Page 32 of Shut Up and Drive
“First of all, I had no idea you were coming, remember? And second of all, you’re hardly an ex.”
“Oh, really?”
“Yes, really. We were young and naïve.”
“Have you fallen in love since then?”
I hesitate. “No.”
“Then I’m your ex.”
“It was barely a month long. And what makes you think I was in love with you?”
“Just a hunch,” he says with a shrug.
“Well, your hunch was way off. That whole thing was such a small blip in our lives that I’m pretty sure that to this day, no one else in our families ever found out about it.Youprobably don’t even remember much about it.”
A montage of memories rushes through my mind as the words escape my mouth. He wasn’t just a blip; he was everything to me. And that summer, for one amazing month, I got to stop pretending he was just my brother’s best friend. He wasmine.My heart. My dream. My future. I got to know what his body felt like when I hugged him. I learned the sound of his heartbeat through his T-shirt. His woodsy, Thane-scent became my favorite smell, and I’ve never been able to forget it. Then there was how warm and safe I felt when he pulled me close and kissed the top of my head because I was so much shorter than him. I’m not sure if he ever knew that I loved him, but Idid.It wasn’t just a childhood-crush kind of love, but the kind of love that grew slowly over time through awkward phases and braces. The kind of love that pulsed through every vein in my body and brought excitement to my life. The kind of love that, no matter how hard I tried to push it away and ignore it, still entwined my heart.
After Thane kissed me, my black-and-white world exploded with color, which is exactly why it killed me when he left. I had given him my whole heart, and in return he disappeared into the night without even saying goodbye—taking all that color with him.
Moving on like I was unaffected after that toreme to shreds. No one knew how I ached for his soft whisper over the fence in the backyard, or his pinky grasping mine in a dark movie theater just so we could touch. How the butterflies in my stomach became such a fixture to me that when Thane ran off, they died, leaving me empty and hollow. I carried that void for years, and never really healed from it. I just taped over the wounds and pretended they weren’t killing me.
“What makes you think I don’t remember?”
“You’ve lived a thousand lives since our little crush.”
“’Little crush’? Why do you minimize it like that?”
“Because that’s all it was, wasn’t it? I didn’t tell a soul, and I assume you didn’t either.”
“That’s a big assumption.”
“Well, Bash probably would’ve beat the crap out of you if he knew you’d been kissing his little sister, and you ran off so fast after the accident you didn’t have much time to tell anyone else.”
His eyes drop shamefully for a second, and I know I’ve struck a nerve. But which one? The running off, or the betraying his best friend?
“You regret us,” I say, my throat drying up like an Arizona desert. I almost don’t want to hear his answer, because if he agrees with me, it’ll tear my heart in two all over again.
Would it be worse to hear he disagrees?
“Not for a second,” he replies. “Do you?”
I copy his words, because to come up with my own will expose my wounds too much. “Not for a second,” I say with a shaky voice.
“Good to know,” he says softly. “We may have drifted apart, but we’ll always have Operation Bisquick.”
The mere mention of our secret code name stops my heart and sets my body on fire.
“You remember?”
“I could live a thousand lives and I’dstillnever forget.” He smiles over at me, zapping my heart into rhythm again.
Chapter 12
OPERATION BISQUICK
Sera: Five Years Ago
