After David had heard what Kelli said to Arno, he’d wandered upstairs and eventually found himself sitting on an old leather couch in the Floods’ library on the third floor in the back, where the walls were covered with Frederick Flood’s collection of nineteenth-century nude photographs. The room brought back good memories for David, because the five friends used to sneak in there when they were in middle school, and they’d spend hours viewing the collection.
Now David sat quietly and took it all in again. Since he’d last been in the room, Mr. Flood had collected a whole bunch of old globes that lit up from the inside, and there were tons of art books stacked on low tables. David had his hood over his head. He should have known it was Arno all along. He’d just been unwilling to admit it. He hadn’t even gotten to the part about figuring out who convinced whom to fool around with whom. Then the door clicked open. David looked up. Kelli stood there.
“You know what you remind me of?” Kelli asked as she closed the door behind her.
“No, what?” He figured she’d probably say Kenny, from South Park. Everyone else did. And he didn’t think she knew about the Most Sensitive Guy in the World thing.
“Just a really good guy. Like a Harrison Ford’s costar type. Like Josh Hartnett, with the square jaw.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“Your only problem is your ex-girlfriend Amanda is a total bitch.”
“She is not,” David said, but his heart wasn’t in it. He knew she kind of was. She’d fooled around with one of his best friends. But he loved her anyway. He understood that love could be that way—he hadn’t been brought up by a pair of therapists for nothing.
“And she’s not my girlfriend. I broke up with her after she cheated on me.” But when he said it, he realized there was a part missing, and it rang hollow. “Arno. She cheated on me with Arno.”
“I’m sorry it came out the way it did,” Kelli said. “You can talk to me about how you feel if you want to.”
So David told her the story, about how he’d fallen in love with Amanda and how they’d had such an amazing time together, and yet at the same time how she always felt kind of out of his reach. And by the end of it, Kelli had her feet up in David’s lap and they were both drinking from the same extra large mug of rum and Coke that Kelli had brought upstairs with her.
“You know what,” Kelli said. “You really are a sensitive guy. Maybe not in the whole world, but you know, you’re sensitive.”
“Stop,” David said.
“You don’t even want to beat up Arno?”
“Sure I do.”
Kelli just shook her head. It looked as if she were thinking. Then she stood up and went to the door.
“Don’t,” David said.
“Don’t what?”
“Don’t leave.”
She smiled. She turned off the overhead lights, and turned up the lights in the globes.
“It feels like we’re floating in the middle of the Milky Way,” David whispered.
She came back to the couch and sat down.
“I’ve so totally wanted to hook up in New York,” Kelli said.
“You haven’t?”
“Nope,” she said. “Not once.”
And she was really close to David. He could smell her warm skin and he was reminded of that first night when he met her, how he just had this kind of instamatic crush on her. Not like with Amanda, where she had to keep saying no till she’d gone away for the summer and then she came back and sort of begrudgingly fell in love. This was different, he thought. And he was kissing her.
“Not with anybody?” he asked.
“Nobody,” she said, and sort of laughed. “I was never going to go anywhere with Randall Oddy. He’s so weird, and so much older.”
She got up again, and this time she put a chair against the door.
“Wow,” David said. “Some people could say I’m doing this just to get back at Amanda and Arno.”
“Shut up,” Kelli said. They’d fallen onto the rug, which was thick and purple. The globes glowed above them.
“Take off your sweatshirt,” Kelli said. “I think that thing’s been holding you back. I don’t think you should wear it anymore.”
“I will if you take off your shirt,” David said.
“I already did. Can’t you see?”
“Oh,” David said. “Oh yeah.”