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“Can I put my flats in your purse?” Mei asked.
Candace wanted to tell her no. She wanted to tell her best friend that her purse wasn’t community property. That she did this constantly, asking them all to hold her wallet and keys and lipstick so she didn’t have to bring a bag when they went out. She wanted to tell Mei that was inconsiderate and entitled, but she didn’t. She never did. Because above everything else, Candace hated conflict. And on a scale of one to worst friend ever, this hardly rated. So she just sighed, opened her crossbody bag and let Mei shove her ballet slippers into the front pocket of her purse.
“Thanks, Can,” Mei trilled.
Candace rolled her eyes.
“We ready?” Miles asked impatiently from behind them.
“Ready,” Mei called and ran toward him.
Ezra appeared where Mei had been standing and checked his car’s back door. It opened. Mei had forgotten to lock it.
Candace rolled her eyes again. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” he said quickly. Not that he would have said anything else, because Ezra didn’t get mad or annoyed or frustrated with Mei or anyone else. He was shy, sweet and accommodating. As far as Candace was concerned, Ezra Posner was too nice for his own good.
“It’s not,” she mumbled as she locked the front door and closed it.
“Do you need help?” Ezra asked as they started to walk to the BART station behind Mei and Miles.
She turned to him and frowned in confusion.
“With your bag? Do you want me to carry it for you?”
She smiled and felt her body relax a bit. “No, I’m okay. It’s not heavy. I’m just being bitchy.”
They stepped onto the escalator and he turned to her. “You’re never bitchy. You’re the exact opposite of bitchy, actually.”
She smiled at him. “Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about you.”
He smiled, like a real genuine smile, which was a very rare thing for Ezra. As far as Candace could tell, Ezra had three kinds of smiles; a pained, thin line that wasn’t so much a smile as a grimace; a brief lift of the right side of his mouth, always the right side; and a shocked — always shocked — spread of his lips that showed that one slightly wonky tooth on the left side of his mouth. They were all endearing in their own way. Especially to her.
“You were thinking about me?” he asked in that quiet voice he always used with her, as if he was genuinely shocked that she knew his name, sat next to him in Western Civ II, or had ever wasted entire afternoons cataloguing his limited repertoire of smirks. As if he still couldn’t understand why they were friends and never could imagine that sometimes — all the time — she wondered if they could be more.
She wondered what would happen if she told him that of course she thought about him. That he was the most interesting guy in their year, and she hadn’t encountered one guy that held her attention like him. She thought about telling him that sometimes she felt as if she couldn’t think about anything else but him.
“The train’s coming,” Mei yelled down at them. “Hurry up.”
Their eyes widened and they took off up the escalator. Candace made it to the platform first, but Ezra overtook her and reached the turnstile before her, because he was wearing tennis shoes and she was tottering around on a pair of heels that made her close to six feet tall and every step a precarious adventure. She made a mental note to write about this for her Women’s Studies final essay and pushed herself to the limit trying to keep up with him.
He pushed his card through just as the train arrived.
“Candace, come on,” Mei yelled at her from the edge of the platform.
“I’m not spraining my ankle to catch a BART train, Mei,” she yelled back. She shoved her ticket into the machine just as the doors opened and Mei and Miles jumped aboard. Ezra was caught somewhere between waiting for her and making it into the car before the doors closed. If she weren’t running for her life — metaphorically speaking — she would have doubled over in laughter at the way confusion contorted his face adorably. But she was running, so she pushed her affection for him to the side. Making this train was an imperative.
BART service to San Francisco on New Year’s Eve was great, but a hassle. On a normal night, the trains might be crowded with drunk people, there might be a fight in one of the cars or on the platforms and there would absolutely be a homeless person walking the length of the train telling stories about his glory days during the Summer of Love while asking for spare change and telling everyone to never drop acid; just regular shenanigans. Tonight, the trains would be full of people at their most inebriated and annoying. There would absolutely be a fight or five, someone was going to vomit and more on a seat, and the nice homeless men would be replaced by a gang of rich, angry frat boys from the Midwest, who would probably end the night passed out and riding the train to the end of the line, their wallets and jewelry having mysteriously disappeared.
This would be a long night, and Candace knew the longer they waited to get to the City, the worse it would be. Most crucially, the longer it took to get to the City, the more likely she’d have to stand in these heels until midnight. And that was absolutely out of the question. They had to make this train if they wanted to get a decent seat on one of the good benches at the Embarcadero Center. But still, Candace was not going to sprain an ankle to make this specific train by running. She didn’t believe in running for buses, trains or men, so this was a magnanimous move on her part as far as she was concerned and she planned to make sure they understood that.
Ezra hopped onto the train but he was angled out of the car, his body blocking the doors just in case they started to close. He extended his arm toward her and the smile on his face was glorious, different; a new category all together.
Candace extended her arm and their hands touched just as a chime indicated that the train would soon be departing. Ezra’s hand closed around hers and he pulled her from the platform onto the car just as the doors began to slide shut, wrapping his arm around her waist to keep her steady. Their bodies crushed together. She couldn’t stop herself from laughing with delight, not because they’d made the train but because Ezra was holding her. They were looking at one another in a way they certainly never had before. Candace wondered if Ezra’s eyes were a different shade of blue under this light, darker maybe, more penetrating? She was thinking about telling him that she liked this new stormy blue she’d never seen before when their train car erupted in applause.
