A. Jackson - When We Met

“Because right now I keep looking at your mouth, and I’m going to convince myself I’m ready if I don’t get some space from you for a little while.”

He automatically wet his lips before a challenging smile crossed his face, and my fingers twitched as my heart raced.

“Leaving! I’m leaving.”

I turned and bolted from the house, his deep laugh following me as I ran down the porch and away from him.

Kier

School started up again two days later, and the rest of the semester began passing quickly with the winter break approaching. The classes were the same, the work still sucked, and for the most part I kept to myself. Except now Indy was filling my days and nights.

In the last week and a half, I’d spent more of my time with her than I had alone. It was the sweetest form of torture being near her and still never touching her, but it was worth it to see her opening up to me the way she had been. Even through classes, homework, and the stress of finals around the corner, she seemed to relax more in that time than I’d ever seen her in the last year and a half. Indy was a master at faking a smile—and she looked beautiful when she did. But, God, Indy just smiling was amazing.

And as the real smiles became more frequent, and fake smiles became only a memory, I just sat back and counted down the days until she would be mine. I knew she was ready; I was just waiting for her to know, too. Judging by the tension between us, and the fact that she no longer set foot in my room, it wouldn’t be long.

Now as we walked across the campus toward my car, she wrapped her arm around mine and pressed her body close to my side. She slipped her hand into my jacket pocket to grip my hand, and her body shivered against the cold air. But even with that, she smiled up at the lightly falling snow.

Exhaling loudly, she sent her smile over to me. “Done. Finally!” she groaned. “Now all we have left is finals next week, and then nothing for almost three weeks.”

“You know, most people don’t get this excited until after finals are over.”

She rolled her eyes and looked ahead. “Well, I’m not . . . most . . .” But she didn’t finish, and her body stilled against mine.

I looked down to see her eyebrows pinched together, a curious expression on her face. As I followed her line of sight, my shoulders sagged and I swallowed roughly when I saw Dean standing not twenty feet away from us.

Maybe I was wrong about her being ready.

Her hand tightened against mine when he glanced over from the group of guys he was talking with, and his eyebrows rose when he saw us. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that it would look bad for her if I were to do it, I would have let go of her right then and continued walking—letting her follow if she wanted to.

I didn’t need to test her. I told her I’d wait until she was ready, and I would. But if she was still not over her old boyfriend, then I didn’t want her using me as a crutch when she saw him. But I didn’t let go of her as I started walking again, and she kept up without any hesitation.

“I haven’t seen him in a month,” she finally said when we got in my car.

I turned to face her before driving away, but she wasn’t looking at me. “And?”

She blinked a few times, her face still in that curious expression she’d had looking at him. “It was weird.”

Indy didn’t offer anything else, and I didn’t ask. I pulled out of the parking space and drove us back to our houses, neither of us saying anything the entire time. I didn’t know if she could sense how frustrated I felt that after going so far forward, we seemed to be right back where we’d started, but she never said anything about it. She just stared out the windshield like she was trying to figure something out, and I tried to tell myself that I needed to calm down.

It wasn’t working. My jaw felt like it was going to break by the time I pulled up in front of the houses, and my hands were gripping the steering wheel so tight that my knuckles were white.

When we got out, she made it halfway to her house before she realized I wasn’t following her.

“Aren’t you coming over?”

“Yeah, just let me go drop my stuff off. I’ll be over in a minute.”

Her brow furrowed, but she nodded as she backed up toward the girls’ house, and I turned to go into ours. As soon as I was in my room, I noticed I didn’t have any “stuff,” and I realized why Indy had looked so confused.

Raking my hands over my face, I fell back onto my bed and groaned. I didn’t want to deal with this; I didn’t want to deal with Dean. I wanted to be sure of where we were, like I had been ten minutes before we saw him. I wanted to ask her what she’d been thinking when she was staring at him. But I knew I couldn’t ask her, I knew I had to wait for her to tell me—and it was killing me.

She was supposed to be mine, and I’d thought she finally was until I realized she still belonged to him.

When I’d calmed down, I got off my bed and walked over to the girls’ house, letting myself in and up the stairs toward Indy’s room. When I didn’t find her in there, I didn’t hesitate; I climbed the stairs to the attic and carefully walked across the death trap of a floor until I was next to her and wrapped another blanket around her as I sat.

She didn’t look at me as I did, and she didn’t say anything for long minutes as she stared at the snow falling outside the window. “You didn’t have anything you needed to put down.”

“I know.”

Her eyes drifted away from the window and down to the pillows. Nodding a couple of times, she flickered her green eyes toward me for a second before saying, “I’d rather you not drag anything out for my benefit, Kier. If you’re done, just say it. I appreciate honesty so much more.”

“God, Indy, seriously?” I cupped her cheek and turned her head so she was looking at me. “You really thought that was what all that was about?”

She didn’t respond, but her eyebrows shot up and she made a face, like what else should she have expected?

“I needed time to calm down. You just shut down the second you saw him, and I had to watch you staring at your old boyfriend who I want nothing more than to beat the shit out of. That was hard for me to watch, but I really can’t expect anything else from you. You were with him for two years, and it’s only been a few months since you guys broke up. I was afraid I’d say something, so before I could, I gave myself time to calm down.”

“You think I still want him?” she asked, her voice cracking. “You think I’m still having a hard time dealing with what happened between Dean and me?”

I shrugged, and my fingers slipped from her cheek. “Yeah.”

“Do you not see how much you’ve helped me—changed me—in the last couple weeks? In the last month? Even before I knew how I knew you, you were all I thought about and I wanted you. Not Dean. Yes, it was still hard then, but talking with you, finally getting everything out . . . well, it’s not hard now. I told you when I saw him today that it was weird, and it was. Because for the first time it didn’t hurt, it was almost like I was looking at a completely different person and it threw me off. Every time I’ve seen him or Vanessa, I’ve been close to panicking. Today, I wanted to laugh, but I think I was too shocked by the whole thing to do anything other than just think about the differences.”

“Differences?”

Now Indy moved closer to me, her hands maneuvering out from her blankets for her fingers to wrap around the sides of my neck, her thumbs brushing my jaw. “In how you treat me, and how he treated me. In how you make me feel, how I thought I felt with him, and how I actually felt. And then it just hit me. Like, I was upset because of him? I’d gotten wasted weekend after weekend, had sex with nameless guys . . . because of him ? And it just blew my mind.”