Ellie waited. She’d learned from Becca that the best thing you could do when someone was working up to something was to give them the silence to find their own way there.
“I’ve been in love with her for a while now,” Alexa said suddenly, and the words came out in a rush, as if she’d been holding them so close for so long that letting them out was explosive. “Two years, give or take. I’ve never told anyone. Not a single person.”
Ellie kept her expression open, present, leaving Alexa the room for whatever she wanted to say. “Ok.”
“She’s my best friend. My teammate. My roommate. We do everything together, we know everything about each other, and for two years I’ve been carrying this one thing that she doesn’t know about and it’s been…” She let out a breath. “It’s been really hard. Because I can’t risk it. If I tell her and she doesn’t feel thesame way, I lose everything. The friendship, the dynamic, living together next year after we graduate. All of it.”
“That’s a lot to hold to yourself.” Ellie paused. “Can I ask you something? Is it just Mia, or have you been interested in any other women?”
Alexa dragged her hand through the sand, letting it run through her fingers. She didn’t answer for a few seconds. “I may have slightly underplayed my prior experience last night,” she said eventually, a wry smile flickering across her face.
“How so?”
“I had a thing with a girl in high school. A teammate. We kept it completely secret, nobody knew, not our friends, not our families, nobody. She even had a boyfriend.” She shrugged. “It ended when we went to college and we never talked about it again. But it wasn’t just fooling around. It was a relationship. A real one.”
“And Mia doesn’t know that?”
“She knows I hooked up with a girl a few times before I knew her. One of those brags when you first meet people, showing everyone how experienced I was. She doesn’t know it was a relationship. She doesn’t know I’m…” She waved her hand vaguely. “Whatever I am. I’ve never really labelled it.”
“You don’t have to label it.”
“I know. But the point is, she doesn’t know the full picture. And now…” Alexa’s voice caught slightly. “Now I slept with her. Last night. Not just when all four of us were… whatever wewere doing. After you and Becca went to your room we just… it happened. What I’ve wanted to happen for years. And it wasn’t drunk fooling around, Ellie. It wasn’t spin the bottle or spring break or any of that. It was real. She was looking at me, and I was looking at her, and it was amazing. We… you get the picture. We didn’t get much sleep.”
Ellie nodded. “How did she seem? Afterwards?”
“Happy. Like, genuinely happy. We held each other while we fell asleep, we kissed, she kept saying ‘that was amazing’ and so did I.” Alexa’s voice was shaking slightly now. “And I’m terrified because I don’t know if that was Mia having a wild night at spring break and moving on, or if it was Mia feeling what I’m feeling. And if I ask and it’s the first one, I’ve ruined everything.”
“What does your gut tell you?”
Alexa was quiet for a long time. A wave ran up the sand and touched their feet.
“I’ve seen Mia like that with guys. If she hooks up she’s all-in. But… my gut tells me she felt it too,” she said quietly. “The way she kissed me wasn’t how you kiss someone you’re hooking up with. It was… God, it was incredible. And after, when we were lying there, she said something…” She paused. “She said, ‘We should have done this sooner’. And I didn’t know if she meant earlier in the evening or, like, two years ago.”
“Did you ask?”
“I was too scared to ask.”
Ellie thought carefully about what to say. This wasn’t her area, she wasn’t the therapist, Becca was, but she knew how to listen, and she could ask the questions that might help Alexa find her own way through it.
“What’s the thing you’re most afraid of?” Ellie asked.
“That I tell her and she panics. That it makes everything weird. That I go from being her best friend to being the friend who’s in love with her, and she can never look at me the same way again.” She shrugged. “That we lose what we already have, which is great.”
“And what’s the best-case scenario?”
Alexa turned to look at her, and her eyes were bright. “That she feels the same way. That last night was the start of something. That we’ve been idiots for years and we finally figured it out.”
“Can I ask you something else?”
“Yeah.”
“Before last night, before us, before the kissing game, before any of it, was there ever a moment where you thought Mia might feel the same way?”
Alexa thought about it. “Sometimes. Little things. But you ask yourself whether they’re real or you’re just being hopeful. Like the way she looks at me every now and then when she thinks I’m not paying attention. How she gets jealous when I hook up with someone, even though she tries to hide it. Those couple of times we kissed… she was the one who started it, drunken bravado she claimed, and afterwards she acted like it was nothing but shecouldn’t look at me for two days.” She paused. “And last night, during spin the bottle. When the bottle pointed at me. The look on her face before she kissed me. I swear that wasn’t nothing.”
“It really wasn’t nothing,” Ellie agreed. “From where I was sitting, that was the most intense, hottest kiss I’ve ever seen. And that wasn’t just you contributing to that.”
Alexa let out a small, shaky laugh. “It’s ridiculous. You’re three years older than me and you seem to know everything about this. I feel like a child.”
