I brush her apology away. “It was an accident.”
“Not that.” She ticks her head to the side. “Not just for that. I’m sorry for being bratty just now. It’s kind of a bad habit with you.”
“I know what you mean.” It doesn’t say much about me that I’ve fallen back on behaviors I’d honed when I was sixteen.
“It’s nice of you to think about my safety.”
I’m thinking about a lot more than just her safety, but if I’m aiming fornice, this isn’t the time to tell her.
“And—” she says, slipping past me, “it’s nice of you to think about my empty stomach.”
She pulls another donut from the box, a double chocolate this time.
“Even elves get snack breaks.”
She groans. “Why are sweet treats so tasty?”
I breathe a laugh, unable to look away from her enjoying the donut. “I wish I’d known you were like this back in high school.”
Her eyebrows furrow. “Like what?”
“You jam out to Van Halen. Whisper sweet nothings to donuts. You’re…” I want to sayrelaxedbut I’m trying to be nice here, and that would go too far the opposite direction.
“You didn’t know me very well back then.”
“I’m thinking now that was a mistake.”
She watches me for a second like she’s trying to decode something in my comment. She can take it however she wants to hear it.
“You couldn’t stand me.”
It’s not quite a question, and the vulnerability in her soft voice stops me from tossing the same remark right back at her.
“Nope. I liked getting under your skin, because you were sure under mine.”
She tilts her head at me like she’s looking for traps. I hate that I’ve made her doubt everything I say. I want to think I’ve put my high school mistakes behind me, but they’ve got a long tail. Seconds pass, and my neck gets hot and itchy while I wait. When she finally smiles, all the tightness inside me loosens.
“We were pretty different. I was busy running for class president. You were busy throwing epic parties in the canyon.”
“Why didn’t you ever come to any of those parties?” I might have instigated them, but they took on a life of their own. Almost everyone in our class had showed up at least once. Right now, Hope’s absence feels like a glaring omission, and I wonder what it would have been like if she’d ever joined in. We might have argued over the best way to start a campfire, but it wouldn’t have been boring.
Her sharp laugh punctures the air. “My mother would have grounded me until college if I’d gone to one of those parties.”
“They weren’t that bad.”
She shoots me a look that says she knows that’s total BS.
“Most of them weren’t that bad,” I amend. Nothing she doesn’t know already will make them sound better, but they weren’t all wild. “Sometimes they were actually relaxing.”
“A relaxing bonfire?”
“Sure. There’s something about sitting under the stars when there’s no other sound but the fire crackling, just you and the woods. It’s peaceful. A good place to go when I need an escape.”
Once again, I’ve confided too much. Maybe starting the day with sugar was a bad idea for everybody.
“I’ll have to try it sometime.”
“You should.”
