AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Good.”
“Good,” I echo, and I wonder how many times a single word can be uttered during the course of one conversation.
He fiddles with the edge of his navy striped comforter. “I’ve been worried about you. Since we, uh—died.” This last word, he says so quietly, as though he can erase it from our shared memory by only barely acknowledging it.
“I was pretty out of it in the morning. I thought we’d escaped.”
“I did too, for a moment. But then…”
“Reality.”
“It can be a real piece of shit, huh.”
“I’m glad you’re not dead,” I say.
A tease of a smile in the corner of his mouth. “That might be the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I nudge him with my unbandaged arm, and then, once I’m close, it only takes another few centimeters—I’ll mentally use the metric system just for Miles—for me to get to my feet and hug him, a gesture that seems to surprise us both. He falters for a split second, the bed frame keeping him from falling backward. Then he steadies himself. Steadies us. God, he’s warm and perfect and solid, his hands locking at the base of my spine in a way that makes me feel impossibly safe. I have to fight the urge to clutch at his hair, settling for a gentle grab of his collar.
Even so, something happens in his throat when I do this, the softest, purest rumble. In the most depraved part of my mind, I wonder what other sounds I could drag out of him.
I inhale his clean woodsy scent. A hint of sweat. My face against his neck, his heart pounding right on top of mine.
I missed him.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice slightly muffled by my hair. “For not telling you. For waiting until the last possible second. As you might have surmised by me being your sole company most of the past few weeks, I’m not the best at friendships.”
I draw back, meeting his gaze. Slowly, we move apart, this awkward repositioning of limbs and readjustment of clothing, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, mine on the floor. It feels intimate, being in his room this late, even if he’s barely had a chance to leave a mark on this space.
I remember his hand, reaching for mine in the car as glass rained down on us. Squeezing tight.
Like if we were going to go, he wanted us to go together.
“I forgive you,” I say. “Thank you. For saying all of that.”
After everything, Miles is still so kind. Stoic and reserved at first, but beneath all that, he’s calm and caring. Funny, too, often unintentionally. He barely has to do anything to dig me out of this bad mood. I’ve been so set on skulking, and yet he is unskulkable.
“You sure?” he asks, but that smile is back, not quite the one I love the most, but close. “Because I was going to bring you this.”
He reaches into a small paper bag on his desk and holds up a salted chocolate-chip cookie as big as his face. I am grinning like an absolute loon.
“Obscene. Those cookies are obscene.” And then, because I’m learning not to brush things off, because I want to be genuine too, the thing I’m learning it won’t kill me to be: “Yes,” I say, not wanting to leave any doubt. “I can see you were in an unusual, uncomfortable situation, and I still don’t love the way you handled it, but I can understand why you did it. And—I guess I haven’t hated getting to know you. I want us to be… friends.”
Friends. The word is a small, fearful thing. It isn’t that Miles and I aren’t friends; we’re well past those declarations. You don’t turn a swimming pool into a ball pit with someone who isn’t your friend, even if the two of you happen to be the only people trapped in a time loop.
It’s just that I’m not sure if friends is the only thing I want to be with Miles. It shouldn’t be romantic that he wanted to hold my hand when he thought we were about to die. And yet it’s suddenly the only thing I can think about, and it’s so goddamn beautiful that now I really think I might cry.
Miles brightens slowly, like he’s trying to fight it, sunshine inching across his face. “I’m honored to be your friend, Barrett Bloom,” he says as he tears the cookie monstrosity in half, and it sends something sweetly electric up my spine.
I don’t know what to do from here, so I try to ignore the complex swirl of feelings and opt for a joke, the way I always have. “I told you about the membership fee, right?” I say.
“I’ve got ten thousand dollars in my bank account. You can have all of it, but only if you promise not to buy dogs or ice cream.”
Then we’re both laughing, and things are back to normal, but it’s a charged kind of normal, a normal that could light a fire and burn down Zeta Kappa. Worst of all, now I’m imagining what it would be like if we really had kissed, the way we did in Miles’s timeline but not mine. The moment we had at Stanley Park, before the flash—I want another chance, but for all my bravado, I’m inexperienced. I don’t know how to put us in that situation again.
Still, it doesn’t stop me from wondering how he’d kiss me. Because I know exactly how I’d kiss him: hard enough to make a mess of his hair and find out what would deepen that rumble in his throat. Slowly, just to see if it would torture him. I’d kiss him up against a wall and horizontal on a dorm-room bed and—
“What have you done the past couple days?” I ask, desperate to focus on anything but the images in my head.
