Girls in Pants - Ann Brashares [47]
She waited until they were headed downhill to get conversational. “How’s it going?” she asked him.
“G-g-ood.” He worked hard for the word.
He waited until they had finished the four-mile loop and begun walking to unburden his heart. “Um, Bridget?”
“Yeah?”
“Do you like Bridget or Bee?”
“Either. Both.”
“Okay, uh, Bee?”
“Yeah?”
“I wanted to tell you something.”
“Okay.”
Silence.
“Uh…never mind.” Sweat made his whole face shine.
“Okay.”
He couldn’t bear to leave it at that. “I, uh, think you’re…pretty amazing.”
“I like you, too, Naughty.”
He cleared his throat. “I think I’m talking about a different kind of like.”
“Like a girlfriend?” She cut to the chase. This could take all night.
He was surprised. “Yes.”
“I’m your coach, Naughty. You know I can’t be your girlfriend.” That hadn’t been good enough for her, back in Baja, had it? Why did she think it was good enough for him?
“Do you have a boyfriend?” he asked.
This would have been an easy out, but she didn’t feel like lying. “No. Not really.”
“Maybe after camp?” he proposed. “I could wait.”
He was so much sweeter and more rational than she had been. Why seal off all hope? “Maybe someday. Who knows what will happen?”
A few hours later, she was sitting next to Eric on the dock. The sun was setting behind the trees and she was feeling thoughtful.
“Can I apologize to you for something?” she asked him, kicking her bare feet back and forth in the warm air.
“What do you have to apologize for?” he asked lazily. His hair was messed up from drying with the lake water in it. His face was stubbly and relaxed in a way it had never been with her that first summer.
“Two summers ago.”
He winced a little, but he let her go on.
“That kid Jack Naughton wants to be my boyfriend. He’s sweet, but it made me think of myself. It made me remember how I behaved to you, and I felt so ashamed.” She cracked a piece of wood off the dock and threw it into the water. She let out a breath. “I’m sorry I did that. You must have thought I was so ridiculous.”
Eric’s face was pained. He was silent for a long time.
She brought her feet up onto the dock and hugged her knees to her chest. She pressed her chin against one brown knee, afraid to look at him. She could feel the weight of her loose hair drying against her back.
They hadn’t talked about this before. In all their many hours spent together, they hadn’t mentioned the fact that they’d known each other—much less known each other. They never talked about “us.” There wasn’t any “us.”
But now, she was raising the specter of “us,” wasn’t she? Not to reawaken it, she promised herself. That was not it. Her mind supplied a funny version of the famous Julius Caesar line: I come not to praise us, but to bury us.
Eric rubbed a hand through his hair. “I didn’t think you were ridiculous,” he said at last, a little defensively. “It was more complicated than that.”
“But it was all my fault. I know it was.”
He looked terribly tired. One side of his mouth was flat and the other pointed down. She could tell he didn’t want to talk about this anymore.
“I won’t bring it up again,” she said softly. Her eyes pricked with tears that she did not want him to see. “I promise. We can forget it ever happened.”
When he finally talked his voice was so quiet she could barely hear him. “Do you think I could forget it?” He brushed his hand over his eye. “Do you really think it was all you? That I didn’t want it too?”
Brian was over, so Tibby stayed in her room. Brian came to see Katherine almost every day. He was transforming her arm cast into a masterpiece, drawing a fierce and sprawling dragon with her Magic Markers, adding a little more each time he came.
Brian also came to see Tibby, Tibby suspected, but she did not want to see him. He would catch her every so often skulking to the kitchen to forage for supplies and ask her, by his hollow-eyed looks, why she was avoiding him. And she just kept avoiding him because she didn’t have an answer.
Tibby was perched on her bed, having left the door open a