Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute(83)
God. It’s just impossible not to be Celine’s friend.
She walks around to my side of the bed and gets on her knees.
I am appalled. “Celine, come on, I was joking.”
“Were you, though?” She arches an eyebrow.
“Well, no, but I’ve changed my mind, get up.”
“It’s okay. I’m fine here,” she says primly, “since I’m apologizing.”
I laugh nervously while my heart skitters around in my chest like a puppy on hardwood floors. Stop that. It’s not what you think. “You don’t need to do that, Cel. I’m sorry I…you know.” I force the words out because I am a reasonable person, goddammit. “I’m sorry you had to watch me storm off and fall down a hill. I shouldn’t have done that. We always…agreed it wasn’t serious.” The words taste like ash, but I need to say them. “Get up,” I tell her. “We’re good.”
“We’re not,” she says steadily, her voice so strangely serious. I haven’t been looking at her head-on because it hurts, but now I do and there’s something vulnerable and solemn in her face that I don’t recognize. I swallow hard. My stomach flips.
“First,” she says, sliding a hand in her pocket, “here’s your phone.”
Of course she picked it up. The low-level panic I’ve carried around since losing it eases away. “Thanks. Thanks.” I squeeze the cool plastic against my palm a few times to make sure it’s there. I have a lot of notifications.
I have notifications from Celine?
“Second,” she says, snatching back my attention, “I got you something.” She releases the notebook shield and puts it beside me on the bed. I pick it up. A good-weight ring-bound notebook, which is nice, because the feeling of cracking a spine makes me want to throw up. The front cover is a symmetrical pattern of dark green leaves against black, interspersed with splashes of gold foil. It’s pretty. It’s very Celine, and I don’t want to like that, but I do. Only, there’s a name printed right in the center of the cover, and it doesn’t say Celine. It says Bradley.
“You can’t use screens for a while, right?” she says. “Because you’re concussed. But I know you’ve been working on your book so I thought you could maybe keep going—and then I thought, you know, if you handwrite it, you probably won’t read it back as much. And you can’t just throw it away if it’s not perfect. So maybe that could…help?” She makes an awkward I-don’t-know expression that I find adorable. “Or maybe it’s the exact opposite, I don’t know, sorry.”
I don’t know either, and frankly I don’t care, because my mind is just stuck on the fact that she got me this. She thought of me. Of what I’d want and what I’d need, and then she went and had it made for me because of course she did, and how the hell am I supposed to fall out of love with her if she keeps being this thoughtful?
“Brad?” she whispers.
“I…need you to stop,” I grit out.
She flinches. “Okay. Sorry, I—”
God, she looks like a wounded puppy, and she doesn’t understand. “I know you wanted to end it, but I can’t just…suddenly change how I feel about you,” I blurt out. “I’m trying. All right? Friends first. I promise. But I can’t have you doing things like this or it’s not going to work, so I need you to stop.”
The breath rushes out of her like a crashing waterfall. “But, Brad, I don’t want you to…I shouldn’t have said…” She inhales through her nose and shakes her head. “God, this is so awkward—”
“Yeah, you’re telling me.”
She purses her pink pillowy lips, then lets them part, and words flood out. “I’m sorry I pushed you away when you didn’t deserve it. I didn’t even mean it. I lied. I didn’t want to end things. I thought you did, which was probably paranoia because I was worried you’d notice how much I wanted to be with you, for real, and I should’ve just agreed when you asked me the first time, only I couldn’t because I was so scared you would…we would…that it wouldn’t last,” she finishes, the words sputtering out like sparks from a malfunctioning machine.
My heart sags into a pile of disbelief and relief. Disrelief. “Celine.”
“I’m sorry!”
“Are you serious?”
“I’m sorry!”
“I FELL OFF A CLIFF!”
She winces. “It was a hill. And that wasn’t technically my—”
“CELINE!”
“Okay, yes, sorry!”
God, I love her. “You…you…” I think I feel another headache coming on. “Do you think you’re the only one who’s scared of things?”
“No,” she murmurs, eyes lowered. “No.”
“I don’t want us to break up either! I don’t want you to go to Cambridge and tutor some hot millionaire who rows and has amazing lats and fall in love with him and come home for Christmas and tell me it’s just not gonna work but we can still be friends and then marry him and travel the world together saving people from capitalism!”
Celine is now staring at me, wide-eyed. “Um. Have you thought about this a lot?”