“You have an athlete vibe . . . ,” I begin, wondering if she’ll tell me.
I’m relieved when she grins and says easily, “Yeah? I played lacrosse.”
“Was BC any good?”
She tilts her head, side to side. “We did all right.”
Humble liar. I fight a grin and hold another dumpling in front of my mouth. “Where did you grow up?”
“Southern California,” she says, and I stare directly at her, mentally daring her to volley the question back at me. “Where did you go to school?” she asks instead.
I watch her carefully as I toss the bite in my mouth and speak around it. “Madison.”
Her eyes go wide. “Seriously? One of my good friends from back home went there!”
“Oh yeah?” I ask, swallowing, and I realize I’m stuck with the next part of this script. “It’s a big school, but maybe I knew him? What was his name?”
Her dark brows pull together in a skeptical frown. “I didn’t say it was a guy.”
Oh shit.
But would it be the worst thing for me to come out, right here in the middle of Franklin’s, and tell her? Now that I’m sitting across from Terra, it feels so obvious, so inevitable, so easy. “Yeah, well—”
“But it is a guy,” she says, laughing. “So you’re off the hook.” She plucks a dumpling from her plate, sliding it between her full lips. I watch her chew and swallow, trying not to let my expression show that I’m imagining kissing her. “This is going to sound really weird,” she begins. I know exactly what she’s going to say, and now I’m dying to hear our story from her soft, plump lips.
“Hit me.” I lean in.
“But I don’t actually know his name.”
I huff out a laugh. “Is that right?”
“It’s a long story and I won’t bore you with it,” she says, “but basically when I was fourteen, he accidentally emailed me instead of his teacher, and we’ve been in touch ever since.”
“That’s cute.”
“But because we were minors at the time, we didn’t share info, and now it’s sort of a thing to not divulge personal information. Like, not a bad thing, but our thing.”
“So I guess that means he’s not your boyfriend?” I ask, and she looks back at me, dark eyes widening with surprise.
She must see that I’m invested in this answer.
“Well . . . no. But . . . maybe eventually he will be? We’re going to finally meet up this summer.”
“Not until summer? Where does he live?”
She slaps a hand over her eyes, laughing. “Why are you asking the hard questions!”
“I don’t know!” I laugh, too, wanting to apologize but also . . . wanting to keep sitting here and eating soup dumplings and flirting with her for the rest of the day until she figures it out.
Terra peeks at me from between her fingers. “I don’t know where he lives.” She drops her hand, laughing. “He’s originally from Irvine, like me. We have this thing, okay?” She picks up a dumpling and holds it aloft, studying it. “We get soup dumplings when we’re thinking about each other.”
She was thinking about me.
I pop another into my mouth. “Is that right?”
She nods. “But admitting that I don’t know where he lives? I hear it, it sounds crazy.” She leans in, lowering her voice. “Do you ever have a feeling about someone? Like they’re your safe space and, I don’t know, like someday it could be more?”
I swallow, nodding. “Yeah. Of course.”
I’m looking right at her.
“I have a feeling about him.”
But the thing is, when she looks up at me and our eyes lock, I’m pretty sure she has a feeling about me, too.
Chapter Twenty-One
FEBRUARY 16, 2024
From: [email protected]
Date: February 16, 2024
Subject: Emerging from the hungover study cave Hi hi,
I swear it didn’t take me this long to get sober, eeek. I had a test this morning and knew if I wrote back to you yesterday I would obsess about it and put way, way too much time into it.
Thank you for putting the brakes on my tipsy request to share. It was sudden and you were right to wait.
But at the same time, I think I am ready to start to know more about you. Full disclosure: I had lunch with my TA today, you know the one from the party, and he said he went to Madison for undergrad, and I was like, Hey, I know someone who went there! And when he asked me about you, I realized I didn’t have any of the kind of information people usually have, like name, location, favorite Golden Girl.