright, advertisingCervezasandMicheladasover the bar,TortillasandSalsasandTostadasin the dining room. Even some of the mirrors on the walls had been painted, one with a gorgeous, vintage-looking script that I’d sketched right away, flipping over the half sheet of paper we’d been given to check off our taco order.
We’d sat at the sticky-surfaced table, the bar loud at our backs, and shared everything we ordered. We ate food that was as bright and delicious as the signs around us. Ripe, pale-green avocado. Perfectly roasted, gold-yellow corn. Bowls of deep-red salsa. Dark, spicy black beans. The translucent purple of chopped red onions.
