Chapter 29: The Math That Will Not Close

He said he had always thought I was cute.

Cute I could almost hold. Cute was the word you used for Carrie’s quiet friend with the pencils and the glasses and the extra-large shirts that cover everything. Cute explained the old Andrew looking at the floor. Cute did not require me to rebuild the last eight years of my life. If he had stopped at cute, I might have been able to walk out there and talk like a person.

He did not stop at cute. He said the pool yesterday had wrecked his normal thoughts. He said today he kept sliding back into the shy boy, not the almost-graduate, not the bartender, not the one who had ended things with a girl who looked like a model from a magazine. He said any guy would die for a chance to know me. He said hot. He put hot on a body I still dressed in the dark sometimes, so I would not have to watch it happen.

I ran the timeline backward because the timeline was the only tool I had that felt like sense.

If he had wanted me for years, then every time I had written him off as Carrie’s gross brother I had been wrong in a direction that made me dizzy. If he had wanted me for years, then the hug in the backyard yesterday had not been only polite. If he had wanted me for years, then the look across the dinner table, the coffee reach, the extra minutes of sunscreen, the accident in the pool that his hand had not let go of fast enough ... those were not me inventing a plot because Justin had hollowed me out. They were a plot that had been running without my consent.