What We Saw(6)

I can still feel the heat where his arm roped my waist. The scent of his skin lingers in my nose—a whisper of the cologne he wore to the party last night: fresh oranges and pepper and smoke from a campfire.

“No way. You fouled me. And you almost brained me on that pole.”

Ben bounces the ball between his legs as he walks. “I was in a legal defensive position.”

“Oh, is that what we call ‘cheating’ these days?”

He’s close again, spinning the ball on his index finger, a challenge in his smirk. He palms the ball and holds it over my head. I try to grab it but he is too quick. He swings it low, and high again, then whips it around his back and tosses a perfect hook shot through the net. Thwfft. No rim. Barely looked.

“Don’t hate the player. Those are the rules. I was set and you made contact.”

“I’ll show you contact.” I charge him with a growl.

He yelps and turns to protect his rebound as I jump on his back, throwing my arms around his neck. I try for a headlock, but I’m weightless to him. He clamps his arms over my legs and takes off. I hang on for dear life as he swings me around in circles. My stomach gets woozy again, and we laugh like crazy people.

He skids to a halt under the hulking oak tree in his front yard, both of us giggling and panting. Dizzy, I slide from my perch. As I slip down his back, my eyes find the scar behind his ear. In a flash, I am seized by the urge to brush my lips against it.

I didn’t mean to feel this way about Ben. I thought it was a fluke when it started last September—something that would fade away. Like the tan I got on Labor Day, I assumed it would be gone by October. I thought I could control it. Cover it back up like my freckles—toned down with some foundation, hidden with a little powder. I’d always planned to choose the person I fell in love with.

I didn’t know it doesn’t work that way.

You were once my friend.

Iowa was once an ocean.

Given enough time, everything changes.

I hover there in midair. I can’t say it yet—but maybe he knows already. I reach out and lightly trace the scar with the tip of my finger, then my sneakers hit the grass, and I am back on earth.

Ben touches the place behind his ear and shakes his head. “The first time you fouled me.”

“It was an accident,” I protest, but his eyes snap and crackle above his smile. His laugh spills across the space between us.

He looks up into the bare branches over our heads, and when he turns back to me, his face is dead serious. “You’ve always had it out for me, Weston.”


What are we talking about now?

He turns and walks back toward the driveway. All at once my legs have gone wobbly. “It’s just that . . .” I follow him, my throat suddenly stuffed with cotton.

Ben picks up his orange T-shirt off the ground, but instead of putting it on, he tucks the hem into the waistband of his shorts. “It’s just that what?” he asks.

The air is thick between us. A system of high pressure threatens to flatten me into the driveway. I try to look anywhere but at Ben’s body. There are crocuses shooting vivid leaves up through the dormant grass around the mailbox. The kids across the street and one house down hit a Wiffle ball into the neighbor’s yard, then start yelling at each other—words their mothers wish they did not know.

All the words I know are jammed inside my brain trying to force themselves past my teeth. The muted trumpet of too much tequila squawks behind my eyes.

This is a first. I’ve never been tongue-tied around Ben Cody in all the thirteen years I’ve known him. Have I always “had it out for him”? Or only since last fall? And how does he know?

The first two words that escape the logjam in my head are “Thank you.”

“What?” He frowns and smiles at the same time.

I almost stutter, but I don’t. I keep my eyes fixed on his. I will not embarrass myself further by staring at the place where his T-shirt hangs from his waistband. “For inviting me to the party last night. For driving me home. Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

He grins. “Somebody did.”

“Well, I’m glad it was you.”

“Wasn’t gonna trust any of those other yahoos.”

There’s a spark in his eye when he says it. This is our shorthand. Yahoo is my dad’s word. When Ben and I were kids, if we were making too much noise while the Hawkeyes’ game was on, Dad would bellow at us from the couch: You two stop acting like a bunch of yahoos.

I smile. This is what Ben does for me: He makes everything easy. Even as I’m standing here red-faced and worried, he’s reminding me of all the reasons I shouldn’t be. “Yeah, Dad woulda been pissed if I’d left my truck at the Doones’. Thanks for that, too.”

“What are friends for?”

Crap. I was afraid of that. Clearly, I’m stuck in the friend zone.

I wonder if he remembers saying the same thing on the sidewalk last night. Him taking my keys, leaning in, touching his forehead to mine. It seemed like so much more than “friends” to me. Was I the only one who felt it? A side effect of agave and lime?

Have I invented that moment? Or has he forgotten it?

I open my mouth to say something—anything—I have no idea what. I am out of my element, trying to reach a new dimension on old machinery, peddling toward the Galaxy of Lovers on the Rusty Ten-Speed of Friendship. I feel certain I’ll never even get off the ground.