by Amanda Abram
“Our wedding, huh?” Dylan teased, giving me a wink. “I’m okay with that.”
I rolled my eyes and chuckled, happy it was dark enough inside the car that he couldn’t see how flushed my face suddenly was.
“Don’t worry; I was just joking,” he said, and then added, “Well, mostly.”
The heat in my cheeks intensified as I cleared my throat. “So, what are we having for dinner?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said as he began to drive.
When we walked through his front door a few minutes later, he took my jacket and motioned to the living room. “Have a seat. Make yourself at home. I’ll be right back.”
He disappeared into the kitchen and I made my way over to the couch. “I don’t smell anything cooking,” I called to him as I sat down.
“That’s because there’s nothing cooking,” he called back.
I glanced down at my watch. “It’s a little after six-thirty. Do we really have time to make and eat a lasagna?”
Dylan returned to the room and joined me on the couch. “Who said we were having lasagna?”
“No one. But a lasagna dinner is what you owe me, so that was kind of what I was expecting.”
“Wow.” Dylan grinned. “Someone is high maintenance.”
“Hey, I like lasagna. Sue me.”
“You know, it was your fault you didn’t get to try it that night anyway,” he said with a smirk. “If you hadn’t run out of the house prematurely, you could have had as much of it as you wanted.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “Well, if you hadn’t kissed me out of the blue, I wouldn’t have run out of the house prematurely.”
“It wasn’t out of the blue. That kiss was a long time coming.” His gaze lowered to my lips. “Was it worth it?”
“Was what worth it?”
“Was kissing me worth missing out on lasagna?”
I pretended to think about it for a moment. “I don’t remember.”
Dylan cocked an eyebrow. “You don’t remember, huh? Do you need me to refresh your memory?”
“Maybe,” I said with a grin. Instead of waiting for him to make the first move, I grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him toward me, pressing my lips against his.
He seemed surprised by my boldness but didn’t let that stop him from slipping his arms around my waist and kissing me back.
It was nice not having to worry about somebody interrupting us for once. There was no Nick. No Caitlyn. No Mom. No Elijah. It was just me and Dylan…alone in his house…alone on the couch…my fingers running through his hair, his tongue brushing lightly up against mine…the doorbell ringing…
Wait, what?
With a groan, Dylan pulled back and frowned. “I was hoping we were going to have more time than this.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked as he pushed up from the couch.
“Our dinner is here.”
He left the living room and opened the front door. He said a few indiscernible words to whoever was on the other side of it before coming back into the room holding a bag in his hand. I recognized it right away.
I pointed to it. “Is that—”
“Kung Pao Chicken,” he finished for me. “I figured this would be the next best thing to home-cooked lasagna.”
“You figured right!” I said, jumping up from the couch.
“Follow me,” he instructed.
He led me to the dining room, and I gasped as soon as I entered it.
The light above was turned down low, and there were three candles of different heights burning at the center of the table, surrounded by a bunch of loose rose petals that had been strewn about. The table had been set with two plates and two sets of silverware, there were two wine glasses with a bottle of sparkling cider next to them, and the napkins had been folded neatly to look like roses. It looked like a scene from a movie.
“Do you like it?” Dylan asked.
I nodded and grinned. “I love it.”
“Awesome. I wanted to try and recreate what a table would look like at a fancy restaurant.” He glanced down at the bag of Chinese food in his hand. “Which seems a little silly, now that I think about it. This would have worked a lot better with lasagna.”
“No, this is perfect.”
Beaming, Dylan pulled out a chair and motioned for me to take a seat.
“Thank you,” I said as I sat down. I picked up a petal that was lying next to my plate. “Oh, good, these are fake. I was worried you had slaughtered a bunch of roses for this.”
He gave me a curious look. “Since when do you care about roses?”
“Since you brought me one that night at the coffee shop.”
Dylan chuckled softly. “Man, that was so corny, wasn’t it?”
“Not at all. In fact, that might have been the moment I started realizing my feelings for you.”
“Really?”
“Mmhmm.”
He smiled to himself as he removed two containers from the bag and set them in the middle of the table. “Dig in.”
That’s exactly what we both did. For the next few minutes, we ate Kung Pao Chicken and fried rice while drinking sparkling cider and engaging in small talk. And when the containers were nearly empty, Dylan reached back into the bag and pulled out two fortune cookies.
“One for you, and one for me,” he said, placing one of them in front of me.
“Oh, my favorite part,” I said gleefully, tearing into the plastic wrapper.
Dylan watched as I broke the cookie apart and took out the fortune. As I saw the first two words of it, I frowned.
“True love is closer than you think,” I read aloud, rolling my eyes. “Seriously? Is that the only fortune that Chinese food restaurant’s cookies can give?”
Dylan laughed softly and then pointed to it. “Hey, it looks like there’s something else printed on the back.”
I flipped it over, expecting to just see a random Chinese word and some lucky numbers, but instead there was what looked like another fortune printed there.
