23...

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23…

I was stuck in the middle of nowhere. I was cold. My feet hurt from walking through the woods and getting stabbed by those stupid tiny rocks that crack windshields. But Roy…Roy didn’t care about any of that.

            After the kiss, I checked his arm to see what I could do to stop the bleeding. But, somehow, like before, the wound was gone. The only evidence that it had been there at all was the dried blood that stained his undamaged skin.

            I wanted to know why it was gone. I wanted to know what had happened the first time too. But I didn’t ask. I had asked enough questions for one morning. And Roy, he barely acknowledged what had happened. He was too busy smiling.

            I couldn’t tell if it was being outside that made him keep grinning at me, or the fact that he wasn’t afraid of James popping out to punish him for being happy. Maybe it was the kiss.

            Did he even understand what it meant?

            Did I understand?

            He was running around like a puppy, hopping over the guardrails and then back into the road to walk along the yellow center lines. I didn’t want him to, because it was dangerous and there were sharp turns in front of and behind us that could hide oncoming cars. Not that we wouldn’t hear them coming, since it was utterly quiet. But still, it made me nervous to watch him walk in the middle of the road.

            “Most people typically hitchhike from the curb. Over here. Where I am.” I told him warily, glancing over my shoulder to check for cars. We hadn’t seen or heard a single vehicle since the truck earlier that morning. It should have worried me, but it didn’t. The longer it took to catch a ride, the longer we could be together.

            Roy stopped walking and shifted his gaze onto my face. I smiled at him.

            He smiled back.

            It was like a thing, now. Our thing.

If we could even have a thing after less than a week.

Were we a thing? Was there a we at all?

            I stopped walking to bite the edge of my thumbnail. Why was I thinking so hard about this now? It wasn’t the kiss. I had kissed a boy before. Once.

            He wasn’t as sweet as Roy, or as cute. And it was a dare.

            But that didn’t matter. Roy was still just a boy. Kissing him wasn’t what made me suddenly introspective—more so than I already was. It had to be something else.

            I quickly raised my gaze from the ground as Roy came to stand in front of me, his brown hair tossed across the left side of his forehead by the wind. His pale cheeks were tinged with pink by the cold but he still grinned as he mirrored my pose, biting the edge of his thumb just like I was.

            I raised my eyebrows.

            He raised his.

            “What are you doing?” I asked, perplexed.

            He giggled.

            He actually giggled.

            Who was I kidding? Roy was not just a boy. He would never be just anything. I didn’t bother wondering if that should have bothered me, because it didn’t. Roy was complicated. But his complexities made mine so much more manageable. Instead of feeling like a torn, twisted puzzle piece on top of a pile of tangled, disorganized puzzle pieces, I was the last one. The one that fits in the very middle of the intricate painting. Roy was all the pieces that made up the puzzle, and I was the one that completed the picture.

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