Beauty's on the Inside, not on the Outside

Almost

Chapter Seven: Almost

March was a long month that felt short.

The current between them had become something everyone around them could feel except, as far as Jules could tell, them. Or rather she felt it, and she suspected he felt it, but they had an agreement they had never made out loud to not say what it was, to let it remain in the register of text messages and coffee shop Saturdays and the particular warmth of sitting beside each other in AP English while something that was not nothing moved between them like a current under still water.

Priya had stopped offering commentary and started just watching with an expression of patient exasperation that Jules found both comforting and mildly alarming.

There were moments.

There was the afternoon in March when they were studying in the library and it had gotten dark outside without either of them noticing because they had been talking about the book, and then about something else, and then about something else entirely and the building had mostly emptied around them and she had looked up mid-sentence and found him looking at her with something on his face that was not the steady evaluative attention she had catalogued over months but something rawer, something that moved, something that had not gone through the usual filter before arriving on his face.

She had held it.

Something had gathered in the space between them she could feel it, the specific atmospheric quality of a moment that is deciding what it wants to be and then his phone had buzzed on the table between them and he had looked at it and the moment had folded itself quietly closed.

She had gone home that evening and sat on the edge of her bed for a long time.

There was the evening of the swim meet a home meet, the pool loud and bright and smelling of chlorine and competition when she had come out of the locker room afterward, hair still damp, exhausted in the good way of someone who had swum well and knew it, and found him in the hallway outside. Not Priya, who she had been expecting. Him. Leaning against the wall with her jacket over his arm because she had left it in the bleachers and the evening was cold and he had apparently just taken it. Picked it up. Brought it.

He had held it open for her without comment.

She had put her arms through the sleeves and his hands had been at her shoulders for one second the specific warmth of a deliberate touch, brief and careful and then he had stepped back and they had walked to the parking lot in the cold and she had spent the entire drive home pressed against the car door trying to contain the feeling in her chest which was too large for the space available.

There was the Tuesday night in late March when they had been texting late, the apartment dark, her mother asleep and he had written: I like talking to you. Just that. In the direct, unornamented way he said things that cost something. And she had held her phone in both hands in the dark and written back: I like talking to you too. And then put the phone on her chest and looked at the ceiling for an hour analyzing whether what they had just done was say something real or whether they had both walked up to the edge and stopped just short of it.

She thought they had stopped just short.

She thought they both knew they had stopped just short.

She thought the stopping was getting harder.

It was Priya who finally said, on a Wednesday in early April at the lunch table with the specific timing of someone who had been waiting for exactly the right moment: "You're going to have to actually do something."

Alex had gone to turn in a late assignment a rare occurrence that Priya had clearly been treating as a window of opportunity.

"I don't know what you mean," Jules said.

"The invisible thing," Priya said. "The current. The thing that happens when you two are in the same room that makes everyone in a ten foot radius feel like they're watching something they shouldn't be watching." She broke her granola bar in half with decisive precision. "It has been going on since October Jules. October. We are now in April. That is six months of almost."

"There's nothing"

"There is something." Priya said it with the gentle absolute certainty of someone who had made up their mind a long time ago. "There has been something since the first week of school. You know there is something. I know there is something. I would be willing to bet significant money that he knows there is something." She paused. "The only outstanding question is which of you is going to say it first."

Jules looked at her lunch.

"Jules." Priya's voice shifted softer, more direct. "What are you actually afraid of?"

Jules thought about deflecting. She decided not to. She had been doing enough deflecting.

"That I'm wrong," she said quietly. "That I've been reading this the way I want to read it rather than the way it actually is. That I say something and it turns out I invented the whole thing." She paused. "And that if I'm right it still goes wrong somehow."

Priya looked at her for a long moment. "Can I tell you what I see?"

Jules nodded.

"I see a boy who came to your swim meets without telling you," Priya said. "Who brought you coffee without knowing how you took it and figured you could add things. Who stood at the end of a locker row in December without hesitation. Who texts you sunrises." She paused. "Who looks at you Jules, I need you to hear this who looks at you the way people look at things they are trying to memorize."

Jules was very still.

"You are not wrong," Priya said. "I promise you. You are not reading it wrong."

Jules picked up her fork. Put it down. Looked at the table.

"I'm scared," she said. The most honest thing she'd said to anyone in months.

Priya reached over and put her hand briefly on Jules's arm. "Yeah," she said. "That's how you know it counts."

April moved slowly the way months do when you are waiting for something without quite admitting you are waiting.

Jules went to swim practice and came home and did her homework and texted Alex about the books they were both reading and sat beside him in AP English and ate lunch across from him and walked home in the same direction and felt the current between them like a physical thing, like weather, like something that had been building long enough that the pressure of it had become its own kind of presence.

