Quinton tugged on my hand, smiling back at me. “You’re not afraid, are you?” he teased, my favorite dimpled smile spreading over his face, his eyes laughing. I pursed my lips, narrowing my eyes at him.
“Don’t you go and dare me now,” I cautioned him, trying to sound menacing and probably failing. “I’m getting too old for some of them. Colonel dared me to jump on the hood of a parked car the other day, and I fell off and nearly broke my hip. I’m old enough to be worrying about the state of my hips, Quinton.”
“Hip-breakage is a sign of getting older, Lena,” he told me gravely.
I turned my nose up at him haughtily. “You calling me old, Lancaster?” I demanded, not being able to help but to feel a little self-conscious that he really did think I was kind of old now. Like he knew what I was thinking, he smiled down at me warmly, gathering me tighter in his arms. I breathed a content sigh and relaxed into him, his breath blowing against the top of my head and making my scalp all tingly.
“You’re not old, cutie,” he promised me. “But I definitely am. Twenty-five . . . It’s like a Kline-style fingernail to the heart.”
I laughed, but now my thoughts had been shifted into a new direction, like a kid with ADD who had spotted a bunch of flashing lights. “Hey, have you talking to Kline lately?” I asked, my eyebrows pulling together, trying to remember if he mentioned it or not, knowing that he would have.
He poked me in the ribs, making me automatically squeal, but his smile didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Yeah, Lena, you were kind of there. Remember?”
“Right,” I affirmed, smiling sheepishly. “Was that the first time you had seen her since . . .?”
“Since her and Mathieu broke up?” he finished for me, nodding slowly with this thoughtful expression on his face. “Yeah, it was, actually.”
We had all seen the breakup coming, but that didn’t make it any less explosive. Mathieu and Kline had been rather ill-suited from the start—he was always so busy with school, she was always so busy being Kline—and they clashed over things so easily that they were always balancing on the tip of a knife. They kept fighting more, and more, and more, until one day Kline showed up at Norma and Colonel’s place in Waltham with a U-Haul, begging for a place to stay for a couple of days. When I had asked her what had made her leave him, she had simply told me that they were never meant to be and changed the subject. So I asked Mathieu instead.
It didn’t make things awkward for any of the parties involved—no one blamed the other. Kline and Mathieu had reached a point where they had to move on. Kline called it her big epiphany. The rest of us called it their closure.
So Kline found an apartment on the edge of Waltham for the time being, until she can solidly get back on her feet, always wearing a smile even though I knew that this all might have been seen coming from a mile away, but it still had to hurt so much. But she always had a smile, a laugh, a joke, and it didn’t take much for me to realize that Kline might have always been the strongest of us all.
Quinton looked out into the Boston Harbor, his arms tightening around me.
“We won’t end like that,” he told me sternly, but there was a slight shaking uncertainty underneath of his voice, like he thought it was just a nature of his family to fall out of love; I knew it was something that haunted him, and what happened with Mathieu didn’t make him feel any better about it. He stared out into the darkening night sky, his eyes strained. “I won’t let that happen, I promise.”
“You’ll have to pry your heart from my cold dead hands,” I told him honestly.
A small smirk tipped up a corner of his mouth. “Well that’s a revitalizing mental image.”
I punched him in the shoulder and laughed, shaking my head. Needless to say, the two of us hadn’t grown much at all since high school.
Well, okay, that is a lie—Quinton went to Yale and did smart-person things and I went to UMass like a normal person. We had our ups and our downs like every couple, but we just seemed to have more ups. Quinton was still a sweetheart, but now just a sweetheart with a fancy law degree and better dress sense. Our parents still lived next door to each other and my brother was still a total idiot with a tumultuous off-and-on-again relationship with my ginger best friend. Everything felt the same, but I knew it wasn’t.
I stopped dressing like a circus escapee about eighteen times after I had been misidentified as one. I grew up and matured a little bit, but I still did too many dares and didn’t own a matching pair of socks. I got a degree, but I still got distracted by tin foil and other things that are shiny.
We all have to grow up sometime, I guess. I think I had done a good deal of growing up over the last several years.
But I still use Marvel. I mean, come on.
I jumped when I realized Quinton was waving a hand in front of my face, dangerously close to karate chopping my nose. He burst out laughing when I vaulted back a step, throwing his head back with the force of his laughter.
“Earth to Mallory,” he paged in a goofy voice. “Come in, Mallory.”
I pushed his hand away, scrunching up my nose as he reached out to touch me again. He smiled at me, but there was this funny look on his face, like he was about to be sick or something. I frowned.
“What’s wrong?” I demanded, concerned, reaching up to touch his forehead but coming back with a negative on the fever. “You look a little green, Quinton. Do you feel okay?”
“I’m perfect,” he told me with a smile, but I wasn’t convinced. “I’m just thinking.”
“Well, try not to think too hard, alright?” I teased him, smiling. “What are you thinking so strongly about?”
“About us,” he said slowly, waiting cautiously for my reaction. My eyebrows show up.
