Fluffy(40)

“Are you kidding me? You of all people are asking me why I would need to play dumb?”

“What makes me so special?”

Talk about a loaded question.

Nodding toward the door, he motions for me to follow him. We walk down the hallway and into the kitchen, where he grabs something to drink from the mostly empty fridge.

“What do you mean?”

“What do you mean? You just said you in a way that was loaded with some hidden meaning.” Opening a soda, he raises his eyebrows, then flinches. “Want a drink?”

“No, thank you,” I choke out.

We move over to the breakfast area and sit at the antique pedestal table, beautifully scarred from generations of use. I think briefly about all the important conversations that must have taken place around it, before this one.

He really doesn’t know. Really, really doesn’t know. I knew I was shy. I knew I was also careful. But to sit here ten years after graduation and realize I spent four years of my emerging adulthood hiding my feelings about this guy and being extremely successful at it makes a part of me feel so stupid.

Mostly the teenage part.

A mature, worldly woman would admit it. Make it a joke. Turn the past into a whimsical ha ha, a shared laugh that would display how far she’d come since high school graduation. A mature, worldly woman would invite Will out for drinks, talk over martinis, and wax nostalgic about those carefree years.

I, unfortunately, am neither mature nor worldly.

“I just mean, you know.”

“No. I don’t.”

“Remember ninth grade? When we had to debate in English class?”

“You mean the debate about animal rights in laboratory research to cure cancer?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

“You said, in front of the entire class, that I couldn’t possibly make a reasoned argument because I was emotionally attached to the animals.”

“You were!”

“You then made the broad generalization that all girls were impossibly biased.”

He’s halfway through a swallow of soda and starts choking. “I said that?”

“You did.”

“I don’t remember that!”

“Maybe the memory is buried by the sound of all your football buddies laughing their asses off.”

“Oh.” He frowns. “I guess I do remember that.”

“So.” I cross my arms over my chest. Point made.

“So?”

I shrug with one shoulder.

“That proves nothing. You took that away from some cocky comment I made while I was trying to win a debate and get a better grade? You didn’t have to dumb yourself down. ”

“Didn’t I?”

“Why would you take that lesson away from some random comment a dumbass fourteen-year-old boy made? I wasn’t exactly enlightened. That was half our lives ago! I used to think all kinds of bullshit.”

“Because I was a supersensitive fourteen-year-old girl, Will.”

“How could something I barely remember hurt you so much?”

“I didn’t say it hurt. Just that it made me dumb myself down.”

“No. No way. There's no way one comment like that did it.”

“I–”

He’s watching me in a way that makes it clear he’s studying me. Figuring me out. This isn’t about his being right. It’s about Will trying to find the truth.

Dear God. He’s more dangerous than I thought.

My heart starts to pound hard, the drumbeat moving up under my collarbone as I wait him out. He’s patient, but he’s far less practiced. I have a treasure trove from four years of turning Will Lotham into my unofficial honors class, an independent-study project that no teacher supervised. If you could earn an A+ in Will, I’d have that shiny grade on my high school transcript.

But never, ever, did I imagine he’d study me right back.

“Mal.” His frown is miles deep. “What else?”

“It was your friends.”

“Which ones?”

“The big, hulking ones.”

“You’ll have to be more specific.”

“Ramini. Osgood. Fletch.” A mental image of them in their football jerseys, one of them half sitting on the edge of my rickety desk, makes my stomach sour.

“What about them?”

“After the debate. They... said stuff. Did stuff.”

He goes tense. “Did stuff? To you?”

“No, not like that.”

“Then like what?”

“They told me you were right. Later on, in the hallway as we walked to lunch. They said a girl couldn’t beat Will Lotham. Said I was being stupid for even trying. They told me I talked too much in class.”

“You didn’t.”

“Does it matter? They said I did. And then they told me to give them copies of my study guides.”

“What?” Real outrage flashes in his eyes. “I assume you said no.”

“Of course.” I look over at the pine server, where a pile of Zen stacking stones sits with great anticipation. The expectation of stress release is mocking me, telling me I’m derelict in not doing what I need to relax. Pressured by Zen.

Classic Mallory.