She thought about what Priya had said.

She thought about the swim meets and the coffee and the jacket and the text in the dark. She thought about the two seconds he had held her gaze on the first day of school, a look that had meant nothing and somehow meant everything. She thought about the music room and grief that was still happening and when I look at you I see Jules.

She thought about the specific shape of her fear the exposure of wanting something, the vulnerability of caring about an outcome, the old familiar instinct to protect herself from anything that could be taken away.

She thought about what it had cost her to learn to look in the mirror.

She thought about the pool and the way she had learned, at thirteen, that the only way through the water was to go.

She was getting tired of the protection.

There were two more moments before the thing finally happened.

The first was a Thursday afternoon in mid-April. They were in the library where else and Jules had finished what she was working on and was watching him read, which she did sometimes without fully admitting she was doing it, the specific quality of his focus, the slight frown that appeared when something interested him, the way he turned pages with his left hand while the right held his pen even when he wasn't writing with it.

He looked up and caught her.

She didn't look away.

He didn't either.

They sat there for a moment four seconds, five, longer than the two seconds of the first day of school, longer than any of the moments that had come before and something moved between them in the space of that held gaze that was not ambiguous, that could not be read as anything other than what it was, and Jules felt her heart doing something technically inadvisable in her chest and held perfectly still.

Then someone dropped a book two tables over and the moment broke and they both looked away and Jules went back to her notes with her face warm and her hands not entirely steady.

She heard him exhale slowly across the table.

Neither of them said anything.

The second moment was the Friday of the same week.

They were walking home the same direction as always, the geography of their separate homes arranging them together for twelve minutes every evening and it had rained earlier and the evening had the specific clean quality of air after rain, sharp and new, everything slightly more itself.

They had been talking and then gone quiet, the comfortable kind, and Jules was thinking about what she was going to say when she realized she was going to say something, which happened sometimes the decision arriving before the words did.

She stopped walking.

He stopped a step later and turned.

"Jules?"

She looked at him. The evening light was the golden after-rain kind, the kind that made everything slightly luminous, and he was standing in it looking at her with that full attention, that complete presence, and she thought: I am so tired of almost.

"I need to tell you something," she said.

Something shifted in his expression a readiness, like he had been waiting for this sentence for a while.

"Okay," he said.

"I" She stopped. Her heart was loud. "I keep almost saying this and then not saying it. And I'm tired of not saying it." She held his gaze. "I don't want to keep pretending that this is just" She gestured between them. "Whatever we've been calling this."

The silence was the long kind.

He looked at her with something on his face that was entirely unguarded, that had not been filtered or managed, that was just there.

"What do you want to call it?" he said quietly.

"I don't know yet," she said honestly. "But I know it's not nothing. And I know I'm tired of acting like it is."

He was quiet for a moment. He looked at the pavement. He looked back at her.

"I've been trying to figure out how to say something since October," he said. "I kept deciding it was too much, or I had gotten it wrong, or" He stopped. "I kept stopping."

"I know," Jules said. "Me too."

"I don't want to just be your friend," he said. It came out simply, without performance, in the flat direct way he said the things that mattered most. "I haven't wanted that for a long time."

Jules looked at him.

The rain-clean evening was very still around them. The golden light. The empty street. The specific suspended quality of a moment that has been a long time coming and knows it.

"Okay," she said.

He looked at her. "Okay?"

"I mean" She felt something rise in her chest that was almost laughter, not from humor exactly but from relief, from the specific lightness of something that has been held tightly for a long time finally being put down. "Yes. Same. Obviously."

He looked at her for a moment and then the smile happened not the almost-smile, not the one that stopped just short, but the real one, the full one, the one she had been collecting since October and had never quite gotten used to, that landed on his face like something released.

She was not prepared for it. She was never prepared for it.

"I'm still not good at this," he said.

"I know." She looked at him steadily. "I'm not asking for someone who's good at it. I'm asking for you."

He looked at her for a long moment in the golden after-rain light. Then slowly, with the deliberateness of someone making a choice rather than following an impulse, he reached over and took her hand.

Not dramatically. Just his hand finding hers, fingers closing, warm and certain.

Jules looked at their hands.

She looked at him.

She felt the specific shape of something beginning not the tentative beginning of things you're not sure about, but the solid beginning of something you have walked toward for a long time and finally arrived at.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay," she said.

They stood on the rain-clean street in the golden evening light, hand in hand, and the almost was finally, completely, over.

End of Chapter Seven.

Get ready for Chapter Eight!🤭