“Yeah?” I asked, biting my lip nervously. “So thinking about our relationship makes you look like you’re going to be sick?”
“With adorableness,” he blurted out, making us both crack up. “But no, really, I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately.”
My stomach flipped a little. It was probably because his mind was subconsciously realizing things and finally catching up with his common sense as he came to the conclusion that he was too good to settle for someone like me. That I was still the weird girl from high school and he was the super cute boy next door and sometimes that wasn’t always the ideal combination.
He said that he wouldn’t let what happened with Mathieu and Kline happen to us, but what if he had been lying to me, to himself?
I grimaced a little, my good mood edging away.
Quinton didn’t even seem to notice as he stared down at our entwined hands, playing with my fingers in a way that usually made my tummy all jumpy and goopy, since I’m an English major and all. He looked thoughtful again, making me wonder if he was always thinking about us when he made that face, since I’ve been noticing that he’d been making that face a lot lately.
“We’ve known each other for a long time,” he started his speech, and then the end was suddenly in sight. “We’ve been dating almost as long, and it’s been amazing, Lena. I’ll never want to forget it, ever. It’s just—after all this time, I started to realize something—I started to realize—”
I burst into tears. “Oh my god, you’re breaking up with me, aren’t you?”
“What?” he demanded, looking both shocked and horrified. “No, no, Lena, I’m not breaking up with you. Far from breaking up. It’s okay,” he soothed me, reaching up and wiping my tears away with one hand as he held onto me for dear life with the other one. “Lena, sweetheart, we aren’t breaking up.”
I pulled away only to punch his chest as hard as I could. He winced and reached up to rub his shoulder, since I kind of have really bad aim.
“Don’t do that to me,” I screeched at him, rubbing away my tears and laughing shakily. “I’m out of my mind and overemotional—I can’t take the strain.”
He pulled me into his arms again, squeezing me so tightly I think my spine even cracked once. He sighed heavily. “I don’t know why you’re so convinced that I’m going to leave you,” he murmured, sounding a little hurt, but I didn’t look away from where I had buried my face into his chest to look. I pulled myself closer, trying to calm my crazy head.
“I’m not convinced,” I muttered.
“Yesterday I asked you if you wanted me to go to the grocery store and get some bread and you started sobbing. You told me that if I left, I was going to leave you forever.”
“Adrian’s dad in Monk left to go get milk one day and never came back,” I reminded him, looking back up at him and raising my eyebrows challengingly. He gave me a flat look in response.
“That is a TV show. Which is part comedy,” he deadpanned.
“You never know,” I mumbled, glancing down as my cheeks started to heat up. He laughed, poking my cheek.
“You never change, Lena,” he said, smiling fondly. “That’s one of the things that makes me love you so much.”
I turned redder even though this certainly wasn’t the first time he had told me that he loved me.
“Yeah, yeah,” I mocked him, secretly feeling like I was prancing through a meadow of flowers. “So, anyway, what were you saying before I started to panic?”
He cleared his throat, suddenly looking uncomfortable. He glanced away from me again, back to our hands.
“A-anyway,” he stuttered, his cheeks turning pink as my nervousness reappeared full-force. He fiddled with my fingers after a moment before he dropped them completely and shoved his hands into his pockets, looking up so that our eyes finally met again.
For a moment, we just looked at each other.
“I love you,” he told me.
“I love you, too,” I replied, gazing at him curiously as he shifted his weight nervously.
“Lena, I was—,” he started, pulling his hand out of his pocket, but immediately broke off when something tumbled out of it, hitting the ground and rolling. Both of us kneeled down and reached for it on reflex—only I got to it first.
I stared at the black ring box for a long moment before I glanced back up at Quinton. He was blushing, and he was on one knee in front of me, his eyes still about level with my own, looking embarrassed but he still had that smile on his face like he did when he told me he loved me, making everything on my body set on fire. I gaped between him and the ring box as he cleared his throat nervously again, looking terrified.
“Lena, will you marry me?” he whispered.
For a moment that felt like it could have been eternity, I just stared at him. Then I screamed a little and launched forward, throwing my arms tightly around his neck as I gripped the ring box in my hand for dear life, worried that maybe it would go slipping out of my sweaty palms like it totally had with Quinton. He laughed a little, still sounding so nervous even as he slipped his arms around me in response, pulling me closer.
I pulled away only to kiss him, smiling so wide my face hurt and my eyes were tearing up.
“Yes,” I told him. “Holy cucumbers, yes times a million.”
“Oh. Good,” he replied, and laughed nervously, reaching up to touch my face, smiling that shy smile that he first smiled at me with—all those years ago, back in the middle of my living room, back before I had fallen in love with the boy next door. My heart melted with that smile even as my whole body was freaking out that holybiscuittheboyIlovejustaskedmetomarryhimandIjustsaidyesohmygosh kind of way.
I laughed, unable to stop smiling even when I nudged his shoulder. “You thought I would say no?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, smiling sheepishly. I shook my head at him, rolling my eyes.
