18. Naomi

CHAPTER 18

Naomi

I head straight for the sliding door as soon as I spot Andrea out on the deck, but instead of pulling on the handle, I pause for a few seconds to watch her. She's got her back to me, thick layers of purple-tinged hair spilling down the back of her loose white tank top and nearly brushing the waist of her denim shorts. Her guitar is sitting on the deck beside her, the glossy wood reflecting the last streaks of pink left in the twilight sky.

She's sitting still enough to deserve her own pedestal among the other sculptures dotting the lawn. As the seconds tick by and all she does is keep staring across the yard, I realize how much smaller she looks when she's not moving.

She's pretty much always moving. She swept me up like a tidal wave the moment I met her, and she's been crashing through my life ever since. She's as breathtaking as a stormy sea doing battle with the shore, but that's not what has me falling for her.

That's not what made me turn to my mom on the car ride back here tonight and blurt the age-old words: so, there's this girl…

I've started falling for her in the moments like this, when her silence gets so much louder than her sound, when the truth of her bubbles up to break her swirling surface and whisper in my ear to tell me somehow, somehow , there is a part of me and this girl that are the same.

I pull the door open and step out onto the deck.

"Hey."

She turns her head, and even though I should be used to it by now, the glimpse of her stunning profile makes my breath catch.

"Oh, hey. You're back."

She slides her guitar away and shifts over a couple inches. I sit down beside her, close enough that the couple centimeters between her arm and mine feel like they're buzzing with an electric current.

The whole house has felt like it's lined with live wires ever since the night of our date. We've kissed at least once every day since then. We've cuddled and watched Jennifer's Body . We've played around in the pool together and stood side by side in the kitchen while making dinner and taking turns picking songs to listen to while we cook.

There's a small, scared voice inside me that whispers I must be reading things wrong, that those moments can't possibly have meant as much to her as they have to me, but that's all the voice is: a whisper.

I'm done letting it shout. I'm done letting it scream the words, ‘What if?'

I'm choosing to listen to Andrea instead when she tells me I'm amazing and special and one of the best people she's ever met. For once, I'm choosing to see what it feels like to tell myself the same thing.

"Ouch." I slap my arm as a mosquito pricks my skin. "Aren't you getting attacked out here?"

Andrea swats at her legs as more bugs descend on us. "Yeah, they're getting bad. I just…didn't want to be inside."

She shudders, and I inch a little closer to her.

"I get that. It's kind of creepy to be in a house that big all by yourself. That's how I felt the few days I was alone here before you showed up."

She grins and leans over to bump her shoulder against mine. "I definitely prefer the house with you in it."

We stay pressed together as she goes back to staring across the yard. I glance at her and see the grin has slipped off her face.

"You okay?" I ask.

She blinks and shakes her head like I startled her. "Oh. Yeah. Just, um, thinking about how early it gets dark now. August always goes by so fast, doesn't it?"

I nod, my chest tightening. She's right. There are still a few weeks of summer left, but the slow, sticky pace of July has morphed into August's sprint towards September.

September.

When both our lives change. When she goes back to Toronto. When our summer fling ends.

Unless it doesn't.

"Yeah," I say, as my thoughts drift back to the talk I had with my mom in the car tonight, "it does go fast."

I told my mom something I haven't even told Priya yet, something I wasn't totally sure of until it slipped out and I heard my own voice say it: I don't want the end of summer to mean the end of me and Andrea.

I don't want to tear up everything between us when we tear off the next page of the calendar. I know we never planned on more than a chapter, but I don't want to write ‘the end' on this story yet.

"Andrea…"

The rest of my sentence gets lodged in my throat when she turns to look at me, her brown eyes almost black in the growing dark. The ‘what if' questions get louder, crashing against everything I want to say until the words are a jumbled mess in my head.

What if she doesn't want that?

What if I got it wrong?

What if I lose whatever it is we do have because I was stupid enough to ask for more?

"Hey." She leans closer, her forehead creasing as she rests her hand on my knee. "You okay?"

My mom said I should just tell her. She said I have nothing to lose, and I agreed at the time, but staring into Andrea's eyes now, I'm not so sure.

"Yeah, I, um…"

Her eyes are as huge as two new moons in the summer sky.

My mouth drops open, ready to tell her everything.

Slap.

I gasp and jerk back when her fingertips smack against my cheek.

"Sorry!" she shrieks before pressing her hand to her mouth. "There was a mosquito on your face! I'm so sorry. It was reflex. Are you okay?"

It was more of a pat than a slap. My cheek doesn't even sting, and as I watch her continue gawking at me in horror, I can't help it.

I burst out laughing.

"You maniac," I tease as she starts to chuckle too.

"It was a huge one!" she protests. "Trust me, you did not want that thing biting your face."

We laugh together for a few moments, but when we've calmed down and she asks what I was going to say, I know I'm not going to tell her tonight.

I want to tell her without any lingering doubts swarming me like a hoard of mosquitoes, and I don't know how to make that happen yet.

"Oh, right. I have news from Priya," I say instead, the deck creaking underneath me as I pull my knees up to my chest. "She found an open mic night happening on Saturday."

"Oh, cool."

There's a questioning note in Andrea's voice, like she can tell that's not what I wanted to say, but she lets it go and gets to her feet before picking her guitar up by the neck.

"That's soon," she says while I scramble to stand up too. "I better get practicing."

"You'll play guitar?" I ask as we head for the house.

She nods. "Mhmm. And what delightful talent will you be entertaining the crowd with?"

I double-check the cats aren't prowling around the kitchen before I pull the door open for us.

"Oh, um, I was thinking I'd pick one of my favourite poems to read," I say once we're both inside. "I don't know if that's a talent per se, but as you can probably guess, I'm not really the public speaking type, so it's going to be a pretty big deal…for me, at least."

She tilts her head and smiles, and I'm surer than ever that I don't want to wave goodbye forever to that smile at the end of the month.

"I can't wait to hear it," she says. "Which poem?"

I huff a laugh. "That's the question. I have a lot of favourite poems."

She steps closer until we're almost chest to chest. My heart thunders in my ears.

"Has anyone ever told you how cute you are?"

She doesn't wait for an answer before she kisses me. The brush of her lips on mine is soft at first, but when I gasp against her, they press harder. My knees shake, and I'm about to reach for her waist when she pulls back.

"Damn, Naomi, you almost made me drop my guitar."

I tell her I'm not sorry, and we both laugh again. I'd like to spend the whole night kissing her, but the sight of my laptop on the kitchen island reminds me I still have a couple hours of data entry to finish before bed. Andrea groans when I tell her but says she'll respect the sanctity of my work by not staying in the kitchen to distract me.

I sit down on one of the chairs at the island, but I only get a couple minutes of work done before the temptation to search for a poem becomes too strong to ignore.

I open up a blank document on my screen to type out a list of options. I should probably go with something modern, the kind of Instagram poet thing I imagine people read at open mics full of art school students, but after listing a few of those off the top of my head, I know they're not right.

Priya's never going to let me hear the end of it, but if I'm going to read something in front of a crowd for the first time in my life, it's going to be by Yeats.

I spend the next couple hours alternating between data entry and browsing through lists of his poems online, but it's only once I'm tucked into bed with my worn out copy of Selected Works by W.B. Yeats that I find it.

I should probably pick something longer, but as soon as I trace my fingers over the smooth page with the musty scent of old paper filling my nose, I know it's what I need to read.

I also know what I need to say to Andrea.