My flight leaves the next morning back to Nebraska. Without Lorelei. She texts telling me she’s staying a few days in the city, but she’ll come home. She promises.
I text back that some promises are meant to be broken.
When I land, I have three missed calls from Rooney Quill, wondering if I’ll take the internship. The last voice message is a little more than groveling.
The taxi drops me off in front of my house, and I slide out, pulling my duffel bag higher on my shoulder. Home. But not. Darker, different. Grams isn’t home yet—I’m going to have to go get her from the Darlings—but right now I don’t want to live in that reality yet. I need a little time.
Just a tiny bit more.
As I walk toward the porch, someone stirs in the darkness of the stairs.
Micah.
He gets to his feet, his hands in his pockets. He squints against the evening sun. “Hi,” he says.
I take a deep breath, I climb the steps beside him, looking through my duffel for the house key. My stomach isn’t full of butterflies anymore when I see him, and I can’t remember when they started fluttering for someone else. “Been waiting long?” I ask.
“Just a few hours,” he jokes, not really joking at all. I see two soda cans and a candy wrapper pushed between the porch pillars. “So, how was New York?”
“Busy, full, wonderful.” I find the key and insert it into the lock, jiggling the handle to get it to open. The door yawns open into the dark, and vacant, house. Is this how this house will feel without Grams? It doesn't feel like it used to.
I drop my things inside and close the door again. We stand awkwardly on the porch for a moment, unable to meet each other’s gazes, and then I can’t stand it anymore. I turn and head back down the steps.
He follows me. “Going to get Grams?”
"Yeah, from the Darlings."
"Where's LD?"
"Lorelei stayed."
"In NYC?"
"Yeah."
At the end of the road, we turn down Corley toward the Darlings' house. It's a white house on the end of the street with a white picket fence and Grams framed in the window. I climb the steps to the Darlings' front door, and pause before I ring the doorbell. I turn back to him. "Can I ask you a question?"
"Yeah, what?"
"Do you love her?”
His shoulders stiffen. He drops his gaze to his scuffed Converses. “Yeah, Igs. I think I do.”
“And she loves you too, right?” When he doesn't say anything, but doesn’t deny it, either, I return back down the steps to where he's standing and kiss him on the cheek. “It's okay. I'm glad."
"You are?"
"Now I am. I'm just glad I have my friend back."
He kicks the ground bashfully, and looks up through his dark lashes. "I've missed you, too."
"You know what I learned from all this?”
"Don't fall in love with friends?"
"No, just don't fall in love with you."
He smiles, and I realize with a pang of sadness that I’ll never see the smile Heather sees. I’ll never find out how wide it is or how bright it shines. But I think it’s going to be okay, because this smile is just as good—and this smile, for this moment, is for me.
“So . . . wanna go catch a bite to eat Saturday night? I got stuff with . . . well, stuff with Heather, but Saturday night she’s hanging out with her friends. It could be like old times, yeah? Just me and you—what do you say?”
I’ve been waiting all summer for this exact moment. For some semblance of what we were. But I’m not the girl I was at the beginning of the summer, and I don’t want to be that kind of girl again.
I give him an apologetic look. "I can't . . . I’ve got plans.”
“C’mon, Igs, what kinda plans could you have on a Saturday night in Steadfast?”
“You can listen in, if you want." I hurry back up the steps to the front door.
"What?"
"Listen in! Saturday at midnight; 93.5 KOTN.”
“The . . . radio?”
"Of course!" I ring the doorbell. "It’s a little-known fact, but when midnight rolls around, I own the night.”