“I don’t want to mess it up either,” I promise. This time, I mean it. Not just because now I know him so much better, care so much more about this friendship. But also because I can admit what I couldn’t before: I like Miles Nowak enough that he could really hurt me.
“So,” he says, unsticking a strand of my hair from my eyebrow and tucking it behind my ear. “That was my complaint. What have you got?”
Despite the ache in it, my heart flutters at this piece of evidence that he knows me, that I matter to him like he does to me. “Are we playing Whiny Babies now?” I ask.
He nods. “Any grievances to air?”
“Well.” I think for a beat. “I’m not a huge fan of global warming.”
The corners of his eyes crinkle, my heart leaping in response. “I hear the Great Barrier Reef is in trouble,” he says.
“The wealth gap is ridiculous,” I return.
“And insurance is way too fucking expensive,” he adds.
“Not to mention, all day long, my sock kept getting caught under my heel,” I say.
He laughs a little, touches my chin. The moment feels like the meniscus of a glass, like any second it might spill over. “I guess we should go home.”
I nod. His hand falls away. “Thank you,” he says.
“For what?” I ask.
“Just, thank you.”
20
THURSDAY, JULY 4TH
44 DAYS UNTIL I COULD LEAVE (IF I STILL WANT TO)
Maybe things are complicated, but they’re also good.
Julia decides to stick around a bit longer, and the apartment is never empty, rarely quiet. Miles drops off chai for me at the library on his way into work. Ashleigh tells me about school drop-off drama over smoothies at a juice bar. One night, she, Julia, and I hit up Cherry Hill and watch Miles dazzle his customers at the bar’s far end. Every time he looks over, it’s like the sun peeking out from behind a cloud, and I do my best to feel content, to be just another person at the edge of his glow.
On Thursday, he, Julia, and I go to Traverse City for the Fourth of July parade, then sit in a row on grass so cool it feels damp, to watch the fireworks pop and sparkle out over the bay. It’s the kind of perfect summer night I can’t remember having since I was a kid, not even this time last year, when Peter and I went to his parents’ annual barbecue.
Because there, in their gorgeous, lightning bug–filled garden, with all of their longtime friends tipsy and flushed and happy in rattan patio chairs, a part of me had still ached.
Could feel that I was standing outside of things, waiting for the moment I would finally become a part of it.
Here, tonight, though, I’m in the center of everything. This moment, though fleeting, belongs to me too.
On Sunday, we go back to Traverse City with Ashleigh, for the end of the Cherry Festival. We wander the aisles of pop-up tents and food trucks, gorging ourselves on tarts and hand pies late into the night, and every time the Daphne Moan sneaks out, Miles’s eyes and mine seek each other out, the quirk of his mouth my own personal lightning rod.
And then I look away, because this is good. We are friends.
When we can’t stomach another bite, Julia demolishes us in a basketball carnival game, then talks us into riding the Spinning Cherries, from which we depart violently nauseous, cursing the cherry slushies we piled on top of everything else in our stomachs before boarding.
I check for job postings occasionally, but only for jobs I really think I might like now. Other children’s librarian or programmer positions in cities I’m at least interested in.
Julia decides to stay another week, and we use our Sunday for an elaborate farmers’ market shopping trip followed by a visit to an arcade bar, where once again she heartily and gleefully annihilates us, this time at Ms. Pac-Man.
Every night that week, we cook together—or Miles cooks, while Jules sits on the counter, curating a country playlist and singing along at top volume into whatever utensil her brother has most recently set down. I chop whatever he puts in front of me, wash whichever dishes he’s done with.
Most nights we eat on the floor around the coffee table, all the windows thrown open, the buzz of crickets and cicadas around us and the smell of fir wafting in, but sometimes we sit in a row on the couch, eating while we watch a spy movie or one about a heist, my veins humming every time Miles leans across me to grab a handful of popcorn or the remote, my heart clenching whenever our eyes catch in the dark.
Sometimes at night, from the other room, he texts me live updates as he listens to the audiobook of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, things like i want to live w the beavers and wat is turkish delight and edmund needs 2 chill. Sometimes we text for an hour straight, like our doors aren’t ten feet apart.
We’re basically always together, but we’re almost never alone, aside from once when he accidentally locked his keys in the truck and I had to bring his spare up to the winery.
I’m already in my pajamas, so he comes out to meet me in the lot, with a grin and a hug that smells like campfire and feels like a hook in my heart.
On Friday the nineteenth, I find out about the children’s librarian job in Worcester County, Maryland.
A quick online search tells me the Ocean City Library is twenty minutes from my mother and looks like an adorable lighthouse filled with books.
I almost text my mom, but something holds me back. It seems too good to be true. There will probably be dozens of applications, and there’s no point in getting my or her hopes up before I’ve even gotten an interview.
Still, I email them my cover letter and résumé on my lunch break, and check my email obsessively for the rest of my shift.
When I get home, I know Julia isn’t there.
I feel it like a barometric shift. Probably because I typically hear Julia before I see her. Less clear is how my nervous system knows Miles is here, even though his Crocs aren’t sitting next to the shoe rack, as is his custom, and it’s Friday night, when he usually works.
I hang my bags on the hooks by the door, kick my loafers onto the rack, and round the corner into the kitchen. He’s standing beside the stove, reading something on his phone with a divot between his brows as he waits for water to boil.
