Page 86 of Wildfire
Lifting me onto the tailgate, he leans in and kisses me again. Slow, gentle, perfect. “I haven’t been on a first date before, either.”
I’m stunned into silence as Russ helps me shuffle back to get comfortable on the makeshift bed, handing me a thermos labeled hot chocolate and a bag of popcorn. He positions the projector on top of the truck, pointing it at the side wall of the creepy house, and that’s when it hits me how much effort he’s put into this.
I’m not a crier, but this man might just make my eyes water a little. He throws another blanket on top of me and finally sits down, getting under the covers, too. “Comfortable? Warm enough?” he asks.
“Everything is perfect.” The wall turns blue as the Disney castle appears, followed by the Pixar lamp, and as soon as Gusteau’s restaurant appears on the tiny television, my heart just about explodes. He’s thought of everything. “Ratatouille!Russ, you’re perfect. Like dream-guy perfect. You’re too good to be real.”
My honesty catches him off guard, and beneath the glow of the moon, I watch all the emotions run across his face. I’ve always known I need validation like I need air and, although I don’t think he’s exactly the same, we are very similar.
People have made us feel like we’re less than we are, and those opinions are buried deep in us both, like weeds. Every drop of self-doubt waters the soil, and once they start to grow it feels impossibleto stop. But it isn’t impossible, it just takes someone to rip them out by the root, over and over if needed.
We’re so different, and yet so similar, and part of me is starting to believe that’s the perfect mix.
He reaches toward me, brushing a strand of hair from my face. “Tell me a secret.”
“I don’t want to go back to reality next month. I want to stay here with you and the dogs and throw our cell phones into the fire.” He laughs quietly, his hand massaging the back of my neck while I ramble. “I’ll open my bookstore and you can open your bowling store or build robots or whatever engineers do—they can protect us from the possums and the wolves, I guess. But you’ll choose me and I’ll choose you and we’ll be happy without anyone else ruining it.”
“You are the brightest thing in my life, Aurora,” he says. “And you’re a living reminder of the good things that can happen when I allow myself to be happy.”
Part of me wonders if I’d let someone in before now, could I have avoided a lot of the unhappiness I’ve dealt with, but I think the answer is no. I’d have still been doing the same reckless things as before, bouncing from one emotional overload to the next, desperately seeking something more. I’d never have made someone happy, and chances are that after the initial buzz of their attention wore off, I’d be lost again.
Russ makes me feel content, the one thing I didn’t realize I needed.
We shuffle closer, sinking deeper into the blankets, facing each other, totally ignoring the cartoon rat being projected onto the wall. “You tell me a secret,” I whisper.
“It’s not a secret because a lot of people know about it, but can I tell you about something bad that happened to me? Something I really hate talking about?”
“Of course.” I’m patient while he awkwardly chews the inside of his cheek, clearly delaying things. His leg slips between mine, his hand rests on the curve of my waist and, just when I think he’s about to start talking, he leans in and kisses me instead. Breaking us apart, I rest my forehead against his. “I’m still going to be here to kiss you when you’re done sharing,” I say softly.
“Did you hear about the hockey rink getting trashed at the start of the year?”
“I think so, maybe? Didn’t you guys have to share the other rink or something?”
“Yeah. Well, it was my fault.”
My jaw almost unhinges. “You trashed a hockey rink?”
“No! Of course not. I, um, I met this girl, Leah, at a party, and she was nice to me. I’d gone with some guys I lived with. Leah kissed me, we messed around a bit, not all the way.”
Someone tell me why I’m jealous. “Then every party I went to, Leah was there and we ended up hooking up a few times. I liked her and I thought maybe, just maybe, sophomore year wouldn’t be trash and I could have some happiness. Next thing I know I’ve got her boyfriend in my DMs threatening me. They’d been fighting or whatever, she’d been using me to get back at him.”
“I’m so sorry she did that to you.”
“Oh, it gets so much worse.” He laughs, but it’s humorless. “This thing between her and her boyfriend was super toxic, one of those relationships everyone loves to hate. So when she found out she was pregnant, she told her older brother, who’s a hockey player at UCLA, that she’d been ghosted. I’d blocked her when I found out about the boyfriend. She wouldn’t give them my name, just that it was someone on my team, thinking that’d be the end of it. But it wasn’t. They trashed the rink.”
“Oh, Russ.”
“I wanted to drop out because of it, I was so embarrassed. If Natehadn’t held my hand through it, I would have. It was bad enough when I thought the rink had been trashed because of her boyfriend, but this was so, so much worse. Everyone was talking about it; I had to go to meetings about it until it was proven I hadn’t done anything. It was a fucking mess.”
“You have no reason to feel embarrassed! You’re the victim in all of this. You didn’t do anything other than hook up with a girl at a party, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You could have hooked up with every girl at that party, it still doesn’t make someone using you as a scapegoat okay.”
“That’s what Stassie and Lola say, but I haven’t been able to shake the guilt. When I’m on campus, I’m wondering if people are thinking about it when they see me. I hate having to play UCLA knowing that’s what they’ll all be thinking about.”
“I hate that this has been eating at you. When something happens it feels so huge to you, but that’s because it’s happening to you, but in reality, most people don’t know or care. If everyone was talking about it like you feel like they are, I’d already know everything. I just heard there was some damage. Nothing about you.”
“You really didn’t know?”
“No! I promise I didn’t. But someone took advantage of you, Russ. You gotta stop punishing yourself for it.” I stroke his face with my thumb and he kisses the palm of my hand. “If you overthink it, you won’t be able to move on. So what, a rink got trashed? It’s not like somebody died! Do you know how much stuff I’ve trashed by accident?”
