You Are the Shell to My Tortoise | ✓

65

Dating Nolan made me feel like we were in different time zones.

He was asleep for most of the time that I was awake, and my "good night" was his "good morning".

The only times we got to talk to each other was the short period in between classes, lunch period, and in the evenings when his 'day' finally started. In a way, it almost seemed like we spent more time together before he became my boyfriend, and I missed those days when he'd join our study sessions after school.

On the other hand, now that he was my boyfriend, his reticence had entirely dissolved into an open willingness to talk.

First, he came to lunch with me without having to be asked.

Second, instead of letting my friends carry the bulk of the conversations, he'd started contributing a lot more without having to be prompted.

Where he'd have previously stayed silent on subjects that didn't involve him, such as Melissa's and Derek's planned snowball fights, Nolan now chimed in with his own opinion without having to be addressed directly.

After putting in his two cents on the topic—which was that it sounded fun—Nolan had suddenly been invited to participate in the one they had organized for later that day with their other friends.

Instead of declining like I'd thought he would, he'd agreed to go and asked me to come along.

"If you go, I'll go," he'd said, and everyone had goggled at him.

I hadn't thought that he would ever want to join in on large group activities, let alone ones with tons of people who were strangers to him.

Granted, the aforementioned people were all in our grade, and he should therefore know them, but since this was Nolan we were talking about, he didn't bother remembering that he'd even met any of them.

The moment I'd agreed to go with him, Ashley had looked at me as if I had suddenly transformed into another person.

When I had tried to suggest that he go ahead without me, he'd shrugged and said that he didn't really need to go. I knew that he wanted to, though. He was still nowhere near as relaxed in my friends' presence as he was when we were alone, so it had to take a certain level of interest in the activity for him to want to take part in this.

Initially, I hadn't wanted to do it, but it was the first time Nolan had expressed genuine interest in any kind of group activity on his own accord.

If it meant that he would be comfortable enough to join in on a social activity for once, I was willing to tag along in a snowball fight—even if that meant that I had to spend the whole time being paranoid that we'd get caught by a teacher.

And that was how I, Chelsea Arnold, the rule-abiding good student who only ever got detention once in her entire life, ended up in my second detention for participating in an all-out snow fort defense war on school grounds.

I did feel a little better about it as I sat in the large school hall after school the next day, surrounded by my many fellow accomplices who were all assigned the same 1000-word reflection essay to be handed in at the end of detention.

The main thing that convinced me that my sacrifice was worth it, however, was how much Nolan seemed to be enjoying himself during the battle.

He had a look of utmost concentration on his face while he was helping to build the snow fort and packing snowballs. I'd never seen him like that before, and I loved it.

He shielded me a few times too, right before I was about to get hit by a snowball. My chest felt all warm and fuzzy as I watched him get all engrossed in the fight.