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My little black dress is hugging all of my curves, and my loose-wave, honey-brown hair is tickling my spine. I’ve been saving this dress for exactly this occasion. It has a high neckline but low-cut open back, making it the perfect combination of sexy and sweet. The mullet of dresses, if you will. Business in the front, party in the back.
His dark-brown hair is mussed and wavy like tides in the ocean. Confidence drips off him and zaps all of mine away.
tie, a guy’s phone number (oops, it flutters right out of my fingers and into the wind),
then stare at his special oxygen lips while he spoke.
I hate that I have body image issues that I can’t seem to get over. I can fake it in public, but when I’m alone, I can’t hold it back.
“Will you stop reading my thoughts? It’s annoying.” He laughs. “Then stop wearing your feelings on your face. You’re smirking like the devil. The only time I ever see you look like that is when June is around. So, are you going for her?”
He pauses his chewing and meets my gaze. Now he’s a chipmunk—frozen with wide eyes and cheeks stuffed with nuts. “Oh crap. I shouldn’t have said any of that.”
“June, open up!” I shoot up from my pillow and briefly wonder if that gas station attendant found out about the candy bar I stole when I was eleven and is coming to perform a citizen's arrest.
I do need coffee. I need it funneling into my mouth from one of those beer hats at all times.
From then on, I would have to go with him everywhere, my hands plastered to the six-pack that, no doubt, lives under his shirt.
“Has it never occurred to you that the only reason I picked on you in high school is because I was crazy about you? Or that messing with you was the only way I could get you to look at me?”
want. I could also list a hundred different ways I think you and your body are perfect. I could tell you that I check you out from head to toe every time you walk away from me, and that, last night, I had a dream about you that would definitely make you blush.” She chuckles against me. “But I think what you need is to hear that your ex was a self-serving ass. You’re beautiful, June. His words had nothing to do with you and everything to do with his teeny-tiny—”
Oh, Ryan, Ryan, Ryan. He thinks he can just waltz around my house in a towel for half an hour—yes, it took a full freaking thirty minutes for his clothes to dry—and then I’ll be putty in his hands? Begging him for a date? For him to kiss me? Ha! He’s right.
“June, I’m not interested in becoming the next guy in your long string of one and only dates. I like you—I have for a long time—and I’m done hiding it. I want to give us a chance, but one date is not gonna do it for me. So, are you ready to give up your rule?”
Finally, the torture stops, and I open my eyes. He’s smiling. A warm, heart-wrenching, let’s-do-this-forever kind of smile, and I feel a piece of the ice around my heart break off.
I curse myself a million times for imagining myself wearing a white dress and mouthing na na na, boo boo to every woman who’s ever given Ryan the I’m-all-yours look. You better believe I would invite them to our wedding. I’m a gloater.
And I plan on trying to wring it out, extracting drops of his sexy scent into a vial that I will only let myself open and sniff once a year after he’s gone back to Chicago and I’m a lonely, creepy old maid.
But then something happens. I don’t want to claim that I’m a sorceress or anything, but I’ve definitely harnessed some sort of mythical powers, because I hear a jingling sound at my front door, and I watch as the lock pops open. Wait. Is someone breaking into my house?
I glance back to the place where June just disappeared and consider shooting a flare up into the sky for help. Come back! I’m sorry! I’ll never choose your mom over you for dodgeball again!
Moms truly are a force to be reckoned with.
up until I trip on my own feet and accidentally slosh the rest of my Coke onto the front of my shirt. For a minute, I panic. But then I remember I’m trying to learn to love myself again even when I’m not all made up or perfectly put together.
“I saw your Jeep pull in. And the alarm beeped when you opened the back door. And you were breathing like an asthma patient all the way down that hallway.”
“This,” my heart whispers, “is what we’ve been missing.” I relax into Ryan and close my eyes. I don’t care about what’s on the TV. I’m too busy healing as he holds me—sticky skin, threadbare leggings, and all.
Actually, Jake’s always right, but I will take that truth with me to my grave.
June sleeps like a coma patient
It took you just the right amount of time. Some of us need to live through the healing rather than talk through it.”
It actually just makes me wish Ryan had been the one to take me to prom. Wearing this suit. And drenched in this cologne. Never mind, I would have become a teen mom.
“I win.”
