Slowly We Trust (Fall and Rise #3)(38)
Author: Chelsea M. Cameron

“I scare you?”

“Yeah. All the time.” She finally turned toward me.

“You scare me. How you feel about me scares me. You becoming a huge part of my life scares me. There are things . . . ”

“That I don’t know,” I finished for her. “I know. I’ve known since I met you that there was something you were keeping close to the vest. I figured it would just take you some time to open up.”

“I’m so, so sorry, Will. I thought I could keep you at arm’s length, but then I fell in love with you.” A tear drifted down her cheek and I wiped it away with my thumb.

“I didn’t mean to fall in love with you,” she said. “I tried not to.”

“I’m sorry.”

She actually laughed, but it was brief.

“You don’t have to be sorry. You were just being your irresistible self. I’m powerless against your charms.” Now I was laughing.

“If anyone’s powerless, it’s me, Aud. You have all the power.” Her expression shifted and the laughter was gone.

“It doesn’t feel that way. I feel like I’m spinning out of control.”

I rubbed my hand up and down on her shoulder.

“Is there a way you can talk to me about it without really talking to me about it?” I desperately wanted to ask her what could be so bad that she couldn’t tell me, but I was so wary of scaring her off.

“No. If there was, I would have done that already. You know I want to tell you, right?” She held the side of my face and the pain was obvious in her eyes. Whatever her secret, I could see it was breaking her.

“I know, Aud, I know. But can I tell you something?” She nodded.

“Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. Nothing would change how I felt about you. Nothing. Not now, not ever. Okay?”

She nodded again, as if she couldn’t form words.

We lay for a while, and she moved closer to me. I put my arms around her and she closed her eyes. Soon her deep breathing signaled that she’d fallen asleep. My arm had as well, but I didn’t dare move it. I didn’t want to wake her.

The one good thing about my phone being demolished was that now I couldn’t call Maria back. I had her number saved into my contacts and didn’t know it off the top of my head. Of course, I could call my mom and ask her, but I would rather cut off my own arm, fry it up and eat it for breakfast.

And then there was Will. The boy I was disastrously in love with. He was being so kind and so sweet and I didn’t deserve him.

This day was supposed to be the start of our new relationship. A beginning. Instead, my past had come to find us, like I always knew it would.

For now, though, I was going to try to just be with Will. And ignore my broken phone and the calls from my aunt.

“I’m starving,” Will said later that afternoon. We were still in bed, but I had Will’s shirt on and he wore his boxers.

“Well, I might have some cookies or something.” I got up and searched the top shelf of my closet, but I must have imagined the cookies.

“Darn. False alarm on the cookies. Um,” I said, searching around the room as Will watched me. “I don’t think I have anything, other than the pie. This could be a problem.” I turned around and found him checking out my backside.

“Just to make sure, you should probably look again,” he said, with mock-seriousness.

I put my hands on my hips and glared down at him.

“You just want me to walk around the room and possibly bend over, don’t you?”

He gasped.

“I would never.” I couldn’t help the giggle that fell from my lips. I shouldn’t be giggling. The bag containing my shattered phone had been kicked under the bed, but there were still a few plastic bits stuck in the rug.

Maria had promised me that she wouldn’t contact me. That was the deal. So what could make her break that? I didn’t want to know.

“Well, we could order takeout. I have a few menus here somewhere.” I kept a folder in my desk for emergency takeout when I pulled all-nighters in my room.

“Chinese, pizza, pizza, pizza or pizza?” I fanned the menus out in my hand and held them up in front of him.

“A hard decision, that is.” He pointed to one of the pizza menus. I sat back down on the bed while we decided what we were going to get. Will wouldn’t stop touching me and I didn’t want him to. I loved feeling his fingers on my shoulder, or in my hair, or his chest resting against my back, or his chin on my shoulder.

“You’re going to have to order, since I don’t have a phone.” My voice choked on the word “phone”. Will kissed my shoulder and went to his backpack to get his and call for a large pepperoni with green peppers.

“You know, one of us is actually going to have to get dressed to go down and pick it up,” I said when he hung up.

“I’ll take one for the team,” he said, grabbing his pants. I tore them away from him.

“It’s not going to be here for another half hour. There’s a lot we can do in half-an-hour.”

He grinned at me and dove back onto the bed.

The day faded into night and as the light faded, so did my ability to just focus on Will and block out the things I didn’t want to think about.

“Hey, beautiful. Why so serious?” He touched my forehead, which I’d probably been wrinkling with worry.

“I’m sorry. I can’t stop thinking.”

“About your thing?”

“My thing?”

“Your secret.”

“Yeah. My secret.” My big, bad, awful secret. He said that it wouldn’t change his view of me, but it would. I knew it would.

“You should be mad at me for not telling you,” I said.

“I’m not. Do you want me to be mad?”

“I don’t want you to be anything other than you.”

“Well that’s good to know.” He kissed me and then swiped the last piece of now-cold pizza. “I don’t know how to be anyone else. But if you wanted me to be Han Solo, I could probably swing that. For you.”

“I was thinking more along the lines of a wizard with glasses and a scar on his forehead.”

Will rolled his eyes.

“I don’t know if I can learn all that pseudo Latin. But I think I’d be good at using a wand.” He waggled his eyebrows and I knew he wasn’t talking about the same kind of wand they used at Hogwarts. Not that they didn’t probably do that, too. I’d always wondered about what they got up to in the Room of Requirement. Seeing as how it could be anything you needed at the time. I was sure more than a few students had needed a private place for a tryst.