by Cara Bastone
“Fin, none of them know about me.”
Ah. Now they were really getting to the heart of the matter. “None of them know about your mom, you mean.”
“I really, really don’t want to be a freak anymore. Not like I was in Columbus.”
Fin, who had a glass to the door of most people’s energy, happened to know that everybody was a freak in some way or another. But she didn’t think that was what Kylie really needed to hear right now. “You’re not a freak, Ky. Your mom kind of is, but you’re not.”
Kylie laughed, knowing Fin’s story about her own mother and not taking offense to Fin’s words. But the laughter dimmed quickly. “You know the worst part, Fin? That I don’t even know the story.”
“What story?”
“She left...to go do drugs? With a new boyfriend? Was she part of a cult? Did she just give up? Hate Columbus? Hate me? What was it? These kids at school find out that my mother abandoned me and that I hid it for all those months. Can you even imagine the stories they’d make up about it? And the worst part is that I couldn’t even deny them. Because I don’t know what actually happened.”
“Ky—”
“Mothers leave kids sometimes. That’s not that freaky. But do kids usually hide it from social services when they get abandoned? No. If they find out at school what I did... I’m the freak. No question. And I just...don’t want that. It’s been cool to be the boring new girl from the Midwest.”
“Kylie, little sister, please trust me when I say that you leave high school and you start to realize that you’re the only one who gets to decide what you are. Freak or not. It’s not up for debate with your peers. I know it’s excruciating to not know what the hell your mother was thinking, that you’re still waiting to understand. But just know that even if she wrote you a fifty-page letter explaining every last detail, the only thing that you can ever really know is your own story. Your own experiences, your own choices and reasons. You don’t have to explain why you did what you did to anyone but yourself. Tyler is here to help you with figuring it out. I’m here to help you with figuring it out. But you’re the only one who gets ownership over that story. Not gossips at school, not me or Ty, not even your mother.”
Kylie was quiet for a moment. “Maybe you’re right. But, God, this trip is still gonna be a disaster.”
“But just remember what I said, Ky. One friend. All you need at a time like this is one friend. Trust me. Via was my only friend for like a decade.”
Kylie took a deep breath. “Okay. Right. Kindle, headphones, one friend. I can do that, I think.”
“I can bring your bag over if you want. You need it for the morning?”
“Are you sure? I know it’s a pain in the ass, and it really is just a bag. There’s just a few books in there I was hoping to bring and my favorite lip balm and—”
“Ky.” Fin laughed. “I’ll bring it over in an hour or two.”
“You’re the literal best.”
Fin said goodbye, laughing and shaking her head. She finished Matty’s tincture and set it aside to cool, spritzed her herbs with water she’d infused with moss agate and went into her bedroom to choose a few crystals for Kylie.
She chose an amethyst necklace because you can never go wrong with amethyst. She also chose a blue agate ring for attracting friendships and a small green malachite key chain for confidence.
Getting dressed herself, Fin gave herself a single, smiling shake of her head when she caught sight of her flowy royal blue pants she’d paired with her emerald green turtleneck, turquoise scarf and rough-hewn garnet earrings and necklace. Her hair was loose down her back, wild and, yes, she could admit, a bit pirate-princess-ish. Could she have looked any more different from her date with Donovan? She didn’t think so. She was practically a different person standing there.
The garnet, which she’d chosen without too much thought, was a stone that sought balance. It was an energy cleanser. And with any luck, it would keep her thoughts from getting too muddied if Tyler was home.
Which he might not be. Apparently, Kylie had told her, Ty was trusting her to get home from school on her own a few times a week. Which occasionally meant that she had the house to herself for a few glorious hours here and there.
Fin wondered if Ty had started doing that because she had mentioned it.
She grabbed her red coat with the hood, Kylie’s bag and an umbrella on her way out. Half an hour later, she was resurfacing in Tyler’s neighborhood, pleasantly surprised that there were still long, thin lines of pink in the sky leftover from the sunset.
