A Missed Opportunity

22

"Yeah, actually. That'd be nice." She agrees with ease. I have a feeling she'd have either asked me or her mom anyway. Maybe Aaliyah.

We fall back into the flow of silence again for a long moment before I decide to finally bite the bullet and ask the thousand-dollar question.

"He asked about Cam, didn't he?"

She hesitates to answer me. "Yeah."

"Hm." I acknowledge with a little smile playing at my lips. I can't blame the guy. A beautiful woman with this great kid? Of course he'd want them both back in his life—not one or the other. He'd be stupid if he was going after just Kiara. "And?" I coax. "What're we doing, Kiara?"

"I don't know, Noah. What are we doing?"

I let out a long and loud sigh. I figured she'd ask me, honestly. Lately, she's liked to include me in some decisions for Cameron. It's a part of parenting, she says. I get that, so I've already thought about it. I've thought about how things would change if I agreed to let this guy back into Cameron's life. Cameron's only mentioned him once and it was sort of a one-off comment, so I really have no way of knowing how he feels about that guy beyond whatever Kiara tells me. And she doesn't tell me much.

"He deserves something stable." I mutter. Someone stable, I mean. But that hits a little too close to home, so I settle for something.

Kiara seems to catch onto what I really mean though. "He has it." She offers weakly. I chuckle because I'm not so sure if that's true. He has her, but he needs that extra person too.

"Maybe we should ask him."

She goes quiet for a moment. "Cameron?" She eventually clarifies. "You want to ask him if he wants to see Wyatt?"

"Why not?" I shrug to myself. "We owe him that much, don't we? The whole secret friend shit didn't work out for us the first time. We should just be honest with him, right?"

She takes another moment to mull it over. "I mean..." She trials off to take an extra while. I smile to myself, amused with her silence. "But what about you? What do you think we should do?"

I'm tempted to insist on getting Cameron's point of view, but that would probably only frustrate her. "To be honest, Kiara..." I trial off while I debate on actually being honest.

"Noah, when people say to be honest, they're usually honest."

I frown. "Please get out of my brain. It's freaky."

She laughs at that. I start smiling again. "But it's so simple to be in!" She reasons.

"Hey."

She laughs some more which ultimately makes me laugh too. I quickly remember how infectious her laughter had been that night so long ago. I hardly remember it, if I'm being honest, but I remember little bits of it. This one was the biggest one. This one is the one that initially had me pausing my conversation with my friends to look over my shoulder at her while she giggled uncontrollably with her friends.

"Noah," She calls once she's done laughing at me. She wants to hear the rest of my to be honest speech.

"Mm." I acknowledge her quietly before I go back to thinking about that damn night. My intentions were scrabbled—I remember that too. I wanted to get somewhere quieter with her, and I wanted to know more about this weird stuffed animal she said she carried around when she was little and also when she was not-so little. I wanted to know why she ultimately was the first one to sit with me. I looked like a mess, and I know that.