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“Gosh, Jo. You’re so bitter, it’s showing on the outside now,” I said as I looked him over.
“In a sexy way?”
I snorted. Jonah was funny like that. Over the years, he’d become a little less twitchy and much more sarcastic, though I think he thought he was far more mysterious than he actually was. Or maybe it was just me. As scornful as he became, he’d never stop being a total dork.
“In a concerning way,” I answered, glancing up to meet his green eyes.
“And you look like a Barbie doll,” he teased.
“In a sexy way?” I bowed my chin, widening my gaze as much as I could. He wouldn’t be able to answer. I did look sexy; there was no question about it. Not that I’m a self-absorbed bitch or anything. I could easily name a minimum of thirty-six things that I’d be desperate to change about myself. But my corset top pushed my bust up in a distracting way and my eyes poked out from beneath the short pieces of hair around my face. For what I was, I think I looked hot.
Jonah cocked his jaw and smiled, accepting his loss and turning back toward the counter.
“I’m just kiddin’,” I said, waving my hand down at him though not turning away just yet. I wanted to observe him more. “You look good.”
“You too.”
I let my eyes roam his outfit, his jaw, the bony little knobs on his thin wrists, before my gaze snagged on his forearm. “Hey, let me see that.” I grabbed his fingers, staring at the giant, abstract tattoo that spread from the edge of his hand to his elbow. Black shapes and swirls crawled across his pale skin, thin veins peeking out in the negative space. “I’ve never seen it in person.”
“Do you see the train tracks?” He pointed to a ladder-like structure on the flex of his arm which represented the very tracks we’d spent our childhood sitting by. I ran my finger over the design, slowly following the trail. “And this up here?” He signaled just under his elbow.
“The path to get to the crossings from the woods?” I asked, as my finger moved up. It was our secret shortcut that surely half the town knew about, but the three of us always liked to hide out in there. It was like going on an adventure through an unknown land, right in the middle of our dusty town.
“Mhm. And down here?” He touched his wrist.
“The trees on the other side of the tracks!”
“Yeah.” Jonah let his lips curve up a touch and shrugged as if that was that, but I could see the way he looked at it. I could only imagine how often he stared at his own arm, wishing we could all go back. Sometimes I wished that too. I thought it was beautiful that he brought it with him everywhere he went—that place, those memories. Maybe if I just followed him around forever, I could hang on his tattooed arm and never be too far from home.
I giggled at the thought. “I love it. It looks like a maze. I could draw in it with a pen. Remember we used to sit right here?” I rubbed my thumb over a big, black arch that undoubtedly represented the covering under which we used to wait for the train to pass.
“Of course.” He slid his extremity away from me slowly and opened his arms. I let my body fall into his chest. He wrapped me up and whispered into the top of my head, “I’m so happy to see you.”
“Jonah? Happy?” I mumbled with my nose pressed into the stiff fabric of his button-down shirt.
“Only where you’re concerned.”
The poor thing thought so highly of me. If only he knew just how lost I was. Though, honestly, it made sense. I always thought he was the greatest thing to grace the planet, so it wasn’t entirely off-base that the feeling was mutual. And I didn’t just think he was. He truly was. His grumpiness was hilarious and his cynicism merely masked intelligence.
Emotional intelligence, not so much. Emotions were my thing. Happy, sad, excited, confused… I was well acquainted with all of them. He was the colder one, the logical one, at least on the outside. I think that’s why we got along so well. Or maybe it was just because we were both lost, anxious losers, albeit in opposite ways.
I blended in, though I didn’t understand a thing. Jonah didn’t blend in but understood everything. Oli had always been lost in a different way. He blended in and understood it all, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily happy about it. At least, Jonah didn’t believe he was. Not until he met June. That’s when he figured it out. That’s when he was found.
Jonah and I were still wandering.
Through the static, I realized we had finished our hug and returned to margarita-making.
“So, your parents told us you’ve been seeing someone. Why didn’t you put anything in the group chat?”
“Huh?” It took me a moment to realize he was even speaking to me. I was too busy thinking about his emotion-processing tendencies. “Oh.” I let out a chuckle to cover up the fact that I’d been gone for a few seconds. That was common. My brain was in constant overdrive, and it was only worsened by the sleep I never seemed to get.
Sometimes, I felt like I was so aware of my surroundings that I wasn’t aware of anything at all. I was so aware of my surroundings. It was all I could think about. But the people around me? Gosh, there just wasn’t always enough space for so much consideration. It was one of the thirty-six things I would’ve liked to change about myself. But I couldn’t help it. Every time my attention was pulled toward something, another thing popped up out of nowhere—
“Kai, that wasn’t an answer.”
“What?” Fuck. “Oh, I didn’t tell them anything. How did they know?”
“They say you respond to night-time texts less frequently when you’re seeing someone.” The skeptical edge in his voice let me know that he already thought whoever I was dating was an idiot. I had enough consideration to gather that, at least.
