Mailboy (Wattys 2015 Winner)

15. The City

I stopped him, “Amir! No bad words, it’s Ramadan.”

“Sorry,” he said, smiling. “So, out of nowhere, you grabbed Nico’s face and kissed him. It wasn’t like a peck, it was a full on kiss.”

“Please tell me there was no tongue action?” I said, feeling dread wash over me. Why, oh why, didn’t the world open up and swallow me at that particular moment?

“That’s for you and Nico to know,” said Amir, grinning. Just as he opened his mouth to continue talking, Fred averted his attention away from me when he not-so subtly pointed out a pretty girl.

I put my face in my hands and mumbled insults to myself.

How could I have been so stupid?

Get over it, you kissed and you two are friends.

Out of the blue, something hard hit my head, making me bounce back and fall on the ground. A pain made my head pound and I felt a bump forming on my forehead. I opened my eyes to see a pole.

Great, just great.

“Zoey, you okay?” said a brunette with eyes that I had spent so much time thinking about. He extended a hand and helped me stand up again, with the others snickering at me.

I felt my hands get clammy, even though they weren’t supposed to anymore. “Yeah, Oliver, I’m fine.”

“You sure?” His eyebrows formed a crease in the middle, just like when he would ask me about a calculus question at school.

Taking my hand away from his as if I had touched fire, I nodded.

“Listen, I wanted to talk to you about something, I—”

“Ey, Zorro! What happened now?” shouted Nico, walking towards me.

I managed a smile, “I hit my head on a pole.”

“You are attracted to getting hurt,” said Nico, shaking his head at me. Then, he turned and looked at Oliver with an expression of extreme distaste, as if he tasted something sour.

“What?” said Oliver.

“Nothing, I was just wondering how it was possible to have this much idiot in a human.”

Oliver’s face changed, from worried to pissed off, “what the fuck is your problem, man?”

“No problem,” said Nico, slightly raising his hands, he nodded his head towards me, “c’mon Hunter.”

With him, my last name was never pronounced the way it was usually said. Nico’s way of saying it was: Huntah.

 For once during the past month, I was willing to talk to Oliver. It wasn’t because of the Xandra thing, just because my feelings for him had subsided. Whatever he had to say had to be important.

“Wait a second,” I said, noticing the way Oliver’s expression was fallen, “he needs to tell me something.”

The rest of my friends were in the back, all smiling. They were walking as slow as they could to savor every moment and none of them were aware of what happened to me.

“Seriously?” exclaimed Nico, an incredulous look on his face.

I didn’t once blink when I said, “Seriously.”

He gave me one last glare before heading back towards James and the others. I turned my eyes to the ground and started walking. Oliver was by my side.

“So, what did you want to say?” I asked, trying to cut through the awkwardness. This was the first time Oliver and I had been alone in weeks.

Right now, my stomach was welcoming an entire zoo with an extra appearance of a million butterflies.