“The weekend is over. It’s done and dealt with. I’m not interested in rehashing any of it and I don’t need you to feel like you have to overcompensate with me. We’re fine. Let’s go eat.” She gives me a smile that’s as close to normal as she can make it, but it falls just short enough to speak louder than her words.
“Tell me something, Eryn.” My voice comes out quieter than I intended.
She pauses mid-buckle of her seatbelt, her hands stilling as she looks at me, waiting.
“Do you remember our first kiss?”
Her expression turns puzzled, not because she doesn’t remember but because I’ve never asked her this before.
She makes a halfhearted lunge for my phone when I pull it out.
“What? You’re the one who posted the video. Did you take it down?”
“No, because it was cute at the time, and it was the start of us.” But she stops trying to grab the phone away from me. “Fine, but just know it’ll be super embarrassing.”
We have to scroll pretty far back in her feed through lots of mermaid and baking content, far more of the latter than the former, before I tap the thumbnail showing me walking toward her on Brant Point Beach—because I could still walk then—just after sunset with a pizza box in my hands. “Electric Love” by Børns plays as the lighthouse looms in the background. I angle the phone so Eryn can see the screen.
We were fifteen at the time, and we both look young in the video, especially me. Shirtless, barefoot, and with my hair so overgrown that it was starting to curl at my neck. I looked like I didn’t have a care in the world, and back then, it was true.
Eryn looks almost the same. Her straight black hair was shorter, but otherwise she’s even dressed almost the same today, in a cropped white tank and cutoffs.
“Do we really want to watch this now?” She looks over despite her words.
The music is too loud to hear what we’re saying, and the golden hour had come and gone, so there are quite a few shadows too, but to my surprise, I remember it all too well. “I was asking you why your phone was set up to record.”
“And I told you I wanted some pictures of you, me, and Tate, but obviously, I never invited him.”
It was just the two of us alone on the beach, and for whatever reason, I had started to get that feeling like something was off. I should have just asked her if something was wrong, but that level of maturity was beyond me at that point. I went for the dumb joke instead.
I smile, watching myself try to be cool. “There I am, telling you they were out of pepperoni, so I got sardines instead. You were so disappointed, but you still told me it was fine.” I laugh and shift the phone closer to her. “Look at the way you’re frowning at the box.”
“I didn’t want to make you feel bad.”
I lift my gaze from the screen to stare at her profile, saying softly, “No, you never did, did you?”
The moment is coming then; I’d know it from the look on her face now, even without the musical cue in the video. I remember telling her I was kidding about the pizza, and just as I was lifting the lid to show her, one of my best friends since kindergarten grabbed my face and kissed me.
Beside me now, Eryn covers her face. “I can’t believe I did that.”
I couldn’t either. I didn’t have a clue that she liked me that way. In the video, she pulls away then runs out of frame and I immediately take off after her. End of clip.
The comments under the video are full of heart eyes and plenty of romantic movie–level speculation on what happened when I caught up with her.
I put my phone down. There’s no footage of what happened next, and we would’ve never posted it if there were.
I’d frozen when she first kissed me. There was nothing I expected less in that moment than Eryn’s mouth on mine, so I did the worst thing I could’ve possibly done in her mind.
I didn’t kiss her back.
In hindsight, I should have seen something like that happening. We spent enough time together, and despite Tate and half the school constantly teasing us, I’d just never looked at her that way, and before that night on the beach, I didn’t think she looked at me that way either. I’d kissed a few other girls by that point, so it wasn’t the kiss itself that threw me, it was the girl whose lips were pressed against mine. Eryn wasn’t any other girl, and in my head, I’d always categorized her as the non-kissing kind. My brain couldn’t make the switch fast enough.
She hadn’t run far, so I caught up to her where the tide was sliding over our feet. She had her arms wrapped tightly around herself, and I remember how close to tears she was.
I’d never seen her cry before, not really, but I knew instinctively that I didn’t ever want to be the cause. My brain still wasn’t ready to move her into the kissing category, but I didn’t know what else to do.
So I kissed her.
It all just kind of happened after that. Me and Eryn.