Weird. I had heard of getting two different fortunes in one cookie, but I’d never heard of those two fortunes being printed on the same piece of paper.
“What does it say?” Dylan asked.
I looked down at it. “It says, Will you…” I began reading and then stopped as I realized what this was. “…go to Winter Formal with me?” I finally finished. When I glanced back up, Dylan was now standing next to me, holding a red rose—a real one—in his hand.
“I know it’s no guitar solo, or some grand production involving all my friends, but…Cass, will you go to Winter Formal with me?”
He barely got the entire question out before I was exclaiming, “Yes!” and jumping up out of my chair and throwing my arms around him. “I’ll go to Winter Formal with you!”
We stood there for a moment in a tight embrace before I finally pulled back a little. Holding up the fortune, I asked, “How did you do this?”
“I went to the restaurant and asked if they could make custom fortunes. They said they could, so I put in my order. It was pretty easy.”
“But amazing,” I breathed. “Dylan, this—all of this—” I motioned to the table, “is so sweet and perfect. How did I get so lucky?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “I’m the lucky one here, Cass. Trust me.”
We could have started arguing over who was the luckier one, but there were better ways to spend our time. Lifting myself up on my tiptoes, I kissed him. Fiercely, deeply, intensely. I dropped the fortune, he dropped the rose, and for a little while, we just enjoyed the moment. There were no worries between us; our minds were focused on one thing, and one thing only: each other.
In some ways, in the back of my mind, this almost felt like the calm before the storm. A moment so perfect and pure that you just knew something was going to ruin it.
But I ignored that nagging feeling. Because for the first time since Elijah cheated on me, I felt genuinely happy. And I wasn’t going to let
anything take that away from me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
“This is nice,” I said, nuzzling up against Dylan on the couch. I closed my eyes and smiled.
“It is,” he agreed, taking my hand in his and lacing his fingers through mine.
“I wish we could stay like this forever.”
“You mean holding hands on the couch in my living room?” he asked. “As much as I enjoy it, I think we’d get bored after a while.”
“Not a chance.” I leaned up and kissed him softly on the lips.
I expected him to kiss me back, but he didn’t. Instead, he pulled away from me.
I frowned. “Is something wrong?”
“No, nothing is wrong,” he replied, but his voice was tight, indicating otherwise.
I studied his face for a moment; there was no trace of a smile to be found. His eyes, which were normally bright and sparkly, were dark and lacking emotion. I gave his hand a squeeze, hoping he would squeeze it back, but instead he let my hand go.
It instantly felt cold in the absence of his.
“So,” I said, ignoring the uneasy feeling that was slowly creeping into my stomach, “are you ready for your Baker’s Dozen marathon date with Caitlyn?”
He didn’t answer; didn’t react to the question, as if he hadn’t even heard it. He just stared straight ahead.
“Dylan.” I waved my hand in front of his face.
Something wasn’t right. A few seconds ago, we had been enjoying each other’s company, enjoying each other’s embrace, and now suddenly, Dylan was acting distant and cold. He could say nothing was wrong, but he was lying.
“Dylan, tell me what’s wrong. Please.”
For a moment that felt like an eternity, he said nothing. But then he turned his head to look at me and said, “Things were so easy before.”
I stared at him blankly. “What things? Before what?”
“Everything. Everything was easy before you went and ruined it.”
My heart began to pound against my rib cage. “Dylan, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Don’t you?” He shifted so he was facing me. “After the night I kissed you and I told you that I wanted you, I knew it was a mistake. That’s why the next day, I suggested we just pretend it never happened.”
That was the moment my blood turned cold in my veins.
“You agreed to do that,” he continued. “Why didn’t you do that?”
I stared at him, speechless. “Dylan, I—I don’t—”
“You ruined everything.”
Shaking, I moved closer to the end of the couch, away from him. I had a feeling he didn’t want me sitting so close to him anymore.
“I didn’t mean to—” I managed to croak, even though I wasn’t even sure what he was talking about.
“I was going to move on, Cass. That’s why I asked Claire to my party. She wasn’t you, but she didn’t need to be. I could have asked her out. I could have been dating her right now, and everything would be fine. Everything would be the way it was before.”
A hard lump began to form in my throat. “Dylan, I don’t understand. You just asked me to Winter Formal, why are you—”
“Why did you have to tell me you had feelings for me?” he demanded. He stood from the couch and began pacing in front of me. “Why did you have to kiss me at my party? You should have let me stay with Claire. You should have gotten to know Chad. If you had, we wouldn’t be going through all this right now.”
“All this” was referring to Elijah. And he was right. If I hadn’t told him that night that I was jealous…if I hadn’t told him I wanted him, too…if I hadn’t kissed him…things would be like the way they were before. The way they had been the last ten months. Dylan and Elijah would still be best friends. Nobody would be angry. Nobody would be hurt.
He was right. I had ruined everything.
