Iclosed my door harder than I needed to, wanting to draw Chase’s attention when I got out of my car. His back was toward me, muscles straining as he lifted down a cracked fish tank full of random tchotchkes that must have been as heavy as it was immense. He turned and smiled, and I felt a frisson of happiness skip across my sternum as I jogged up his driveway to help him.
My fingers abutted his as I took some of the weight from him—not a lot, since the discrepancy in our size and strength was pretty vast, but enough that he was able to lower the tank without the whole thing shattering.
The thing was huge, barely smaller than a bathtub.
“What did you keep in there, a shark?”
“An iguana.”
“Seriously?” It was hard to picture Chase as a little kid with a reptile obsession. He looked more the kind who went straight from walking to weight lifting, bypassing all the seminerdy stuff that thrilled the rest of us mere mortals.
“Lizard guys don’t do it for you, huh?” Chase asked, starting to unload the tank. I joined him.
“You saylizard guyand I immediately think of something like this.” I lifted an old comic book featuring a crocodile/human hybrid thing.
“I didn’t wear a lab coat.” He took the comic book from me, smiling openly as he flipped through it.
“Keep pile? Donate pile?”
He sighed. “I don’t need it, so donate.”
From the corner of my eye, I saw him glance back at the comic a few more times as we worked, so when his back was turned later, I snuck it into the keep pile. We didn’t always need the things we wanted, but some things were worth holding on to anyway.
I moved to another box that looked small enough for me to handle on my own, but when I lifted it, my knees nearly buckled. Hearing my grunt, Chase turned and grabbed the other side, and together we moved it to the space he’d cleared on the shelf.
The box shook the entire metal shelving unit when he slid his fingers out from beneath it.
“What’s in there?” My fingers pulsed hot from the brief pressure of holding the box.
Stepping aside, Chase let me read what was written in thick black marker on the box.
“Oh,” I said, letting sympathy draw the laughing word out. “You must have been the cutest little nerd.”
“A lot of kids collected rocks.”
“Sure they did. And I bet all of them still live with their moms too.”
I saw a glint in his eye as his mouth curled up. I tried to dart away when he lunged for me, but there was nowhere to go. His fingers dug into my rib cage, forcing an involuntary peal of laughter to burst from my lungs as he started tickling me. I twisted, but he caught me up against his chest. His fingers stilled, and he stopped the retaliatory tickle attack, but he kept his hands splayed on either side of my rib cage, where my heart was beating way too fast. We were both grinning, until we weren’t. And when he shifted his gaze from my eyes to my mouth, I stepped back, breaking his hold on me. Our eyes were locked together.
“What did you collect?”
I hadn’t really collected anything, except… “Baseball cards.”
“So when I was chasing lizards and polishing rocks—”
“Wait, polishing?”
“—you were collecting baseball cards?”
“Go back to polishing rocks. That’s like a whole other level of nerd-dom.”
Chase grinned. “You were the girl who ran around with perpetually scraped knees and always had a ball cap on.” Chase ran his finger over the bill of the one I wore.
I was, until puberty. Then I traded my scraped knees for lip gloss—usually Selena’s—but I still felt the most like myself with a baseball cap on.
“Yep, and you,” I said, smiling, “were…the boy who had his own rock polisher?”
He inclined his head, conceding without embarrassment.
