“Did you see his face?” she asked. “He cried like a baby!”
I wanted to laugh too, but I was too busy staring at her scraped knuckles. They were red and already starting to swell.
“Y-Y-You’re hurt,” I said, my face burning with embarrassment at the stutter but also something warm.
Paige looked down at her hand as if she had forgotten about it. “Oh. Yeah, I guess I am.” She shrugged. “Worth it though.”
I pulled out the Spider-Man Band-Aid I always carried. My mom made me keep one on me ever since I had fallen off my bike last month and scraped my knee.
“H-Here,” I said, holding it out to her. My hands were shaking, and my cheeks felt like they were on fire. She’s so pretty. “For y-y-your hand.”
“Spider-Man!” Her face lit up. “He’s my favorite!”
She took the band-aid and pressed it onto her knuckles. Then she grinned at me. A huge gap-toothed grin that made my heart do something weird and jumpy.
Wow, she gets even prettier when she smiles.
“Th-Thank you,” I said, scratching my ear. “For s-standing up for me.”
“That’s what friends do, silly,” Paige said, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Then she grabbed my hand again, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. “Come on! Let’s go and play in the treehouse. I’ll show you my Spider-Man figurine.”
She started pulling me along, chattering about superheroes and how she was going to be a superhero when she grew up, and I followed her like a lost puppy. I was hers and utterly gone for the fierce little girl in a yellow dress who stood up for me.
“Hey, Derek?” she said, slowing down to walk beside me instead of dragging me. Her hand was still in mine, warm and a little sticky from the playground.
“Y-Yeah?”
“Don’t worry about your stutter, okay?” She squeezed my hand. “My grandpa stutters too, and he’s the smartest person I know. It just means you think faster than your mouth can keep up. That’s what he says, anyway.”
“R-Really?”
“Really.” She bumped her shoulder against mine.
I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to explain that she had just given me something no one else ever had. The feeling that maybe I wasn’t broken after all.
Even if my dad thinks so.
So I just held onto her hand and let her lead me to the tree house, where we spent the rest of the afternoon reading superhero stories.
And somewhere between the laughter, I fell in love.
I opened my eyes, pulled back to the present by the ache in my chest. That little girl in the yellow dress had grown into the woman sleeping down the hall. The woman who had married someone else. The woman I had spent years trying to get over.
The last thing she needed was me complicating things further with feelings she might not even return.
She deserved better than that. Better than me.
So, I’d stick to the plan of our fake engagement. Help her divorce Jack, give her the space and safety to heal, and when it was over, when she was ready to move on with her life, I would let her go.
I pulled out my phone and added one more rule to my mental list:
5. Don’t tell her the truth. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
7
AM I DROOLING?
PAIGE
