goodnight, stranger

seventeen

key

olly
ash
winnie
alayna

•••

As if Olly wasn't excited enough for Prom, now he had the additional anticipation for the moment he would get to kiss Ash. It wasn't exactly making the wait any easier. He felt like he was going crazy thinking about it; they'd been so close, and what if that happened again? Would Winnie and Alayna manage to screw it up for them?

Those weren't even his biggest concerns. What if Ash changed his mind? What if he'd been caught up in the moment while they were in the treehouse, but now that he'd had time to think it over, he didn't want it anymore? He'd been pondering these possibilities all week.

"Stop it," Winnie scolded him from across the room. He looked over at her. She was watching him, an eyebrow raised skeptically. She had only contoured half of her face, and her concealer and her contour stuck out of her face like paint. It looked pretty ridiculous. Olly would have laughed if he weren't so nervous.

"What?" he asked.

"That face you're making. That's your overthinking face." Olly had an overthinking face? "Stop it."

"I'm not overthinking anything," he muttered, huffing and turning back to the mirror he was standing in front of. The two of them were getting ready for Prom in Winnie's bedroom. Winnie was definitely feeling more confident than Olly. He didn't know how she did that.

Maybe confident wasn't the right word. It was more cocky than confident.

"I'm not overthinking things," she parroted him in a high voice, her nose crinkling up. "That's some stinky bullshit."

Olly rolled his eyes. "I'm not. It's just pre-dance jitters. Very normal."

She snorted, but she didn't press him any further. She just turned back to her mirror and continued her makeup routine, and Olly turned back to the full-body mirror in front of him, buttoning up the last few buttons on his baby blue shirt. He hesitated for a moment.

"Should I leave the top few buttons undone?" he asked Winnie carefully.

"No," she said monotonously, "you'll look like a player."

"I genuinely cannot tell if you're joking."

"Go for it." She turned back to him again, making eye contact with him in the mirror. "It'll make you look more disheveled." She nodded certainly. "And I don't know what Ash's type is, but disheveled men are about nine hundred times hotter to most of us."

"You literally have a girlfriend."

"My girlfriend and I literally talk about how hot other people are all day." She turned back around again.

"Winnie, really." He sighed desperately. "Do I unbutton them or not? I wanna impress him."

"You're way overthinking things," she said in a singsong voice. "Leave 'em buttoned for now. That way, later tonight, you can unbutton them when you start getting hot and it'll literally kill him, probably."

"I'd rather not literally kill him." Figuratively killing him? That was another story, but he wasn't gonna tell Winnie that.

They spent a while longer getting ready (i.e. Olly waited for half an hour longer while Winnie finished her makeup) and Olly left to let Winnie change into her dress. He spent more time than he was willing to admit messing with his hair.

Winnie practically shoved him out the door to get to the car so they could meet Alayna and Ash for photos. Olly sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window as his anxieties came creeping back up his throat, the main one being that he looked like an egg and Ash would most certainly not be looking like an egg.