Funny Story(30)

“I’m serious,” he says.

“Oh, you’re serious?” I say. “You’re serious that you’re going to spend all summer ferrying a near–perfect stranger around so that she won’t move away?”

“You’re not a stranger.” He knocks his leg into mine. “You’re my serious, monogamous girlfriend, remember?”

I chortle, the high seeming to explode through my veins from the force of it.

His face remains deeply, painfully earnest. “I don’t want you to move away. I like you.”

“You like everyone,” I remind him. “I’m highly replaceable.”

He rolls his eyes. “You really think you have me figured out, don’t you?”

“Am I wrong?” I ask.

He holds my gaze, not quite smiling. We both flinch when his phone chimes in his pocket. He slides it out, his face lit as he reads the message onscreen, a divot etched between his brows.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

His teeth worry at his lower lip. “Petra.”

“Seriously?” I say. “You two still talk?”

“Not often.” He scratches his jaw.

I think about the tense call I overheard behind his bedroom door, wonder if it’s possible he was talking to her, and what Peter would make of that.

“Apparently Katya told her that we were together at Cherry Hill,” he says.

I shift uncomfortably. “And she messaged you about that?”

“She’s happy for us,” he says, voice quiet and flat.

“Well, that’s good,” I say. “Petra’s happiness has always been my utmost concern.”

He looks over at me, slowly starts to laugh.

The weed has my heart feeling like softened butter even while my stomach boils over with anger. At Petra and Peter both, not just on my behalf this time, but on Miles’s too. This ridiculously nice man who let me move into his place, no questions asked—didn’t even charge rent my first month—and comped my food tonight and bought me a milkshake and brought me to a beach I’d never been to and lent me his jacket.

Offered to parade me around all summer, just so I won’t move away.

After hanging out twice.

In general, I don’t put too much stock into a person’s charm, but I think he might be the rare real deal. A genuinely kind person who likes everyone and deserved better than a note on the counter and Petra’s room-sized closet cleared out.

I hold my hand out for his phone. He considers for a second, then plops it into my palm.

“Come here,” I say, opening the camera.

His eyebrows pinch in a bemused expression. “Come where?”

I move the remnants of our fries to my far side and pat the space between us.

“Oh, there?” he says. “One foot to my left?”

He doesn’t ask why, just holds my gaze and scoots until his side’s right up against me. “Here?”

My stomach flips at the closeness of his voice. “That’s good.”

I hold his phone in front of us, the camera’s flash turned on, and lean into him. He puts an arm around me and smiles sort of ruefully, unable to muster true joy. At the last second, on a whim, I turn and kiss his cheek as the picture finally snaps.

His face turns toward mine, our noses almost touching, pieces of his chin and cheeks hidden behind the flash’s afterglow.

“Just thought we could make Petra really happy,” I say.

“Really thoughtful of you,” he says, the corners of his mouth curving.

“Yeah, well,” I say, “I thought about taking a video of myself giving you a lap dance, but I don’t have anything to mount your phone on, so this was the next best thing.”

“I will happily go back into the woods, find some sticks, and build you a tripod, Daphne,” he says.

I laugh, busy myself with another sip of milkshake, immediately shivering from the icy cold.

“Here.” He draws me in against his chest, so that we’re almost fitted together like we’re on a sled, him in back, me in front, and his arms folded around mine, blocking the worst of the wind.

I shiver again as I nestle back against him, snapping a few more pictures.

Honestly, my head is swimming from all these unfamiliar sensations, and I’m not sure whether I’m still taking pictures for any reason other than not quite wanting to acknowledge how good it feels to be curled up against him. It’s been so long since I’ve been curled up against anyone.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he says.

I lower the phone in front of me, and glance over my shoulder at him. “I know that.”

“You were probably right,” he says. “They’re probably not even jealous. And even if she was, so what? As it turns out, it doesn’t make me feel any less like shit.”

“It makes me feel less like shit,” I say.

His brow lifts skeptically. “Does it?”

“Okay, not exactly,” I admit. “But it makes me mad that she, like, thinks you need her approval to move on, or something. If she was so in love with Peter, she never should’ve strung you along like that, but she did, and she dumped you in the worst possible way, and then for her to just insist that you view her kindly—to try to make you not mad, instead of just letting you move on . . . it’s selfish.