You Have a Match(17)

“What are you doing here?” he asks.

Before I can ask what he’s doing here, the guilt I was already coated in gets a fresh new layer of more guilt painted right on it.

Because here’s the thing: I haven’t told Leo about any of this. I could blame being busy, or say that I wanted to tread carefully about finding Savvy when Leo didn’t find anyone. But while both are true, neither are truer than this: the Big Embarrassing Incident is somehow still bigger than us both.

“I’m—uh—going to camp?”

“I can’t believe it,” he says.

And, of all things, he crosses the space of the waiting area and wraps his arms around me in a bear hug so firm I can see the popcorn he’s holding spilling out in the periphery. It’s a wave of warmth and cinnamon and home. I almost forget to hug him back, my heart beating somewhere in my throat instead of doing the one damn job it’s supposed to do, my face so hot that I’m sure he can feel it where my cheek is pressed to his chest.

Jesus. I used to nap on top of him during movie nights when we were little. Now one second of prolonged contact is all it takes for my limbs to go wonkier than Connie’s after the student government kids raided some parents’ beer stash.

“Abby,” he says, so earnest and stunned that for once there’s not even a pun to accompany it. “This is the best surprise.”

I blink into his chest, and he lets me go, beaming like someone just shoved stardust down his throat.

“First I score a summer job at Camp Evergreen, and now you’re going to be there, too?”

I know the name well. It’s the camp Leo and Carla have spent every summer at since we were little kids, since their parents used to work on the staff. He’d come back with all these stories about misadventures with camp friends around the same time Connie would come back from traveling with stories about her cousins, and I’d nod and only half listen so the jealousy wouldn’t eat me alive.

“No, I’m going to Camp Reynolds,” I correct him.

“Oh, yeah,” he says with a derisive snort. “I forgot they renamed the place when Victoria took over and they collab’d with that academic thing.”

“Oh,” I say, and in my head, a slower, deeper, phenomenally more screwed Oh.

He tilts his head, and something in my chest aches at the sight. How that head tilt is so familiar to me, so familiarly mine, and how it’s been so long since I’ve seen it. Long enough that I realize he’s grown even taller in the last few months, and I’ve been so busy keeping my head down around him, I missed it.

Leo’s head untilts, and it dawns on me that Leo thinks I followed him here. And he seems ridiculously happy I did.

I stare back out the window, at the view of Mount Rainier passing us by, trying to recover from the whiplash. I should be relieved, shouldn’t I? Maybe this is proof that the weirdness is over, and we’ve made it out the other side. Finally made the BEI our bitch and are better off for it.

But I guess if I’m being honest, the weirdness didn’t start with the Big Embarrassing Incident. It’s been brewing since last August, when he got back from camp. We hadn’t seen him in a few months, and he’d had, as Connie put it, “an extreme glo up.” Not only had Leo shot up several inches, but he seemed to have acquired a jawline and some major “I dragged kayaks back and forth across a wet beach every day for two months” biceps.

I mean, yeah, I noticed. Suddenly we couldn’t swap hoodies anymore and other people in our class were asking me things like whether Leo was dating anyone or—most awkwardly of all—if he was dating me.

I rolled my eyes and waved everyone off, because it was all super dumb—until it wasn’t. Until Connie went to visit her grandparents over Thanksgiving break, and Leo dragged me to a line outside Best Buy for some game release, and we spent an entire night huddled in the dark, sleep-deprived and delirious and probably judgment-impaired from all the cranberry sauce in our veins. Until right when the sky started to bleed pink, and I eyed the roof of Leo’s dad’s pickup truck, thinking that maybe from that height I might be able to get a shot of the sunrise over the mountains in the distance. Until the moment when, before I’d even so much as moved a muscle, Leo put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t you dare, Abby Day.”

He’d said the words probably a thousand times. But this time was different, because this time when I looked at him—eyes bright, cheeks flushed, with that knowing smile pressed into his lips—it seemed far more ridiculous not to kiss him than to kiss him. As if it was something that wasn’t just inevitable, but long overdue.

So I leaned in. And I closed my eyes. And then—

And then both of our phones pinged at the same time.

It was the ping we’d set specifically for Connie. I pulled back, my heart hammering. It was maybe the first time in my life I actually managed to stop myself from doing something impulsive. Of all the things in the world I could never compromise, chief among them are my friendships with Connie and Leo.

And with that almost-kiss, I could have torpedoed fourteen years of our trio’s dynamic straight into the sky.

“Sorry.” I wasn’t sure what I was sorry for—initiating it, or stopping it, or all the moments in between.

Leo stared at me like I was a stranger. “Don’t be,” he said.