Written with Love

Chocolate

Sasha and I walk arm-in-arm up to the movie theatre entrance. The air is cold, and I shiver as a gust cuts its way under my coat, leaving frigid fingerprints against the inch of exposed skin at my waist. At least I'm wearing a coat this time, and I smile, softly, as thoughts of Noah surface. Sitting across from him at lunch, those forearms and the intense way he looked at me, eyes bright and blue and searching. 

He made me laugh with stories of growing up as an oldest sibling, of writing, of the kitten he'd found on his walk home from school once in 8th grade and spent weeks nursing back to health. Camping with his Dad, the first story he ever published, how he never really understood the hype around Halloween. 

"Especially as a grown-ish person." He'd said, with a wry smile. "The magic of it was always staying up past your bedtime. What's the fun if we're out of bedtimes?"

"Being someone else for a night? Scaring the shit out of your friends?" 

But he only shook his head and leaned in across the table. He looked at me like the weight of the world hung on my understanding of his next words. 

"Why would I want to be anyone else?" 

And I believed him. Each new story and smile and detail about the 21 years of life he'd lived up until then, of the person he was and how he'd gotten there and who he wanted to be, felt like a fraction of the larger picture. Felt like dipping my toe into the lake of his life, when all I wanted to do was swim to the bottom and live there for a while. Like one of those wildlife photographers who sit quietly in coral reefs and wait for schools of iridescent fish to flash by above them. 

An hour passed before I checked the time on my phone, smiled apologetically and said I had plans with my roommate. He didn't ask for my number again. If he had, I probably would've given it. If he'd asked to kiss me, I probably would've let him. Would've melted into his touch, letting my eyes flutter closed at how good it felt to have him pressed against me -- the weight of his fingers against my waist, the scrape of his voice against the soft shell of my ear. Would've, being the operative word there. 

I shake myself out of the daydreaming as Sasha pulls the door of the theatre open, dropping her fingers from my arm. I shiver at the loss of contact. 

"He said they'd meet us in here." She says, scanning the small entrance area. It's a vintage feeling theatre, with worn green wallpaper and plush red-velvet upholstery. Gold crown molding lines the ceiling, giving the whole space a sort of old glamour, "celebrities used to come here" vibe. I feel my lips curl at the word vibe and wish Noah were here so I could watch his face twitch. For purely selfish reasons. 

"They? Like it's not just Jack?" Jack, her partner in film class, and the whole reason I wasn't at home right now, doing something about the heat that pooled low in my stomach every time I thought of Noah, Noah's hands and his eyes and voice, and the teasing twist of his smile. 

"He said he was bringing his roommates, I think. And maybe his sister?" 

"His sister? That's...strange."

"Yeah. But who knows? Maybe they're like, really good friends." 

"Maybe it's not incestuous at all." 

"Exactly." She grins at me, and I smile at the line of sparkly pink barrettes at her hairline. When Sasha first barged into our freshman dorm room, bedazzled suitcase in hand and red curls flying, I had little hope for our friendship. She was, is, the most genuine person I've ever met, but I knew, by then, that those kinds of people -- the ones that wear bedazzled hair clips and laugh loud and often, who seem to dance through life to music the rest of us can't hear -- quickly get bored with the me's of the world. When they realize the quiet and the awkward aren't just coats I'll eventually shrug off to reveal someone funny and cool and interesting.