Ezra frowned and Candace turned her head to glare at the rest of the car in confusion. Everyone was very not sober or on their way to being, and clapping at them as if they’d just won a gold medal at the Winter Olympics.
“You made it,” Mei said. Miles kissed her in celebration or because those two could hardly keep their hands off each other.
Candace furrowed her brow and turned to Ezra. He shrugged and grinned — that brief lift of the right side of his mouth. The train began to move and then quickly plunged into the Caldecott Tunnel, turning on the track, shifting her body against his. She could have stepped away, put some distance between them and caught her breath. The train wasn’t technically packed enough for them to be so close. Not yet. But she didn’t move. Instead, Candace leaned into Ezra. And he let her.
***
It was almost midnight.
They’d staked out a good spot at the Embarcadero. They’d have a perfect view of the fireworks and there were low concrete benches for the girls to sit on and “extend the shelf life of these heels,” Mei had said.
“Or,” Miles said, “you two could put on your flats and we can push through the crowd by the water.” Ezra appreciated that Miles wasn’t giving up on his plan. No matter how many times Candace and Mei shut it down. But they didn’t even bother to respond to him this time.
“Come on, Ezra. What do you think?” he asked.
Ezra lifted his eyebrows and shook his head quickly, meaning that he wanted to stay entirely out of this disagreement. He didn’t care where they were as long as they were together. But he could tell that Miles took his silence to mean something else.
“Of course,” Miles rolled his eyes and looked briefly at Candace.
Ezra frowned at him and they had a silent standoff.
“Oh, it’s almost time,” Mei shrieked.
The crowd around them began to buzz with excitement.
Mei shoved her disposable camera against Miles’s chest. “Take a picture of us.”
Miles sighed as he wound the film and brought the camera to his face. Candace and Mei posed on the bench they’d half occupied, their sides touching, their faces close together and their smiles posed and unnatural to show off their glittery makeup.
“Make sure you get our matching shoes in the shot,” Mei instructed. “And then a close-up of our makeup.”
“This isn’t a fashion ad for broke co-eds, Mei,” Miles said as he snapped some more pictures.
“Come on, Ezra,” Candace said to him.
He shook his head again. “I hate pictures,” he mumbled.
“I know. But we need to document the moment anyway,” she said, extending her arm toward him.
He stood, stunned at the thought that Candace knew he hated pictures. Almost as stunned at the idea that Candace had been thinking about him and her hand in his as he pulled her onto the train and her body pressed into his side as the car had jerkily traveled along its tracks. She took advantage of his shock and pulled him down onto the bench next to her. She and Mei posed while Ezra tried to hide his sheer panic at being close enough to Candace to smell her perfume. Again. Twice in one night.
It was entirely possible that nothing would ever beat this moment. This might even be the best New Year’s Eve of his life. Well, second. Nothing could beat Candace kissing him last year. Even though they’d never talked about it and he’d never had the courage to ask her out; that was still the best New Year’s Eve ever and in the top five nights of his life.
But then the countdown started. Mei shot up from the bench into Miles’s arms. He picked her up and she wrapped her legs around his waist. She grabbed her camera from him and began to take pictures of everything; the early fireworks, the crowd, close-ups of Miles’s face, everything.
Candace stood and Ezra followed, mostly just because he didn’t know what else to do with himself.
“It’s so loud,” Candace said, leaning toward him.
“Do you want to be my New Year’s kiss?” he blurted out and then swallowed the panic he felt at being so bold.
She smiled. “Again?”
He nodded as the crowd began to count down. The ruckus and the time limit of this question — let alone the fact that he had even asked it — made Ezra’s heart beat faster and his hands sweat. It was as if the entire city was counting down, not to 2003, but to his fate. Or maybe his heart was beating erratically at the way Candace was smirking at him. As if she’d been waiting a year for him to ask just this question. But of course, she hadn’t. It was dark out and that look was probably just a trick of his imagination and pathetic heart.
“Why me?” she asked.
“Because you’re perfect,” he yelled, loud enough to be heard over the erupting crowd as the countdown seemed to speed up.
Candace shook her head and rolled her eyes. “I’m so far from perfect, Ezra. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Three!” Mei yelled at the top of her lungs.
He wanted to tell her that she was perfect to him and nothing she could say would ever change that. He wondered if he could tell her that he knew — apparently better than she did — how great she was. He wondered if that would make him sound like a stalker. And maybe it would, because sometimes he felt like one, studying her like he did. But either way, he knew how amazing Candace Garret was, because he considered himself an expert on everything about her. The words were a jumble in his chest and he tried to figure out the right order to loosen them.
Apparently, he waited too long.
Candace sighed and rolled her eyes again. And then she slapped her hand onto the back of his neck and pulled him forward. “Oh, Ezra,” she breathed, just before their lips touched.
“One!” the crowd screamed, and the fireworks erupted, hundreds of flashing cameras illuminating the Embarcadero. Ezra barely registered it all. Every firework and flash and scream faded to nothing when compared to Candace’s scent and her taste and her tongue sliding against his.
He smiled against her lips and moaned into her mouth and couldn’t believe that her answering moan — which he felt, rather than heard — was real and not some figment of his imagination like all the other moans had been.
This night and this kiss might have tied last year as the best New Year’s Eve of his life, but it blew last year out of the water when Candace moved his right hand around her waist and placed it onto her ass. His other hand followed, and they ground into one another in the middle of the city-wide celebration.
Best New Year’s Eve of his life. Best night ever.