“You don’t know much, boy,” I told him, making him laugh as he pulled me closer, pressing his forehead against mine, his perfect blue eyes making my heart heat up in my chest, making me realize how much he really did love me. He smiled at me, and I felt like maybe I was the only girl in the world.
And then the silence was shattered.
“HE DID IT!” a voice with a southern accent that I knew well yelled from somewhere to our left, echoed immediately by a set of three different cheers. I let my head fall into Quinton’s shoulder to hide my face, mortified. “QUINTON AND TOMATOES’RE GETTIN’ MARRIED!”
“We heard,” Norma called back, laughing loudly. “Wooo!”
“Yeah, what she said,” Kline replied. “Woo!”
“Lena, I know you still love me somewhere in that cold, cold heart of yours,” Peter cried, “but I’ll accept it for now because I can beat him in Call of Duty. Real men don’t lose in COD.”
Quinton’s body was shaking with hysterical laughter and I knew I couldn’t hide my face forever, so I turned my head and looked at—water. My four best friends were standing on a boat in Boston Harbor holding signs and jumping up and down, rocking the boat as they cheered. Kline brandished a sign that said “TOLD YOU SO!” while Colonel went with the traditional “I OWN GUNS, LANCASTER”.
I burst out laughing, shaking my head at them. “You’re unbelievable,” I yelled out at them, turning back to Quinton. “Did you know they were there?”
“Of course I did,” he told me. “I needed the moral support. Turns out I choked even with it.”
I smiled at him widely and opened my mouth to tell him I loved him, but I was interrupted when Mathieu shot out from behind the nearest bush, blowing air through the loudest vuvuzela I had ever heard in my entire life. I jumped as Quinton flinched as his older brother started running around honking on the ungodly instrument, his free hand raised in triumph. This time it was Quinton’s turn to hide his face in shame, burying it in my hair as he groaned.
“Tell me when it’s over,” he groaned, sounding mortified. I couldn’t help it—I burst out laughing.
Mathieu ran up to us and threw his arms around us, vuvuzela and all. “Congrats, little bro! You got yourself a girl!”
“I’ve had a girl for a long time, dude,” Quinton told him, but Mathieu wasn’t much for listening when people talked.
“I remember back that one time when you were in third grade and you told mom that you didn’t like girls and she started to cry . . . And that time where I came home with one of my girlfriends and you asked her why she had boobs . . . And also—”
“One word, Mathieu,” Quinton said. “Bermuda.”
Mathieu cringed. “Okay, you win this round. I’ll tell Lena more embarrassing stories when you aren’t around to know that you’re secretly being mortified.”
“I look forward to it,” I told him, and then hugged him properly. “You know, she’s here,” I murmured into his ear.
“I’m not blind, Lena,” he said back, going to pull away, but I didn’t let go.
“Mathieu,” I sighed, “I know you still love her.”
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he insisted, trying to pull away with more force now, but I had his neck in a death grip, and he didn’t move back an inch. I clung as tightly as I could to him, sighing heavily as he started to squirm.
“She’ll take you back if you apologize,” I told him morosely. “But she’ll never forgive you if you continue to act like nothing happened.”
“L, I told her that I didn’t love her,” he replied, flinching. “I don’t know how to make that up to her.”
I pulled away, putting my hands on his shoulders and looking into his eyes, smiling. “Prove to her you still do,” I pointed out to him, but before I could even finish he was shaking his head sadly, smiling at me like I would never understand. And maybe I wouldn’t. I didn’t know.
“I know you mean well,” he told me, leaning down to kiss my cheek, “but she’s finally happy, L. I couldn’t do that for her—she was only happy when I was gone. I’ll let her walk away from me if it means that she’ll be happier without me.”
I chewed on my lip, and he smiled again.
“She’ll never know, though,” I whispered.
“And sometimes, the truth hurts more than anything,” he replied, and shrugged, smirking and going back to the normal Mathieu, pretending like nothing was going on when I could see the pieces of him broken in his eyes. But I bit my lip and didn’t say a word—I would let him pick up the broken pieces of his own life, no matter what it took. Sometimes, I just didn’t know what to say or do anymore.
Mathieu patted Quinton on the back. Hard. “Well, good luck, Quintonio. I wish you two the best.”
“Thanks, loser,” he replied to his brother, pulling me closer again, smiling radiantly now that the nervousness was gone. He beamed down at me, his eyes sparkling happily. “But I don’t think I’ll be needing that luck.”
“I could still dump your ass,” I reminded him, and he laughed.
“But you won’t,” he argued, and I knew he was right, so I just shrugged. He pulled me against his chest, leaning down and pressing his lips against my forehead. “I love you,” he told me sincerely, making my heartbeat pick up in my chest.
“I love you, Quinton,” I murmured back, smiling.
And with the sun disappearing behind the crowds, the end of another day, with my friends on a boat and with his brother holding a vuvuzela, Quinton dipped me back and kissed me like they did in the movies—telling me without words that this moment in time, this feeling in my heart and soul, that this was going to be our always.
And that’s what made it all perfect.