BASH
Ember canceled the next couple of rehearsals that we’d scheduled. The dance was a week from now, and while we probably didn’t need to practice, I wanted an excuse to see her. She’d asked for some space and time, and although it was killing me to give it to her, I knew I needed to do as she asked.
She’d been showing up late to algebra and grabbing a seat far away from me. Which pained me. I wondered what was going through her head, why she felt like she had to stay away.
When we kissed it had been . . . explosive. Incredible. Beyond. But no lines had been crossed. Things hadn’t gone too far. At least not as far as I was concerned, especially since I’d wanted to take them much further.
Was it about her thinking I wasn’t attracted to her? I thought I’d demonstrated pretty clearly that wasn’t the case. And I was still dumbfounded by the fact that she’d ever thought it in the first place. How could she not know how amazing she was? How it was all I could do to keep my hands off her?
After class Sabrina introduced me to a friend of hers. I had been busy watching Ember pack up her things, so I missed the part where Sabrina and her friend had met. The friend’s name was Gwen, and once I’d said, “Nice to meet you,” Gwen hadn’t stopped talking. Like she’d decided, I was going to exhale anyway so might as well keep saying words.
I tried to pay attention to what she was saying, not knowing what Sabrina was up to until she stood behind Gwen and held both of her thumbs up, mouthing, Go for it!
She was trying to set us up. Me and the girl who would not be quiet. Even when she said, “Wow, I’m talking a lot, aren’t I?” and I nodded, she missed that social cue. I liked a woman I could talk to, but also one that I could be quiet with and have it not feel weird. Like what I had with Ember.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I recognized the touch and the scent that followed quickly after.
Ember. As if my thinking about her had somehow brought her over to me.
Holding my breath, I turned to face her, wanting to both comfort her and be upset with her about how she’d left me to twist in the wind and be accosted by people who didn’t have an off switch.
“Sorry for interrupting, but can I talk to you for a second, Bash?”
I made my apologies to Gwen and walked out into the hallway with Ember. My pulse raced as I waited for her to speak.
“I was hoping we could have practice today. Would that be okay with you?” she asked.
Okay with me? That would be fantastic. “Yeah. I can do that. In about an hour?”
She nodded, giving me a tight smile. I wanted to hold her and kiss that sad face away. I wanted her laughing and happy. Or frantic and passionate. Either worked for me. Anything but this putting me at a distance.
I showed up early to our practice space and felt stupid for having done so. It wasn’t like it was going to make her show up any faster. I just wanted to make sure that I was here and ready to listen.
She walked through the door about fifteen minutes later, during which time I’d worked myself up into a frenzy imagining what she might say.
“Hi!” My greeting was like an overenthusiastic puppy, readying to leap on her. “I mean, hey.”
“Hey,” she returned my greeting. She put down her bag. “Can we sit?”
“Yeah.” I sat down against one of the mirrored walls. She came over and sat next to me, but far enough away that I couldn’t feel her warmth.
“So, sorry for all the weirdness the last few days,” she said, looking straight ahead while I watched emotions flit across her profile.
“I get it.” I didn’t, but it seemed like the right thing to say.
“That makes one of us,” she said with a little laugh. “But Doug came by last night to drop off registration tags for my car that had been mailed to the house, and he seemed sad. I wanted to check in with you and see how you were doing.”
Not how I saw this going. “I mean, I’m dealing. It is what it is. It’s not what any of us wanted, but Marley seems surprisingly okay with it all, and that’s what matters the most.”
“I can see why she’d want to get to know your mom.”
While I understood, it didn’t mean that I approved. But this was Marley’s decision to make.
Ember went on. “And maybe . . . maybe you should talk to your mom, too. Tell her some of the stuff you told me. Find out what her story is. It might make things a little easier for you. Especially where Marley’s concerned.”
If this was some kind of one-person intervention for trying to get me to talk to my mother, I wasn’t interested in participating. Especially since all of my recent mental energy had been expended solely on Ember and whatever was or was not happening with us. I felt like I could only deal with one drama at a time. “Okay. Thanks. Should we start practicing?”
“Wait.” She put her soft hand on my forearm, and the entire world shrank down to that one touch, as if nothing else could exist outside of it. “There’s something else.”
“What is it?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about what you said and about, um, what we did.”
“Me too.” My voice sounded gruffer than I’d intended.
Her hand was still on my arm, so I took that as a good sign. “And the thing is . . . the thing is that I’ve believed certain stuff about myself that wasn’t true because I thought you believed it. It’s bothered me for years, and it bugs me even more that I wasn’t strong enough or self-confident enough to say, ‘Screw him’ and have my own self-image that wasn’t influenced by you.”
It still shocked me that she couldn’t see how hot she was. How I would have loved nothing more than to pull her into my lap and prove it to her again. Logan had been right. I should have talked to her about it before we kissed. I felt bad that she’d been carrying around all this unnecessary baggage, and even worse about the part I’d accidentally played in packing it up for her. “You are stunning and perfect, and I want to touch you constantly. I wish I could help fix it and undo what I did.”
“You’ve helped. But I can’t just flip a switch and feel different about everything. Totally change my worldview and how I see myself in it. Maybe I will, given some time. But I think you know that’s not the only issue we have here.”
I knew. I nodded.
“If we dated,” she went on, “what would we tell our parents?”
I was about to tell her what my dad had said all those years ago, which had been the cause of me leaving, when we heard a commotion out in the hallway.
A woman was yelling. We exchanged glances and then both went over to the door.
Keilani and Ford were walking toward the opposite end of the hall.
She called out, “Ford, wait!” He came to a stop, turning to look at Keilani.
“What?” he asked, his exasperation evident in his voice.
“What is your deal with me?” she asked.
Ford crossed his arms. “My deal? Can you just not? Can we not?”
