Page 16 of The Time It Takes
The one thing I never liked doing with Ollie was talking about all the girls he’s been with. I also didn’t like when girls came up to me at school to see if he’d give them his number or if he would want to hang out with them sometime. I wasn’t his keeper by any means, but I understood. We’d been attached at the hip since we were kids. We were basically a package deal.
I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me a tad jealous. It was only confusing because I didn’t always know in what ways I was jealous.
Was it because I was a selfish, stingy friend or because deep down I had always wanted to be more than that?
I was as inexperienced as it got. I chalked it up to everyone that I didn’t care to discuss his hookups because it was indecent instead of admitting that I had nothing to reciprocate it with, but lately, I was starting to question myself.
He tapped my shoulder with two knuckles, catching my attention. When my eyes met his, he seemed to hesitate about something. The wind pushed a piece of hair across my face, and I was silently pleading him to push it behind my ear. His green eyes fell on it, and I was thinking,yes. You know you want to. I know you know that I won’t mind if you do.His posture went rigid as if reading my thoughts, and I wondered if I was reading him wrong or if the thought also occurred to him but frightened him somehow.
He cleared his throat and looked away. “You could have waited. I thought we were all going surfing in the morning. The waves should still be huge.”
“Phoebe and I are teaching a class, so we can’t.” I didn’t bother hiding the disappointment in my voice.
“It’s not safe out there by yourself when it gets like that.”
I didn't usually rush out there without him, but I could get impulsive sometimes.
“I know, I’m sorry.”
He studied my face for a while as if he was waiting for me to make a stupid remark. For that reason, I decided to stick to the apology. I knew what I did was stupid and reckless. Especially with what happened to my father. From the way his gaze was fixed on me, he might have been trying to figure out what exactly I was sorry for. Going out there alone or not inviting him to go with me?
He reached up and gently tugged on a strand of my hair. “Come get me next time if I don’t answer my phone.” I didn’t miss the way his hand lingered there before he brought it back to his lap. He put out the joint and set it against the pillar so that it didn’t blow away.
I lifted myself onto the rail, stretching out my legs in front of me, and leaned my back against the pillar opposite to him, locking my eyes with his.
“Promise.” I extended my pinky toward him.
He grinned as he looped his pinky around mine. “And what do you promise, Willow?”
I hate that I love how my name sounds whenever it rolls off his tongue.
“I promise that you will be the first person I run to when I feel like putting myself in a dangerous situation. A situation I had total control of by the way if you were wondering.” He laughed at that before letting me have my pinky back. He knew I was equally as cautious as I was careless.
“You’re a good mixture of both madness and order. Both equally as entertaining to witness when it comes to you,”he’d once said when I’d mastered a skill on the water on my first try.
Pinky promises were sacred to us.
It was something we had always done since we were kids. It was one of those little things we never grew out of. It somehow stuck with us as time passed. It seemed stupid to some people, but it became more than silly promises to us the older we got. It all started when Ben cut one of my pigtails off when I was four—which was the reason why I was beyond terrified to have someone get close to my neck with a pair of scissors. After that happened, I made him pinky promise to sneak me ice cream without our parents knowing whenever I asked him to. If that were to happen now, I wasn’t so sure ice cream would fix it, but when you’re a kid, sugar fixed everything.
I also had to pinky promise Ben that I wouldn’t tell our mother about him failing his Spanish exam if he did all the dishes and my laundry for three months. We sort of sucked Oliver into it when we all decided to make a pact. It was also used for truces. It meant sticking together through everything and anything. It was also used in derisory situations—like now—but it was very precious to us when used in more meaningful circumstances.
For a while, Oliver and I sat in complete solitude. I watched him watch the stars and I couldn’t look away. I couldn’t help but think that out of all the humans, this one was my favorite. Before I started to think about him so hard that I fell off the edge and said something so incredibly stupid, I thought of something my father used to tell me before he passed away.
“Do you think the entire future exists in the stars?” My voice was merely a whisper but it dragged his eyes to mine and suddenly I wished I hadn’t spoken at all so I could keep staring at him while he remained oblivious. His eyes were so brilliantly bright despite the night enclosed around us and in that very second in time and space, I swear every single star existed just to be admired by him.
“You tell me,” he said with such swiftness that I wondered if he was blind to what the universe did just to get his attention.
Dragging myself away from my thoughts, I hopped onto my feet and went inside to grab a blanket. When I returned, I extended my hand to him, and he hesitantly looked at it before placing his palm in mine. He followed my lead, letting me pull him behind me.
“Where are we going?” he asked eventually as our feet hit the sand.
“We’re stargazing,” I told him confidently. His calluses scraped my own and he felt so warm against the chill of the night that it made my stomach flutter.
Once we were closer to the water I stopped and made him help me lay the blanket out evenly. The air was cooler down here and I took a deep breath in before plopping down onto the blanket. I gestured at the open spot next to me. “On your back soldier,” I ordered him in a deep voice.
He laughed. “You’re so weird.”
I smiled. “Yes.” I patted the spot next to me once more.
