Weather Girl(85)

“I think I’m going to take a walk,” Russell says. “Ari?”

He doesn’t need to ask me twice. I zip my coat and follow him outside, my brain buzzing, buzzing, buzzing.

“I’m still trying to process this,” Russell says when we’re a couple blocks from the station, ducking out of the way to avoid being caught in a snowball fight. “How exactly did they find out, anyway?”

My boots crunch into seven inches of snow. This street is usually jammed with cars waiting in traffic; today, only a handful of drivers are braving the roads. “Torrance saw an email we sent months ago, where we joked about trapping them somewhere in a snowstorm. I fucked up when I was forwarding it to her. I’m sorry.”

“It probably would have happened eventually,” he says, and I can’t tell if there’s a hint of blame in his voice.

“It doesn’t matter how they found out. What matters is that they’ve been doing the same thing. They’ve been manipulating us, the same way we were manipulating them.”

“Gently nudging,” Russell says, borrowing Seth’s wording.

“Sure.” The single syllable hangs in the air between us, shifting the temperature. Dragging it far below freezing.

It should make us equal. Two couples meddling in each other’s romantic lives—logically, they should cancel each other out. A mathematical relationship equation. I’d love to laugh it off like Torrance and Seth did, but this revelation has shaken me in a way I wasn’t expecting. We don’t have the foundation Torrance and Seth did. We weren’t building on something that was already established, albeit shattered. We were starting from scratch.

“We’re both a little on edge right now,” Russell says. He runs his fogged-up glasses along the hem of his jacket before putting them back on. “Let’s calm down, maybe get coffee and talk?”

I can calm down over coffee.

But first, I want some answers.

“I need to know,” I say as we pass the Thai restaurant where I had lunch with Torrance a few weeks ago. Across the street, some asshole kid swipes a carrot nose from a fresh snowman and chucks it into an alley. “That night on the retreat. If Torrance had gone with me to the hospital, would we have gotten as close as we did? If she was the one who took me back to my room afterward and helped me with everything?”

“Would we have—what?”

“I’m just trying to imagine what might have happened. If she hadn’t gently nudged you to take me, would we have started dating?”

“It’s not like the alternative was me letting you lie there in pain.” Russell’s voice is knife-edged now, his steps in the snow more deliberate. “She didn’t track me down and beg me to take you. I was glad to do it—I cared about you, and I wanted to make sure you were okay. She also didn’t ask me to go to your room or bring you vending machine candy. Or talk to you.”

The memories of that night flood back, warming my face even out in the cold. “I understand that,” I say softly, wanting to keep that memory untainted.

“Do the details really matter? We’re together, and it took us a while to be able to express what we both wanted, but we’re finally here. Can’t that be enough?”

I want it to be, so desperately I can almost feel the desire thumping next to my heart like a brand-new organ. He looks so lovely out here in the snow, the pink tip of his nose and ice crystals caught in his hair. I want to say okay and live out our snow-day fantasy. We’ll go sledding and build a lopsided snowman and drink cocoa in front of the fireplace. When we settle into bed, he’ll sweep my hair away from my ear and tell me again how good it feels to be around me.

“And my feelings for you didn’t suddenly materialize that night,” he continues. “I didn’t realize I cared about you after they disconnected your computer. And I didn’t instantly want to kiss you after Torrance told you to go home with me when I faked being seasick. I’d liked you for a while, Ari. I want to think we’d have gotten together eventually, whether I went with you to the hospital or not.”

Truthfully, I don’t think he’s wrong about that. But it’s not that we wouldn’t have found a way to each other. It’s that there’s been something keeping us together, preventing us from veering off course. And whether it’s a gentle nudge or a firm shove, it doesn’t change the fact that someone was pulling strings, making sure we never strayed too far from each other.

“This whole time, we’ve had a safety net,” I say. “We don’t know what we’re like without that.”

Russell brushes his arm against mine, and I want it to feel warmer than it does. “Then we’ll figure it out. I meant what I said that night we were at your mom’s—I’m ready to do this with you. That hasn’t changed.”

But.

There’s that tiniest but at the back of my brain, the one I can keep quiet some of the time but now refuses to listen, the one hell-bent on self-preservation. The one that asks, But what if he’s wrong? What if that changes?

What if he can’t handle you on your dark days?

“But—you haven’t seen me at my worst yet.” It’s only when I say it out loud that I realize it’s a genuine fear of mine. “Because it’s not pretty, Russell. It’s sitting-in-a-Taco-Bell-parking-lot-and-trying-not-to-cry levels of not pretty. It’s can’t-even-do-basic-tasks levels of not pretty, and I rarely know when one of them is coming. Is that something you’re ready for?”