She watched until she had to admit to herself that she was stalling and then crossed the street with a wave to the Camry that slowed down to let her pass.
The doorman was on his break, so Fin went straight up to Tyler’s floor, knocking when she got there.
Tyler flung the door open, a crisp T-shirt over perfectly fitting jeans and a dish towel tossed over one shoulder. He held a carrot stick in one hand and obviously hadn’t been clued in that she was coming over because the curiosity on his face immediately gave way to genuine delight at seeing her standing there. “Fin! Hi! What’s up?”
She held up Kylie’s bag. “I’ve been summoned to drop the forgotten bag.”
“Oh my gawd,” Tyler said, sounding just like Kylie, his delighted expression melting to one of complete horror. “My sister called you and asked you to trek across town to drop off a backpack? Of which she has three? I could have come and gotten it. Jeez.” He shook his head in disgust. “Please, for eff’s sake, come in. Do you want a beer? I made dinner. Let me feed you. At least, for the love of all that’s holy, tell me you’re hungry and that I can feed you.”
Fin laughed and stepped into his apartment, setting Kylie’s bag down and holding her breath while Tyler helped her strip her coat off. “It’s not that big of a deal, Ty. Besides, when I agreed to bring the bag, I may have assumed that there’d be a free dinner at the end of the line.”
He turned back from adjusting her coat on the hook, a smile on his face, which fell the second he looked at her. “Wow. You look...” He cleared his throat. “You have a date tonight or something?”
“Oh. No.” Just dressed up to see you. Fin’s mouth opened and closed, having no idea what to say.
“Fin! You’re a lifesaver!” Kylie came bounding into the room, red hair flying, and saved Fin from having to come up with something—anything—to say.
“No problem.” Fin handed over the bag. “And I added some crystal jewelry to the little pocket in front that’ll help with the friends thing if you want to wear it.”
“Score,” Kylie said solemnly, and it warmed Fin’s heart to know how seriously Kylie took her work.
“Hey. Kid,” Tyler cut in. “Please don’t ask our friends to trek across town to bring you stuff.”
“She volunteered!” Kylie insisted, looking up from the jewelry she’d already dug out of the bag.
“Based on how much like a kicked puppy you sounded, I’m assuming?”
Kylie looked like she was going to argue for a second and then bobbed her head to one side, apparently conceding the point. “All right, fair enough. Fin, I’m sorry. I should have just sent Ty for the bag.”
He burst out laughing. “Not exactly what I meant, but good enough, I guess.”
“What’s for dinner?” Fin asked, not even caring that she was a hopeless mooch.
“Baked chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans and salad.”
“That explains the carrot.”
“What carrot?” Tyler looked down at the carrot he still clutched in his hand. “Oh. Right. I guess I should go put that in the salad.”
Fin watched him go and went to sit on Kylie’s bed and help her finish packing. At dinner, they talked about the school trip, about the soccer game they were all going to next week, about Fin’s birthday—
“Your
what?” Tyler demanded.
“My birthday,” Fin said calmly, a little mystified at the cloud of energy that had descended over Tyler’s head like thick, soupy weather.
“It was really fun,” Kylie cut in. “I didn’t mention it, Ty? Mary closed down the store early, and Via came over. It was just us.”
Tyler’s eyes snagged on Kylie’s face, and Fin hoped he could tell just how important it had been to Kylie to have been included in Fin’s birthday celebration. And though Fin usually didn’t celebrate, she’d had to admit that Mary had thrown her a really good party. It had been fun.
Some of his soupy energy abated just a bit, but she could tell that Tyler had feelings about said birthday.
