I shake my head. “It was one of those things –– I don’t know, but it showed your shoulders and your legs, and then you looked at me, and I was a fucking goner, Melly.”
She holds back her smile as she listens to me, and then after a quiet moment, she stands up and walks over to her closet. She shuffles through a few things and pulls out the exact shirt, and then she walks to her dresser and grabs the shorts.
“This one?”
I sit up, nodding. “That’s the one.” I smile. “You still have it?”
She laughs. A real laugh. The first real laugh of this conversation. “I actually still fit it.” She holds it up against her front.
I stare at the outfit. I remember every single time she wore it. The first time in eleventh grade. The time she wore just the shorts to a pool party at Lewis’s house. The time she wore the top to a hockey game with jeans. I have a private mental folder forthat outfit. I have had it since I was sixteen. It has, until tonight, been a fairly shameful folder.
“It’s your color.”
She nods. “Which happens to be your name.”
She puts the outfit down on the dresser, and she lies back down on the bed next to me, on her side this time, facing me, her cheek on her hand. The hoodie is bunched up under her chin.
“Remember when I asked you what your favorite color was?”
I do.
I watch her talk. I watch her mouth move. I watch her eyes.
“I thought it was going to be too cliché for your favorite to be blue.”
“My name isn’t the reason it’s my favorite color.”
Her brows furrow. She gives me a face. “Right.”
“What’s your favorite color?”
She grins. “It’s been the same since the sixth grade.”
I look at her lips and then her eyes. And I smile because even though we’ve known each other since we were kids, I feel like there’s still so much I don’t know about her.
“What color is that?”
She tilts her chin down, lifting a brow at me. “Blue.”
“What?” I ask.
She chuckles. “No, I’m telling you that my favorite color is blue.”
I shake my head. I cannot, for one whole second, speak. I reach for a pillow on her side of the bed to tuck under my head — purely for somewhere for my hand to go, to keep my hand from doing the other thing it wants to do, which is to push her hair behind her ear — and I knock her pillow at an angle, and I see something black underneath it.
I grab the pillow.
She makes a small sound.
It’s black and round and —
“Is that my puck?”
She grabs the pillow from me, turning a gorgeous shade of red. “Um, yeah.”
“Why is it under your pillow?”
“I was holding it when you texted me,” she admits, flushed. She grabs it and crosses her legs.
