Kidnap My Heart

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Will

A/N: Probably my single favoritest chapter ever, and I mean it this time. Scout's honor. Except I was never a Girl Scout. But that isn't relevant. Just trust me on this one. 

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Kidnap My Heart

Chapter 28: Will

I wasn’t sure why I was even pushing this or what the hell was going on with me. It was a stupid metaphor, anyway, something only Emma would come up with. A designer dress vs. a cat onesie. It was stupid as fuck.

Why would I want to be the cat onesie she was embarrassed of? It was demeaning. Actually, it was, in a way, what I did to other girls, but not because I thought I could do better. That was the difference between me and Emma. I knew the girls I dated could do better than me. I couldn’t give them what they wanted, just like Emma couldn’t give me what I wanted, but in pretty much every other aspect, I did the same thing Emma was doing.

I avoided turning my flings into relationships and kept them in the dark. I didn’t introduce girls to my dad or to Eric or to any of my friends. I didn’t take girls on romantic dates. I mostly just took them to my bedroom. I didn’t make plans too far into the future because I couldn’t see myself with any of them for more than a couple of weeks. I avoided “defining the relationship” and referred to what we did as “hanging out.” I didn’t have real conversations with them. Hell, I probably couldn’t have told you some of their names, much less what they liked or didn’t like.

I didn’t do girlfriends. I didn’t choose weird cat onesies. I didn’t choose anyone. So why did it bother me that Emma might be the same way? It shouldn’t have, but it did. It bothered me. It bothered me a lot.

All I really wanted to do was shut up and drop it. There was no point in going on with this. I was in over my head. I’d finally met a girl who wasn’t interested in me at all, partly because of our less-than-ideal circumstances. If she was interested, even a little—and at moments I would’ve sworn she was—it would only be in me as a fling. All I would ever be to her was an embarrassing cat onesie she secretly hung out with.

Yet I couldn’t stop myself from speaking again, and I hated myself for it. I was turning into Eric. I was turning into my mom. “How did you describe the cat onesie again? Comfortable?”

She just nodded, a blank look on her face. If she’d known what was going through my head, she wouldn’t have looked so calm. She would’ve been out the door before I could count to ten. Not that it took me a particularly long time to do that. I could count perfectly well. Hell, I was pretty sure I still remembered how to count in French. Un, deux, trois, quatre—damn it, Will, priorities!

Snapping out of my distracted train of thought, I said, “I mean, I’m no expert or anything, but I’d say you’re pretty comfortable with me.”

“How would you know how I’m feeling?” she asked. She still had that forced blank look on her face. She didn’t want me to see what she was really feeling.

“You pull pranks on me, even pranks that involve touching my boxers. You work out with me and you don’t care if I see you all sweaty or make fun of you because you can only do ten pushups. You don’t wear makeup, and you didn’t buy any when we went to the mall. You have no problem sleeping in my bed. You reference Vlad the Impaler just as casually as I do. Do you need me to go on? Because I can.”

Emma looked at me warningly. But it was more than that. She looked scared. Worried. Like she was convinced if I said the wrong thing—or the right thing, depending on how you looked at it—I would strike a cord and everything would change. “Will.”