Chapter Four
865 Words
Ace
"You reorganized my entire kitchen."
She is sitting at the counter when I get home from practice, perfectly calm, eating my cereal out of my bowl, and behind her every cabinet I own has been rearranged by a person operating on pure spite.
"I labeled everything," she says, not looking up. "Now you'll always know what's yours. You seemed real worked up about the food situation."
She has been living in my apartment eight days now, and in those eight days she has rearranged my kitchen, claimed the entire left side of the bathroom counter, started leaving her textbooks all over my coffee table, and somehow made the whole place feel less like mine and more like ours. I do not know when that happened and I am not handling it like a grown man.
"You're in my seat," I say, because it is the only complaint I have left that I can say out loud.
"There is a whole other stool."
"I sit there."
"You sit wherever I'm not, apparently, because you've been circling me since the second you walked in the door." She turns on the stool to face me, and she has her hair down tonight, and she is wearing the little shorts she sleeps in, and I have to physically decide not to look at her legs. "What is your actual problem, Ace?"
"My problem." I set my bag down hard. "My problem is that you blew up my season, moved into my apartment, and now you're sitting at my counter eating my cereal like you pay the rent here."
"I do live here. That was the entire point of all the begging."
"You know exactly what I mean."
"I really don't." She slides off the stool and stands up. She is a full foot shorter than me and she still squares up like she fully intends to win this. "So say it. Use your words. You're so good at running your mouth at everybody else in this school, so go ahead and run it at me. What is your problem with me, Ace? Out loud."
I close the space between us before I have thought it through. She does not back up. She never backs up. We end up close enough that she has to tip her head back to keep her eyes on mine, and I can see her breathing go uneven, and I tell her the truth, because she asked for it and because I am done sitting on it.
"My problem is that every girl in this school has thrown herself at me, and the one single time somebody looked at me like I was garbage, it was you. And I can't get it out of my head. That is my problem, Cole. You walked into that room and called me the thing on the bottom of your shoe, and I have not stopped thinking about your mouth since you said it, and I hate it, and I hate you, and I still want to know what you would do right now if I kissed you."
The whole apartment goes dead quiet.
She is staring up at me. Her chest is going fast. Her hands are in fists at her sides and she has not moved one inch, and for a second, one single second, her eyes drop to my mouth, and I know. I know she is thinking about it too.
"Don't," she whispers.
"Then tell me to stop."
She does not tell me to stop.
Her phone goes off on the counter, loud and shrill, and we both flinch like we have been caught with our hands somewhere they should not be, and the name lit up on the screen does the rest of the work for us.
Mason.
She steps back. I step back. She grabs the phone and turns away from me and answers it with a voice that is somehow perfectly steady, and I stand in my own kitchen with my heart slamming against my ribs and the taste of a kiss that did not happen, listening to her tell her brother that everything is fine, everything is great, Ace is being a perfect gentleman.
She hangs up. She does not look at me.
"I'm going to bed," she says.
"Wren."
"Don't." She is already walking down the hall. "Whatever that just was, it didn't happen. He's my brother. You're his best friend. It cannot happen."
Her door clicks shut.
I stand there for a long time after.
Because she is right, and I know she is right. Mason is the one person who took my side back when everybody else on this campus decided I was a problem to be managed. Mason vouched for me when my own father wouldn't return my calls. Mason picked up the phone today and asked me to keep his little sister safe, and wanting to put my hands all over her is a very specific way of doing the exact opposite of that.
I know every bit of that.
I am still standing outside her door at midnight with my hand half raised to knock before I make myself turn around and walk away.
- Writer
