A Season of Firsts

Chapter 29 - New Beginnings

Before December 31st

DANIEL

Cleo and I walk across the snowy park on a chilly Thursday, the day school ends, wrapped up in layers of winter wear and leaving footprints behind us. I smile at how much bigger mine are than her own tiny dents in the blanket of white.

"It's so nice to be with you again," she says, slipping her hand into mine and leaning against my shoulder.

My heart starts racing. I could try and tell myself that I was over Cleo the day she broke my heart, but it would be a laughable lie. I never stopped feeling this way for her.

I look down. She's using the hand that she hurt that night of the police station. I'm glad it's healed now.

"I feel the same way," I tell her.

She lifts her head and looks me in the eye. "Daniel, I..." she lets her sentence drift away in the cold air, and stops walking to face me fully.

"Yes?" I don't like how my hopes are shooting sky high, but recently I've been finding that it's better to hope some and be disappointed than to have no hope at all. Hope is a kind of fuel, it keeps us going.

"I wanted to say I'm sorry. For all I said a year ago," she eventually finishes.

I think back to that day I finally had the courage to tell her I liked her.

"Cleo!" I had been with her in this very park, and had been speaking very loudly to try and get her to concentrate on something other than the sketch she was drawing of me.

"Yes, Danny Niel." She'd always thought it was the funniest thing to put her two nicknames for me together. "Can't you see I'm trying to get your nose right?"

"I don't really care," I had said. "I have to tell you something."

She had heard me out. Cleo had always been a good listener. And afterwards she told me she could never return the feelings I had for her, that she only wanted to be friends.
I remember scrunching up her half-finished drawing of me and throwing it down to the ground. I remember running all the way home.

And now here she stands, in front of me. Will she say the words I've been wanting to hear all this time?

Slowly, she retrieves something from her pocket. A piece of folded up paper. She hands it to me and I open it up. It's the drawing of me.
She finished it and she kept it. It looks so much like me that I'm slightly taken aback.

"Cleo," I breathe. "You kept it?"

She nods. "I wanted to have it as a reminder of the boy...the boy that I love."

Did she just say love? "You mean, as a friend, right?"

She shakes her head, and then nods it again. "Well, yes. But more, too," she smiles at me shyly. "Daniel, I don't really know what I was thinking or how I felt back then. Not anymore. But I know what I feel now. And I'm sorry. For confusing you, for letting you down, for not being there when you needed me. That's why I brought you here, to the place where you spoke your heart. It's me doing that this time. I was wondering...could we start over?"

I look down at her, so many feelings swirling around inside of me that I can't think straight. Only one thought materializes.
She has feelings for me.
More than just the kind of feelings you have for a friend. I can see it in her intensely green eyes.
My Cleo. That's what I want her to be. Mine.

"Yes," I say. "A thousand times yes."

I want to kiss her now. But she's young, and I'm young, and it might be too soon. It's okay, though, because I'm willing to wait.
So instead I wrap her up in my arms, feeling the tickle of her warm breath on my neck, before lifting her up higher, so that she's dangling above me. She giggles as she looks down at me.