“Dylan.” I jumped up from the couch and grabbed his arm to stop him from pacing. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—I thought I was doing the right thing because this is what we both wanted—”
“I didn’t want to lose my best friend, Cass,” he said coldly, shrugging his arm from my grasp. “I didn’t want to lose all my friends.”
A small part of me felt angry because he had the nerve to be mad at me for all this when he was the one who started it in the first place. I could have lived a perfectly happy life never knowing he was in love with me. This was just as much his fault as it was mine.
But a larger part of me felt heartbroken and desperate to fix the situation. Desperate to calm Dylan down and remind him that everything was going to be okay in the end. After all, that’s what he’d assured me of himself last night.
“You said you weren’t worried,” I reminded him in a shaky voice.
“I lied, Cass. I am worried. I stand to lose everything because of this. Because of you.”
I felt as though I’d been slapped in the face. Tears stung my eyes and I began blinking furiously to make them go away.
“That’s not true,” I whispered.
“It is true, and you know it.” He took a step closer to me. “This is never going to work out between us. The longer I’m with you, the worse things are going to get. And the worse things get, the more likely it will be that I’ll end up resenting you.”
My breath hitched in my throat. “You’re going to resent me?”
Dylan sighed, raking a hand through his hair. “Deep down, I think I already do.”
And that was when my heart stopped beating altogether. When the tears began spilling down my cheeks—one after the other, like a faucet had been turned on inside me.
“No,” I strained to say, but I wasn’t even sure if the word had come out or not. It didn’t matter either way. Dylan wasn’t listening.
“I’m sorry. This has to end.” He took a step back. “Goodbye, Cass.”
“No, wait, don’t go,” I pleaded. I moved to follow him as he turned to leave, but my feet wouldn’t budge from their spot on the floor.
“Dylan, wait!” I pulled desperately at my legs, trying to pick my feet up so I could run after him, but I was stuck. Glued to the living room floor. Unable to go after him and beg him to stay with me. To give us a chance.
Giving up, I fell to my knees. I buried my face in my hands as I began sobbing uncontrollably.
“Dylan, come back,” I whimpered to nobody.
But he wasn’t coming back. And I only had myself to blame for that.
With a gasp, my eyes flew open and I sat up. Glancing around, all I could see was darkness, and all I could hear was the sound of my white noise machine humming next to my bed. My hands grabbed at the sheets beneath me and I sighed with relief.
I was in my bedroom, not Dylan’s living room. It had all just been a dream.
No. Not a dream. A nightmare.
I fell back onto my pillow and stared up at my pitch-black ceiling. I had never experienced a dream that had felt so real before. Usually, dreams had a habit of taking reality and twisting it into something that felt familiar but was almost unrecognizable. Like a few months back, I had a dream that was school-related, and it took place in a mall I’d never been to before. Despite the fact my chemistry class was in a Sephora, my brain didn’t question it. It just accepted that the store was the classroom, and in the dream, it had made perfect sense to me. When I woke up, not so much.
But what didn’t make sense about the dream I’d just woken up from was how realistic it was. Dylan’s living room looked exactly the way Dylan’s living room looked. His face, his hair, his clothes. Everything was spot-on. And the emotions. The tears. It all felt too real.
Trying to push the memory from my head, I closed my eyes tightly. As I did so, I felt a tear escape and trickle down the side of my cheek. No wonder the emotions in the dream had felt so real—I had been crying in my sleep.
I used my sleeve to dry my face of the tears and then turned onto my side, hugging my blankets close to me.
It was just a dr
eam, I tried assuring myself. It didn’t reflect reality. That’s not how Dylan really feels. It’s how YOU think he might feel deep down. Big difference!
However, those thoughts did very little to help ease my mind and I spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, trying to get back to sleep.
When I finally rolled out of bed the next morning, the first thing I did was text Dylan to tell him I didn’t need a ride to school. I told him Lauren had something important she wanted to discuss with me, so she would be giving me a ride.
I hated lying to him, but I couldn’t face him right away. Not while the dream was still fresh in my mind. For me, memories of dreams I’d had the night before would rapidly fade throughout the day.
I had a feeling I wasn’t going to be so lucky with this one.
After I was done describing the dream in vivid detail to Lauren on the way to school, she tried to be encouraging.
“It was just a dream,” she said. “I had a dream last weekend that I was auditioning for a Broadway play about an espresso machine. I was reading for one of the lead roles: a mug. Pretty weird, right? Except I’d had a lot of coffee to drink earlier that day, which is probably why my dream was coffee themed. Just like your dream was Dylan themed because of what went down the other night with Elijah. That’s perfectly normal.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” I said, resting my head against the window beside me.
“What, do you think you’re suddenly psychic, or something? That your dream is predicting the future?”
“I don’t know,” I mumbled. “All I know is that he seemed angry with me.”
“Dylan could never be angry with you.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s true. Besides, Laur, you were the one who warned me about this, remember? You were the one who said Dylan could end up resenting me someday if things with Elijah didn’t turn out well.”