After dinner, Kylie had homework, so she hugged Fin, thanked Tyler for dinner and disappeared back into her room. Fin rose and automatically started putting extra food in Tupperware, her standing at one counter and him kitty-corner. They were a foot apart, but she could feel him there. It wasn’t heat exactly. It was more like a static disturbance. Her energy was touching his energy. It was a prickling awareness that cat-walked itself up her spine. She used to feel this all the time. Tyler’s energy mixed with hers. Until the baseball game when she’d severed it like she was deadheading an errant daisy.
But right now? In the kitchen, a delicious tension between them, she was feeling it again, even with his back turned to hers.
Is it coming from me? Or from him? she wondered, her pulse racing backward as she tried to keep her breath steady. Was she the only one putting out vibes? She couldn’t tell. Not over the bongo of her own noisy heart.
“When was your birthday?” he asked, quasicasually. She felt him turn to her. “So that I don’t miss it again next year. Put some of that in a small Tupperware for Kylie on the bus tomorrow, please.”
Fin quietly, calmly, boxed up a lunch for Kylie and then turned to face Tyler, who was still facing her, carefully watching for a reaction.
“You’re mad I didn’t invite you to my birthday?”
“I’m not mad,” he said, his brow battening down in confusion. “I’m kind of hurt. I thought we were friends.”
“And birthdays are a measurement of friendship to you?”
“Well, hiding a birthday certainly says something about the level of friendship two people have.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “Believe it or not, but my issues with birthdays have nothing to do with you. I...don’t celebrate my birthday usually. Mary found out about the date and threw me a very small surprise shindig at the store. If you have issues with the guest list, take it up with Mary.”
She turned back to the Tupperware and realized she had no more food to put away. She started carting empty dishes to the sink, stepping around him and holding her breath. There were straight-up goose bumps on her forearms at this point.
“Why don’t you celebrate your birthday?”
Fin dunked the plates in the soapy water and reached for a sponge, sighing, knowing he wasn’t going to let this go.
“It lost meaning for me as a kid because I never celebrated with my mother.” Fin sighed again, knowing she was embarking on a sad, pathetic story and wishing she didn’t have to. “She didn’t know the exact date of my birthday. I was a home birth and it actually took a long time for her to report my existence to the state. By the time I actually had a birth certificate, she couldn’t remember the exact date I’d been born. But she thought it had been January and she knew I was an Aquarius. So, January 26th it was. Like I said. Celebrating just seemed arbitrary to me. Cue the violin. Preferably a tiny one.”
There was silence behind her. She waited for the sympathy. The requisite hug that she was going to have to grit her teeth through and pretend that his nearness didn’t melt her knee joints and his pity didn’t make her skin crawl.
But all that came was a firm squeeze to her shoulder. “That’s an awful story. Jeez. Terrible. But it’s also beside the point. Because at some point, you have to realize that birthdays aren’t about you, they’re about the people who love you getting to show you. But you know what? You’re a birthday novice. So, I’ll let it slide this year. Prepare yourself for next year, though. January 26th. Okay.”
She heard a scratching sound and turned in time to see him adding her birthday to the calendar that hung on the wall on the far side of the kitchen.
She blinked. An unexpected, stinging tension gathered at the top of her nose, spread to her eyes. He was adding her to his calendar. Making sure that he wouldn’t forget her birthday for next year. Because it was important to him that there was a day celebrating her.
She watched, his back turned to her, as he carefully wrote out her name.
She had the strangest feeling that even though he was writing her name, he was signing some sort of contract. In some grand, cosmic way, he wasn’t just jotting down a date to remember, he was signing Fin into his life. Her name, in bold blue ink, was a casual reminder to himself to celebrate her next year. She watched as their friendship went from a few shaky months of growth to suddenly, at least, lasting another year.
She realized, watching him cap the pen he hung on a neat string next to the calendar, that she’d been picturing their relationship as a hallway with a door at one end. She’d known, in her pessimistic heart, that that door was locked up tight. Once they got to that door, there’d be nowhere else to go for them. Relationship over. She’d thought they’d reached that door at the ball game last spring. But Kylie’s presence had somehow telescoped the hallway a bit farther. Fin and Tyler had kept walking. Fin had assumed they were going to reach the door again at some point.
