Page 18 of All That History
It was like a cold nausea, descending over me.Horror and guilt, blended with a good-sized shot of regret.Flynn might not be my favorite person in the world, but it didn’t make it right for me to out him.Even if it was to an audience I knew wouldn’t be judgmental.
“Forget it,” I told them.
Catherine’s eyebrow was up, though, and I knew what that meant.“Did he tell you?Or...”
It was the sort of ellipsis you can hear, and I didn’t want to know what was coming at the end of it.“Just stop, okay?”
They both sat back, sharing a glance.
“Did you and him...y’know...”
At any other time, Kyle’s coyness would’ve been amusing.
“No!”
My vehemence prompted another glance.
“Look,” I said, trying to keep my voice level, and not sound as if I was about to have a small panic attack at the direction the evening had gone.“It’s no big deal.We talked, very briefly, when he and his parents stopped by a few nights back.”
“Just talked.”Catherine sounded skeptical.
“Yes, just talked,” I repeated.“But, look, you can’t...I mean, you can’t tell Flynn that I told you...”
“Told them what?”
I froze.Mouth still open, but the words no longer coming.In fact, it felt very much as though my lungs had ceased operations, too, along with my heart.Just leaving my brain, doing kill-me-now backflips in my skull.
“Oh...hey, Flynn.”Kyle somehow managed to make three words sound suspicious.
“Hey,” Flynn echoed.“Happy holidays.What did he tell you?”
My friends were reasonable clever, capably cunning young people, arguably in the prime of their lives.Or, at least, I’d thought they were.The fact that they apparently couldn’t come up with a convincing lie between them was making me rethink that assumption.
“Your shirt,” I blurted out.“I mean...that you bought it from the thrift.That shirt.”
Flynn glanced down at the black polo, then up at me again.He seemed confused.
“Oh.I mean, yeah?”
“All your outfits are so fancy,” I pointed out.“I thought you might be self-conscious, if people knew that was...y’know...second-hand.”
He frowned.“You said it looked good on me?”
Had I?Like a lot of my interactions with him this past week, I’d done a surprisingly good job of wiping the details from my brain.If only to spare myself the sort of lingering embarrassment that gets you a reputation for randomly wincing.
“Oh, it does, it totally does.”
I was over-egging it, I knew.Didn’t need Catherine and Kyle’s conspiratorial shared look to tell me that.But there was a difference between knowing something and being able to stop it, not to mention the fact that - left to my idiotic friends - we’d all still be here in mortified silence, mouths gaping like goldfish.
“Maybe I should just donate it back,” Flynn suggested.From his slight smile, I figured he’d decided this was all a joke.
“Make sure to wash it first,” I pointed out.
“Oh, you mean I shouldn’t just give it to you now?”He grabbed the hem, lifting it as though to strip the polo off.
I made a mental note to tell Catherine, later, that I’d seen the way her eyes instantly shot to the brief glimpse of abs.
“You’ll get kicked out if you’re half naked,” I said.“This place has standards.”
