Offered to parade me around all summer, just so I won’t move away.
After hanging out twice.
In general, I don’t put too much stock into a person’s charm, but I think he might be the rare real deal. A genuinely kind person who likes everyone and deserved better than a note on the counter and Petra’s room-sized closet cleared out.
I hold my hand out for his phone. He considers for a second, then plops it into my palm.
“Come here,” I say, opening the camera.
His eyebrows pinch in a bemused expression. “Come where?”
I move the remnants of our fries to my far side and pat the space between us.
“Oh, there?” he says. “One foot to my left?”
He doesn’t ask why, just holds my gaze and scoots until his side’s right up against me. “Here?”
My stomach flips at the closeness of his voice. “That’s good.”
I hold his phone in front of us, the camera’s flash turned on, and lean into him. He puts an arm around me and smiles sort of ruefully, unable to muster true joy. At the last second, on a whim, I turn and kiss his cheek as the picture finally snaps.
His face turns toward mine, our noses almost touching, pieces of his chin and cheeks hidden behind the flash’s afterglow.
“Just thought we could make Petra really happy,” I say.
“Really thoughtful of you,” he says, the corners of his mouth curving.
“Yeah, well,” I say, “I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.”
“I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.
I laugh, busy myself with another sip of milkshake, immediately shivering from the icy cold.
“Here.” He draws me in against his chest, so that we’re almost fitted together like we’re on a sled, him in back, me in front, and his arms folded around mine, blocking the worst of the wind.
I shiver again as I nestle back against him, snapping a few more pictures.
Honestly, my head is swimming from all these unfamiliar sensations, and I’m not sure whether I’m still taking pictures for any reason other than not quite wanting to acknowledge how good it feels to be curled up against him. It’s been so long since I’ve been curled up against anyone.
“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he says.
I lower the phone in front of me, and glance over my shoulder at him. “I know that.”
“You were probably right,” he says. “They’re probably not even jealous. And even if she was, so what? As it turns out, it doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.”
“It makes me feel less like shit,” I say.
His brow lifts skeptically. “Does it?”
“Okay, not exactly,” I admit. “But it makes me mad that she, like, thinks you need her approval to move on, or something. If she was so in love with Peter, she never should’ve strung you along like that, but she did, and she dumped you in the worst possible way, and then for her to just insist that you view her kindly—to try to make you not mad, instead of just letting you move on . . . it’s selfish.
“So maybe it’s immature and stupid. But it does make me feel a little better, to think that maybe she’ll see these pictures and remember that, even if she’s not overall an asshole, she was the asshole in this scenario, and she didn’t appreciate you, and she should have. Even if all that meant was letting you go before telling my boyfriend she was in love with him, instead of keeping you on the back burner in case Peter turned her down.
“It makes me feel a teensy, tiny bit better to think she could see a picture of me sitting in your lap and staring adoringly at you and remember that you deserved that all along.”
His smile unzips slowly, from one side of his mouth. After a long moment, he leans forward and presses a kiss to my temple. “Thank you,” he says, arms tightening around me.
My body warms as if I’d cannonballed into a heated pool. “It’s just the truth.” I turn my eyes to the water, my blood humming with nervous energy.
We’re done taking pictures, but neither of us moves. It feels too good, to be wrapped in someone’s arms, protected from the wind and listening to the lake’s easy rhythm, feeling Miles’s breath move through him until mine syncs up without even trying.
“This is nice,” I say, sort of dreamily and entirely unintentionally. The few times I’ve smoked weed, this has always been the primary effect: a feeling that the cord between my brain and mouth has been snipped, and I have no control over what I’m saying.
Miles nods against the side of my head. “It is,” he agrees.
“Miles,” I say.
“Hm?”
I—and the weed—tell him, “I think you might be the nicest person I’ve ever met.”
“I’m not being nice when I tell you not to move away,” he says. “I like hanging out with you. And you’re the best roommate I’ve ever had by a landslide.”
“You mean I’m clean,” I say.
“Learn to take a compliment,” he says.
“See?” I say.
“See what?” he asks.
I turn to look at him. “Even when you try to be mean, you’re nice.”
His eyes seem to spark when he smiles. “I’ll try harder.”
We go back to sitting there, touching, watching bonfires dance and the water roll.
10
SATURDAY, JUNE 1ST
77 DAYS UNTIL I CAN LEAVE
Miles and I pass the next week without so much as brushing shoulders in the kitchen.
I don’t think either of us is actively avoiding the other—it’s more like, we both suddenly remember we don’t know each other and have nothing in common beyond our hilariously bad breakups. We’re back in the territory of polite nods, separate dinners, and conversation made via monosyllable.
