Almost Perfect - Brian Katcher [69]
I grabbed my bag, and with a quick peck on Mom’s cheek, I was gone. I didn’t realize until later that I’d forgotten the lunch she’d made me.
I didn’t want to give Sage a chance to ask to use the bathroom, so I nearly broke my best sprinting time dashing to her car. It was the family sedan this time. I guess her parents didn’t want her taking the cranky truck out of town.
I’d thrown my bag in the back by the time Sage folded herself into the driver’s seat. She was wearing jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair was tied up in a scarf, and she wore sunglasses. I think this was the most conservatively I’d seen her dressed. For a moment, I remembered that there was no padding under her top; it was all Sage. Then I realized I was staring.
Sage smiled at me. Was she going to bring up what had happened in her bedroom or wait for me to say something? Could we just laugh it off as a mistake, or did we need to have a long, serious talk? And maybe she didn’t even think what we’d done was wrong! For all I knew, she was planning on getting me alone this weekend and showing me just how much of a woman she was.
This was stupid. I shouldn’t have come. I waited for her to make some mention of what we’d done. How I’d touched her. How I’d almost done more.
Silence. After a while, she instructed me to pick out a CD for us to listen to. Her window was rolled down. She had one elbow on the door, the other arm casually on the wheel. A few strands of hair tickled her forehead from under her headscarf. She looked like a confident, attractive girl, off to conquer a new town. A girl who was going to arrive at college and own it. And who didn’t even care that she’d reduced her only friend to a miserable pile of jelly.
I jammed a random CD into the slot and stared out the window.
Sage drove maddeningly slow. I remembered how she’d mentioned her fear of getting a speeding ticket. The half-hour drive to Columbia was going to take nearly twice that. After fifteen minutes of silence, she finally spoke.
“We don’t have to do this. I can take you back home if you want.”
I knew I should say yes, but I kept my mouth shut. When I didn’t answer, she spoke again.
“Logan, remember the night you met my dad?”
I snorted. “Vividly.” Why was she bringing that up?
She removed her sunglasses. With her wide, sad eyes, she looked much less confident. “When we got to my house and he was standing there, I expected you to bolt. I wouldn’t have blamed you at all. But you stayed and let him yell at you, even though you were still uncomfortable around me. That was the nicest, bravest thing anyone has ever done for me.” Judging by her tone alone, you’d think I’d slayed a dragon or two.
“That night, I promised myself that I’d never do anything to hurt a friendship that special. You don’t know how great it was to finally be able to talk to someone about everything in my life. But the other day, when I saw you checking me out at the pool … I think I let us both down.” She massaged the bridge of her nose, then gripped the steering wheel with both hands.
“Sage, it’s not like that.”
“Logan, you’re my best friend. I need that more than anything else. And trying to take advantage of you the other day, I almost ruined it. Can we just forget about that? Are we still cool?” She was breathing hard, and her steering had become slightly erratic.
“Yeah, we’re cool,” I said bluntly. There. We’d talked and put it behind us. Things could go back to “normal.”
Only I didn’t want to drop it. My best friend had allowed me to see her bare body and now was apologizing to me. I couldn’t let her sit there feeling ashamed of her beautiful, though highly inappropriate, gesture. But how could I put my feelings into words when I couldn’t even define them? There was only one thing I could say.
“Sage?”
“Yes?”
I waited till she turned and looked at me. Then I winked. “Wow.”
She rapidly looked back at the windshield, her eyes wide, blushing under her freckles. I rolled down my window and leaned back in my seat.
Everything