Then finally, a far-too-mournful-sounding observation.
“I guess we can’t just expect to shift from enemies to friends without it being occasionally uncomfortable and sometimes full of inappropriate hand gestures.”
“Is that howyousaw me? As your enemy?”
He didn’t look up at her when she said it.
Or when he answered, in the lowest possible tone.
“No. I was…I was just mostly talking from your perspective.”
“And what was yours? How did you think of the shit between us?”
“I don’t know. I think you want me to saya game,but that wasn’t true. It never felt like a game to me. It felt like I was trapped behind glass watching a really shitty version of myself operating my body.”
Now he looked up at her—right when she needed his eyes to stay down.
She knew she appeared too shaken by what he’d just said. She knew that he would see.
And he did. He just took it a different way from the one she’d expected.
“Though that’s not to absolve myself of responsibility. I don’t want to do that. I just…I don’t know how else to explain what it was like. I would go home and just be my ordinary self and wonder what the fuck happened. I still don’t know what the fuck happened.”
There were words she wanted to say here, but none of them came out.
Nothing came out. She felt suddenly frozen over—much to his consternation.
“Letty, are you still breathing?”
“Yeah. I just forgot how for a second.”
“Because you hate what I said?”
“Because you keep saying amazing things,” she said, part of her already wanting to take it back. It revealed too much and seemed too grateful. Her voice trembled in the middle. You could hear the tears in it.
But then he dipped his head to hide his smile, and she just couldn’t.
She had to make it a subject change instead.
“Now, can we actually do some work? I think we’ve written about three relevant words.”
“Well in fairness to us, it’s kind of hard to write relevant words about movies in a library.”
“We can do plenty. This is the part where we get a ton of quotes down so we can jam them into our presentations and essays to make us look super smart.”
“You do that? You, Juliet Judith Carmichael, take shortcuts to look super smart?”
She wanted to hate him for the raised eyebrow, and for using her full name.
But she couldn’t. The most she could manage was suppressing the laugh.
“I’m going to act like you didn’t say that dreaded thing and just skip straight to the question.”
“You really hate it that much, because I th—”
“I said, I’m skipping to the question.”
“Okay, cool, cool. What was the question again?”
