Check, Please (Book #2)

Fourteen.

Although I didn't dare jinxing it by admitting it often, recently things with Gemma had been going... Honestly, pretty well. Our relationship--or whatever she wanted to call it--was doing better than it had in a very long time and I was damn near giddy to say the least.

For the first time since freshmen year, neither of us had anything to complain about, which made me think that she'd been right: removing a label from what we had somehow made us work. Still, I didn't hide the fact that I would've preferred to be her boyfriend in name and in practice, though she continually rejected my attempts to make things any more serious. She kept saying that she didn't want to deal with any drama and I couldn't find a good way to argue with that. No matter how many times I promised her that things would be different if she gave me another shot, she would simply shake her head and tell me not to go there.

As great as things were in general, it would've been a lie to say that our arrangement wasn't confusing at times, especially when Gemma rested her head on my chest while we lay in bed and told me that she loved me. She refused to let me say it back, though, which I accepted even if I didn't fully understand her reasoning. Our arrangement came with a lot of rules like that--rules that Gemma said we needed to follow if I wanted to continue hooking up with her. Sometimes I wondered if she'd really end it if I ignored her instructions but, frankly, I was too scared to find out.

Oddly enough, the person I turned to most about my uncertainty and relationship concerns was, of all people, Melanie. I'd fallen into a routine of always walking her home after we met for tutoring and in that twenty minute journey, we never failed to find a way to talk about everything under the sun. We'd become fast friends--much faster than I'd ever expected--and I truly enjoyed the time we spent together, even if most of it was inside of a library. Being around her somehow put me at ease and occasionally I caught myself confiding stories that I hadn't meant to share, things that I would've been embarrassed to tell anyone else. I couldn't figure out how she did it but if Melanie had asked me to tell her my deepest, darkest secrets, I probably would've spilled them all without a moment of hesitation.

Of course, I didn't notice it at the time but if I'd been a little less selfish, I would've realized that our conversations were painfully one-sided. By the first week of October, Melanie knew most of my life story, whereas I hadn't even made it through the prologue of hers. 

Nevertheless, as the days went by, the temperature slowly began to drop from the sweltering triple-digit days that had sapped the life from the city in August. Over the years, I'd come to learn that fall evenings in California required a jacket regardless of how warm it had been during the day, and I slowly began remembering to stuff a sweater into my backpack whenever I left the house. When it wasn't too brisk, Melanie and I would sometimes stand outside of her apartment for over an hour while she listened to me babble, nodding and sighing at all of the appropriate moments. She never offered for me to come inside and I never asked. Instead, I was happy to sit on the steps that led to her front door while she gave me advice.

"It almost sounds like she wants you to completely start over," Melanie said one day. As I turned to look at her, the floodlight that illuminated the concrete stairs flickered, giving her face an unnatural glow.

"What do you mean?" I asked, tugging at the laces on my sneakers. I watched the toes of Melanie's floral-patterned combat boots tap together. She pulled her black leather jacket closed and folded her arms across her chest.

"From everything you've told me, it seems like she wants to date you but not until you've worked out all of your old problems." When I didn't say anything, Melanie went on, "Maybe you should try doing something to really show her that you're ready to give her what she needs in a relationship."