You Have a Match(49)
A beat passes, and I’m praying she doesn’t say anything, because I don’t know how much longer I can hold it together. Then Savvy—fully clothed, her hair all done up for the day, her eye makeup applied with doll-like precision—grabs my hand and pulls, and we’re both running, matching each other’s strides, smacking the water with the same splash.
I look for Savvy, but find Finn first, his cackling cutting through the mist. Then there’s a hand on the top of my head, pushing me fully into the water. My cheeks immediately go numb and my legs start kicking out from under me, and when I break the surface, I’m gasping right into Finn’s face.
It’s a nice face. And my heart is beating in every nook and cranny of me, angry and confused and too overwhelmed to remember which way it’s supposed to beat. And maybe I should do something about it. Maybe I should break the hold Leo has over me, solve one problem with another, do the thing that is obviously occurring to me and Finn at the same time and kiss him.
Finn licks some of the water off his lips, the smirk sliding off his face. I don’t have to look back to know Leo is watching, and for this fleeting, selfish moment, I’m glad. Finn leans in, and maybe I am, too—and I get an eye full of water instead.
Finn lets out an indignant crow and splashes back in the direction it came from. Savvy lets out a little shriek, backing away. I catch Savvy’s grin, wider than I’ve ever seen it. Full of the little kid freedom of letting yourself get lost in a moment. It’s the Savvy from the old camp pictures, the one everyone else knows, who I’m still filling in the edges of—someone I can actually see myself in.
“You’re supposed to get back out after you jump in, you bunch of masochists,” Mickey calls from the shore.
Someone blows the whistle and we all scramble back out, shivering. Mickey immediately holds out a towel for Savvy, rolling her eyes at us both. I look around for Finn, but he’s nowhere to be found.
“Looks like a cold Day in July,” says Leo, offering me some hot chocolate.
I let out a sharp breath of a laugh, still wheezing from the run in and out of the water, and take the Styrofoam cup from him. Leo wraps an arm around my sopping wet shoulders again, this time with an unfamiliar tightness—briefly I think it’s because he knows I’m upset, but just unsubtly enough, he tilts us, so Finn can get a full view.
I stiffen, and so does Finn, meeting my eye—no, meeting Leo’s. Finn blinks away from him so fast that I almost miss it before he turns on his heels toward another group of campers.
I pull away from Leo.
“You’re gonna get soaked,” I tell him, even though he already is.
Leo reaches out his arm. “I don’t mind.”
I duck out before he can touch me. I feel raw. Different. Like the cold has crystallized everything, made the things I didn’t want to see so clear that there’s no way to avoid them: it’s not just that Leo doesn’t want me. He doesn’t want anyone else to have me either.
I make myself watch the confusion streak across his face, the hurt, but it doesn’t do anything to chip at my resolve. It’s like Leo said when we were watching the lightning. There are some things you gotta own up to yourself.
“Leo,” I start, but he grabs my arm and pulls, pressing me into him right before Mickey and Savvy barrel right into us.
“I regret to inform you that we’re going to have to bury you in this,” says Mickey, trying to wrestle the wet sweater off Savvy’s body, “because it is permanently stuck to your skin.”
The heat of Leo against my freezing cold skin is so inviting that it lulls me, displacing me in time. I’m taken back to two winters ago, when we were sledding on a rare snow day and I went too fast and ended up landing face-first in a pile of someone’s driveway slush. Leo kept rubbing my arms to keep me warm while we were laughing and hightailing it back to my house. Back when things were simple. Back when I had no reason to think they wouldn’t always be.
Savvy lets out a squeal, bent over with her whole face swallowed up with fabric. “My hair is stuck on the tag!”
“Then hold still, you goofball,” says Mickey. “I swear to god, Houdini couldn’t get out of this. What brand sent you this death trap?”
“Jo gave it to me for my birthday!”
I shiver, and Leo pulls me in tighter. I tell myself I’m only letting him because we’re both distracted by Savvy and Mickey’s little show, but the lie is too shallow to take root. The truth is, this might be the last time I let him this close. I want to savor it, stamp it to my heart, and hold the part of him I can have, even when I can’t have him.
“Jesus, what did you do to piss her off?”
Savvy ducks her head down so Mickey can untangle the tag from her wet ponytail, but the two of them are cracking up so hard at how ridiculous Savvy looks with her head upside down and her arms extended out like she’s about to burst into the world’s most aggressive jazz hands that they aren’t making much progress.
“Probably fucked up the Gcal date schedule,” says Savvy, snorting.
Mickey is breathless, cupping Savvy’s head between her hands, trying and failing not to laugh. “Tell me you’re kidding.”
I pull away from Leo with absurd slowness, like maybe he won’t notice if it happens little by little. But I guess we’ve been pulling away from each other a lot longer than that. This time he finally lets me go.