“Obviously,” I tried to joke but instead heard myself whisper and waver.
Alex looked down at the sketch again. It was a drawing of Tag, a very old one from freshman year. We weren’t even friends when I’d done it. I remembered Pravika, Zoe, and I had been doing homework in the library, and we’d spotted Tag in one of the reading rooms. “Lily, look!” Both my friends had grinned. “Look who’s over there.”
With them, my secret crush had been anything but a secret.
“Fine,” Zoe had said after I refused to go talk to him. “Then I dare you to godrawhim.”
My stomach dropped. “What?”
“You heard me.” Zoe nodded at the sketchbook tucked under my arm. “Draw him.”
Pravika gave me a little push, and for some reason, I let myself be pushed. I’d walked into the reading room, and before my legs melted like two candlesticks, I went straight up to Tag’s mahogany study table. “Hey, Tag,” I’d said, and whenhe looked up from his book, his face was bathed in the warm lamplight.
“Hey, Lily,” he said with a smile. “How are you?”
I’d ignored his question, immediately breaking into a ramble. “I have an assignment for art class,” I said. “We’re drawing people, so I need to draw someone, and I was wondering if I could draw you.”
“Draw me?” Tag comically quirked an eyebrow. “Like one of your Spanish girls?”
“Okay, it’sFrenchgirls,” I’d sighed, unaware at the time that he’d purposely misquotedTitanicso I’d relax. “The line is ‘draw me like one of your French girls.’”
“Do you want me to pose?” he asked once I was seated across from him, sketchbook open to a fresh page and charcoal pencil in hand. His evergreen eyes caught mine, and I blushed under their glimmer.
“No.” I shook my head. “Just be…” I searched for a better word than “normal.” I didn’t want him to be normal. “Just be at peace,” I said quietly. “Okay?”
Tag’s lips curved into a slow smile. “I can do that.”
When he went back to reading a worn copy ofDune,I began to draw. For the next couple of hours, there was complete silence between us—a silence that felt strangely comfortable and would eventually grow so lovingly familiar. “It’s almost scary,” Pravika once said. “How you guys can understand each other without saying a word.”
The sketch made me ache. The way Tag rested his head in one hand while he read, dark hair disheveled and his fifteen-year-old facial features gentle. While his eyes focused on the page, his right hand had absentmindedly reached across the table—as if hoping to find someone else’s. “I hugged my sketchbook on the way home that night,” I now murmured to Alex, remembering how my heart had swelled. “I’d never been more in love with a drawing.”
Alex responded by rubbing his temples. “You went to see him today.”
I nodded. “Yes, and we talked about—”
“Iknowwhat you talked about,” he interjected. “He gave me the recap while we had spaghetti Bolognese for dinner.” He sighed. “I should’ve been there. You guys aren’t talking about what you need to; I clearly need to guide the discussion.”
“And what exactly would that be?” I asked with a pounding in my chest. “What is this oh-so-fascinating topic that must be addressed?”
The expression on Alex’s face shifted from exasperation to extreme pain. I waited for him to say something. “Do you remember…” he said slowly. “What I said the night of the prank? About Taggart wanting a girlfriend?”
My mind flashed back to the three of us—the A team—trekking toward the sculpture sanctuary. Tag had been leading the way and out of earshot when Alex claimed Tag gushing about his cat translated to him secretly wanting a girlfriend.“Sure,” I said. “You said he wanted a girlfriend but that Blair didn’t count as one, and then you made this bizarre metaphor about her being a box of Band-Aids.”
“Bizarre?” Alex wrinkled his nose. “It’s not bizarre; it’s brilliant.”
“Brilliant?” I sighed. “Alex, I have no idea what you mean.”
Alex lowered his voice. “You dropped his heart, Lily,” he said. “You dropped it andshatteredit. And I tried to pick up the pieces and put them back into his chest, but one is missing and the others won’t work without it.”
I felt a sharp pang in my ribs, an epiphany dawning on me. “Oh,” I breathed.
“Again and again, he goes back to Blair because he’s missing the most important piece of sparkling glass,” Alex continued. “He keeps patching up the dark hole with the same bandage because he believes you are lost and that he’s never going to find you.”
My eyes welled up with tears. I tried wiping them away, but it didn’t work. “Alex…”
“He desperately wants to find you, Lily.”
“He doesn’tneedto find me.” I quietly started to cry, right there in detention. All this time! All this time, Tag had loved me, and I hadn’t let myself believe it. “I’m here. IpromiseI’m here. Yes, I hid for a while, but I’m not lost. I’m found, and I’ve always been his. You know that, Alex.”
