His words knocked me backward from his comment. Butterflies. So many butterflies.
“Ask me again,” I whispered. “Ask me what my type is.” Ash looked at me, and I didn’t even give him a chance to answer. “Because it’s you, Ash. It’s always been you.”
This was the closest we’d gotten to talking about something that felt like a little bit more than friendship. The butterflies only grew as I kept my stare tangled with his.
“And my type is you,” he confessed.
My cheeks felt warm as those words left his mouth. I wasn’t exactly sure what to make of them. I used to dream of him saying those words. I used to envision a life with him, with us. I used to dream about us falling in love and finding our happily ever after.
I used to daydream about what would’ve happened if we’d made it to spring break.
Who would we have been if we fell in love and never let go of each other all those years ago?
I stared out into the night sky. You couldn’t see a lot of stars in the sky with all the city lights, but I swore the city felt like the whole universe whenever a light breeze would pass against my face. “Tell me something good,” I requested.
“You,” he replied, looking at me for a split second before turning his stare toward the sky once more. My cheeks heated even more from his simple and direct answer. I lowered my head as a wave of shyness washed over me. I didn’t know whatto say in response to his comment, but luckily, he moved the conversation forward as if he didn’t just send shivers throughout my entire body.
“Do you think the zigzags after loss ever become just wrinkles and then get ironed out?” he asked.
“Maybe not. But maybe that’s the point, actually. Maybe the goal isn’t to go back to the straight line, but more so to learn to love what you have left. I think over time, we learn to embrace the zigs and appreciate the zags.”
He nodded in agreement. His hand slowly brushed my hand, his pinky slowly touching mine. It amazed me how a tiny touch could feel so... so... big.
“This zigzag right now doesn’t suck too much,” Ash said.
My cheeks flushed as I stared down at our hands. Our hands that were slowly but surely finding their way to each other, our fingers becoming intertwined with one another. We were holding hands...
Well.
That was a new development to our story, that was for sure. Our hands were zigzagging together, and my heart was soaring somewhere off in the sheer fantasy of its own happily ever after. Did Ash’s heart do that, too? Envision a life full of happy endings? And if it did, did he envision me there with him, too?
Somehow, I was closer to him. I wasn’t exactly sure when it happened, but Ash and I were so close.So, so close.So close that my body rested between his spread legs. So close that he had our hands resting against his chest. So close that I felt our hands against my own chest, too. So close that my forehead was resting against his forehead. So close that I was sitting in his lap.
When did that happen? How did it happen?
I’d never been so close to a boy before. Especially one who controlled my heartbeat.
“Ashish...” I murmured.
“Karla,” he gently replied, the heat of his mouth falling against the tip of my tongue.
“How often have you thought of this?” I asked, my mouthalmostgrazing his. “Thought about us this close?”
“Since the day you first said hi to me,” he confessed.
And there that feeling was again—home.
That was the moment I realized something that my soul had always known. Ash Banks wasn’t just a man in my life. He was so much more than that. He was familiar to me in a way that I couldn’t truly grasp. As if the main purpose of life was for the two of us to be right there before one another.
Chest to chest.
Mouth to mouth.
Heart to heart.
This was meant to happen, and I knew that somewhere deep in the depths of my spirit. I was made for Ash, and he was crafted in the heavens with me in mind. We existed in a realm where timelines didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if we crossed paths in our youth, or later in adulthood. It didn’t matter when or how or why.
All that mattered was that we made it back to each other. It felt like my soul had been searching for him since I took my very first breath of life. My spirit knew his name before my lips ever spoke it.