But there Tyler was, writing her name into his calendar like locked doors didn’t exist. He wrote her name down in careful handwriting as if all he could see at the end of the hallway was light. Maybe a corner that led in a new direction. Maybe even a quiet, comfortable room where it could be just the two of them.
“Don’t you want to ask when my birthday is?” he asked as he turned, a smile on his face that slid off the moment he caught her expression. “Shit, are you crying?”
He strode toward her, his eyes wide, his hands suspended in the air like he was ready to catch her should she fall off into space.
“No,” she answered in a husky voice, thick with emotion. “I mean yes. Yes, I’m crying. No, I don’t know your exact birthday.” Her last few words were muffled by the shoulder and neck that were suddenly pressing against her face, her breath stolen by the arms that banded around her, yanking her into his chest.
Here was the hug that she thought she’d been dreading. But why would she ever have dreaded something as warmly sparkling as this? He had one palm cupping the back of her head, his other hand spread, fingers in a perfect star, against the middle of her back. She was buried against him, her brow pressed into his collarbone, halfway covered by the collar of his T-shirt. She felt stubble against her temple, and when his breath huffed into her ear, she knew that he’d bowed his head down.
She should have known that Tyler was not a back patter. She should have known that he hugged with his entire body. In fact, on an intuition, she moved her socked feet an inch to either side and encountered his socked feet. Even his feet were hugged up against hers.
The sting of her tears gone, her temple brushed his cheek. “I don’t know your birthday,” she whispered. “But you’re obviously a Gemini.”
He laughed, and she felt it in his chest. A rumble of vibration and sound and heat that, for a moment, pressed them together even more intimately. She liked the way his sound felt against her. Coming from deep inside him, rumbling through her. She wanted more of it. She wanted him to speak while he held her so tightly.
“June 12th,” he said, and she got her wish. She felt the rumble of his voice. Was it her imagination or were his arms even tighter around her?
Her arms were still pinned between them, and she didn’t want them the
re. She started to move them and he loosened his hold against her. He thought she was breaking the hug and the idea panicked her. Quickly, she slid her arms out from between them and around his back, gripping her own wrists as she held him just as tightly as he’d been holding her. Instantly, his release on the hug was ruthlessly eliminated and she was back to being embraced fiercely, her front pressed to his.
“How’d you guess that? My sign?” he asked.
This time, she wanted to see his face. As long as they weren’t looking at one another they could kind of pretend that this hug wasn’t happening. So, she tilted her head all the way back and he lifted his an inch or two.
This, she knew, was the kind of embrace that balanced on that skinny bridge she’d been walking for so long with him. This was not how friends embraced. But that didn’t make them lovers either, just because they were breathing each other’s air and gripping the shirts on one another’s backs.
Mostly because she knew, without a doubt, that she’d warned him away so well in the past that he had no confidence on whether or not she was actually inviting him back in, even when they were heartbeat to heartbeat, her toes gently laid over his. She knew what she had to do.
“I know you’re a Gemini because you’re curious. Adaptable.”
She felt his energy change. It was subtle. Where it had been skating around in confusion, now it just sort of slowed, like the motion of a cloud swirling lazily across the sky.
“Affectionate,” she continued, listing his characteristics that absolutely slayed her the most. And now his energy slowed and swirled even more. She felt those goose bumps again. Whether he knew it or not, he was tangling himself with her, allowing some part of himself to get lost in her.
“Gentle,” she whispered. “Generous.” Her eyes dropped down, unable to keep from looking at his mouth. “Passionate.”
When she lifted her eyes to his navy blues again, she felt his energy shift completely. Irrevocably. Moving as one, they eliminated all but an inch of space between their mouths, and she was overwhelmed by his energy, the delicious mixing of the two of them together.