She mirrored his stance. “No, I think it’s past time that we did. Could you please just be honest with me for five minutes and tell me what I did to make you hate me so much?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t be listening,” I whispered to Ember, who just elbowed me in the stomach and told me to be quiet.
“I don’t hate you.” Ford’s voice sounded broken. “I never hated you.”
“You did a pretty good job of convincing me otherwise. Why?”
If either one of them turned slightly, they would see us and stop, but they were completely wrapped up in each other and in their conversation.
I felt bad about eavesdropping on this private moment, but it was kind of like a prime-time show I’d been watching for months now, waiting for something to happen in the story line, and it was finally happening, and I couldn’t look away, even if I thought I should.
I had to know how it all played out.
He looked down at his shoes for so long that I thought he wasn’t going to answer, but then he did. “When I got here, I was one of the youngest QB coaches ever, for any school. I wanted to be taken seriously. And Coach Oakley had that no-dating rule in place, and I thought I couldn’t expect my players to follow a rule I wasn’t willing to follow myself.”
“I don’t understand. What has that got to do with me?”
“When I saw you . . . you were so beautiful. I wanted to ask you out. But then I thought about the rule and what would happen if we did go out and we broke up, and then it’d be awkward and we’d still have to work together and see each other all the time.”
“That’s . . .” She seemed to be searching for the right word. “So stupid it makes me sad. You were worried we’d break up so you acted like you couldn’t stand me?”
“It was childish. And selfish. But it was the only way I could stay away from you.”
“Oh.” She sounded bewildered. “You can’t think about dating someone and mentally go on your next thirty dates and predetermine how things will end. What if you were wrong? What if it didn’t end badly? What if we were meant to be something more?”
“You think I didn’t consider that, too?” Ford asked. “Like when we talked at that Halloween frat party, and I recognized your voice, and I knew you didn’t recognize mine. I wanted to prove to myself that I’d been right. That we would fight and pick at each other and get annoyed, but we didn’t. It was one of the best conversations I’ve ever had. It was like we fit together. Like you were a piece of me that I didn’t know was missing. And then at the Christmas faculty party, when I let a few glasses of wine impair my decision-making abilities and I kissed you under the mistletoe? That was . . . magic.”
She waited a few beats, as if wanting him to go on. When he didn’t, she prompted him, “And what? You liked me but didn’t want to date me, so you decided to keep being cold?”
“I’ve had the worst time keeping my distance from you. You’re an incredible woman, Keilani. You’re so kind and optimistic and beautiful and good at your job and devoted to helping all of your students. How was I supposed to stop myself from falling in love with you?”
“You’re in love with me?” Keilani repeating the words made something twist deep inside me. Reminding me that I was in love with Ember but hadn’t ever told her.
“How could I not be? And I’m sorry that I’m an idiot. I’m sorry that I thought this was the best way to go about things. I’m sorry that I hurt you, because that is the last thing I would ever want to do. I’m sorry that I ruined any future we might have together. Because of course I want to date you. Of course I want to be with you. I’m sorry that my actions made it so that you’d never want to be with me. Again, I apologize for the idiot part. And I’m so sorry that—”
We never got to hear what else he was sorry for because Keilani was kissing him, and it all felt weird. Both to be watching it and having overheard what we did. It was starting to verge into creeper territory.
Ember sighed, “Aw,” happily.
I walked away from the open door, my mind racing. Jess had talked about Keilani and Ford often, insisting that they were in love and the rest of us (including them) just couldn’t see it.
Now Keilani was mauling Ford in the hallway, and even I had to admit that Jess had been right.
Telling Jess about what I’d just witnessed would make her insufferable for about a week or so.
Ember quietly closed our door, and I figured Ford and Keilani wouldn’t even notice. Then she joined me where I stood, waiting. I wasn’t sure for what. For them to leave? For Ember to talk to me again? To start our practice?
She smiled and said, “Wasn’t that so sweet? So romantic?”
It was certainly something. “I don’t know. I think I liked it better when they threw up at the sight of each other.”
She smacked me on my upper arm, but her face was amused.
The problem was, I didn’t know how I felt about what I’d just seen. I’d been listening to Jess’s conspiracy theories about their relationship for the last few months, and it was weird to see it happen in real life.
But beyond that, I couldn’t help but compare their situation to the one I found myself in with Ember. I thought of Keilani’s admonishment that Ford couldn’t mentally go on their next thirty dates before they’d even gone on one, and it made me recall my dad’s thirty-Christmases comment again. It was what had kept me from Ember.
Had I been doing the same thing? Assuming that things with Ember would end and end badly, and then I’d be stuck seeing her for decades at family events, making things hard and awkward on everybody around us?
What if I’d been doing what Keilani accused Ford of? That I’d already mapped out our entire future relationship without even knowing how things would turn out? Ember could be the one. I knew that, in my heart of hearts. I could easily see myself spending the rest of my life loving her.
Was I giving up what could be the most important relationship in my life just to make other people’s lives easier?
“Are you okay?” Ember asked, pulling me out of my train of thought.
Not ready to share everything I’d been thinking, I smiled. “Fine. Shall we dance?”
As we moved to our stance, I planned what I would tell her once she lifted her time/space ban. I’d made the mistake when we were teenagers of not telling her everything that was in my heart, and it had hurt her in ways I hadn’t anticipated. It made her doubt herself when she was the last person who ever should. I didn’t want that to happen again.
I also needed to sort out what I wanted to do. I’d been avoiding all of my problems for so long—that needed to stop. But I still wanted to respect her wishes.
Before I counted us off I said, “E? I know that you need time and space to figure out what you think and what you want to do next. But when you’re ready? I’m here.”
“Thank you.” The words were quiet and heavy.
I only hoped she wouldn’t take too long.