Living Out Loud (Austen, #3)(59)

“You okay?”

I nodded and tried to smile. “I, um…”

“Come here,” he said in an honest-to-God come-hither voice.

I fought the urge to run. You are a grown woman, Annie Daschle. Now, get up and get on that couch with that boy.

To which another part of my brain said, Nuh-uh, no way.

“I…I don’t think I’m…it’s just that…”

One of his brows rose. He was still smiling.

God, he’s going to make me say it. “I don’t know if I’m…ready for that.”

His smile fell at that. “Oh. Right.”

“Can we…do you want to maybe watch a movie?”

He cleared his throat and sat up, his face unreadable as he discreetly rearranged the steel pipe in his pants. “Yeah, sure.” The words were level and distant.

Shame crept over me, and I climbed back up onto the couch. “I…I’m sorry,” I said, wondering why the hell I was apologizing.

Will offered a smile I didn’t believe, but he didn’t absolve me. “What do you want to watch?”

He turned to the television and started talking about movies, but I only gave cursory answers as I tried to sort through how I felt.

Why did I feel so guilty? Should I have just gone along with it? Was he frustrated? Annoyed? Why did I feel like I’d let him down?

I agreed to a movie he said he’d wanted to see, some action flick I couldn’t remember the name of and wouldn’t remember the plot of the next morning. We didn’t speak, but he pulled me into his side, throwing a blanket over us.

As close as our bodies were, he seemed a million miles away. But once it was playing, he finally looked at me and saw me.

“Hey,” he started gently, and I looked over at him, trying for reassuring. “It’s really fine, Annie. Okay?”

“Yeah. Okay.”

He seemed appeased, turning his attention to the screen as I mercilessly lectured myself.

Because had he done anything wrong? Other than seeming put out, no. He wanted what most people wanted, and if that thing in his pants was any indication, he wanted it pretty bad. All he’d done was grab my boob. Most people did that their freshman year. It was me who was different, not him.

Maybe that was why I felt so bad, I told myself.

Because I was weird, and in that moment, he had known it. And for that moment, he hadn’t been happy about it.

It was me who had the problem, and really, he didn’t have to put up with it. He could tire of me at any time. I could almost guarantee he hadn’t been with a virgin at any point in recent history, especially not one who had zero experience, not even with something so rudimentary as kissing.

I wondered how long he’d be patient. And I wondered if I could force myself to be ready for something I wasn’t prepared for. Was it like jumping off the high-dive—you just needed to go for it—or was it like learning to do skateboard tricks—something that required instinct and practice and familiarity?

I told myself again that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He’d stopped when I said to. And I was only imagining that he was unhappy with me.

By the time he took me home, I’d even convinced myself that was the truth.





15





Some Magic





Annie

I held up the quilt my nana had made for me before I was born, remembering a hundred moments in the span of a second, sparked just by holding that stitched, worn fabric.

“It feels like a lifetime ago,” Elle said quietly.

In her hand was the painting she’d done of the rolling hills, dotted with trees and spring grass that lay behind our house—our old house, the house I’d never wander through again. The painting had hung over our mantel for years and had traveled thousands of miles in a moving pod, a little window into our old lives.

It was almost as hard to bear as it was a homecoming.

Boxes were stacked around the music room where there was plenty of room to spread out and sort through them. There were nonessential clothes and boxes of filed papers. Some were filled with photo albums and some with old schoolwork. And the rest were our own keepsakes.

Elle had arranged for the furniture Daddy had made to be put in a storage unit in Texas in the hopes that someday we would be able to bring it to wherever we were. And everything else had been sold, donated, or packed up in a big wooden box to travel here.

My boxes contained mostly books with some clothes, scrapbooks, and sheet music. I pulled the old Polaroid camera he’d given me when I was little and dozens of albums I’d accumulated over the years. But I had another full box devoted to things Daddy had made.

That box I put in my room to go through another time when there were less eyes to witness.

Susan cleared an entire bookshelf for me; it went all the way up to the ceiling, and I was more than a little excited to get on the ladder to add books to that topmost shelf. They were my old friends—my hardback set of Outlander and Harry Potter, stacks of Harlequin romances, piles of indie romances, the entire collection of Neil Gaiman books, which included one limited edition illustrated copy of Neverwhere, signed. In marker.

Mama came in when I was deep in the organizational throes, Mozart playing from my phone speaker and entire mind turned to the best way to order my books.