We had a secret, and I found no one really needed to know that I was kissing her lips each night — as long as that fact remained true.
Currently, on the Monday night after our homecoming game against the Ranchwood Rockets — whom we absolutely crushed — Sydney was on my couch in an oversized t-shirt and a pair of boy shorts, her hair loose and wavy where it framed her face, and she was popping candy corn into her mouth. She had her legs outstretched, feet in my lap, and I rubbed them as we finished the second movie in our Halloween movie marathon that night.
First was Casper: The Friendly Ghost.
And now, Hocus Pocus.
Turned out neither of us were big horror fans.
I tried to keep my attention on the movie, chuckling as the kids tricked the witches and the parents were put under a spell to dance all night. But I was more focused on my hands moving over her arches and pads, on the little groans of approval that she let slip from time to time, and on the unbelievable four weeks I’d had with that woman on my couch.
I wondered if she realized it, too — that one month ago in her backyard, she’d said she’d be mine.
Or maybe I was just a lovesick fool and should be ashamed that I even cared that it had been one month.
Still, though, I’d held my stern outward appearance at school and kept quiet around my family as per usual, when I was with her?
I couldn’t pretend.
I massaged up her calf a little, smiling as I recounted the time we’d spent together. I didn’t know which I’d loved more — watching her work with appreciation from a distance, sneaking kisses when the other coaches had yet to show up to the locker room, learning her as a woman on the nights Randy had Paige and I got Sydney to myself, or marveling at the role she played in Paige’s life as her mother when I spent afternoons practicing with that little girl in their backyard.
I was learning her favorite flowers and memorizing the look of determination she wore when she worked in the garden. I was learning about her childhood, about her parents and her sister, about her life traveling before finally settling down in Stratford just in time to finish high school. I was learning who she was when she was with Randy, how she’d changed since, and the ways in which she would never change — like the fact that she was, had always been, and always would be a woman who was curious about the way things worked, like the bodies of the players she worked on and the vegetables she tended to in the garden and her daughter, who threw her for a loop because she changed and grew each day.
It was like slowly peeling off buttery flakes of a pastry, discovering new tastes with every layer, and I cherished each morsel.
The more I got to know her, the more I struggled to understand Randy — who, up until that point, I had respected. It wasn’t that Sydney ever spoke ill of him, but she didn’t need to. I knew all I needed to know about him, the way he treated her, and their relationship by how she responded to being treated the way she always should have been.
Every game he came to with Paige by his side, I would chance a glance at him, wondering how he could have been so stupid as to let her slip away.
He always met my gaze with the same intensity, as if he knew something I didn’t.
As I became more familiar with Sydney, I revealed my own layers to her, too — letting her pass through walls I never realized I had built and fortified.
My smile faltered a bit as that thought settled in, because I realized one subject I’d yet to even broach with her was the death of my father — specifically, the hard drive and the journal and my discoveries so far.
And I knew it was on purpose.
That part of me — the young man who was left without a father, with questions never answered — he was tender and raw and I did everything I could to never expose him. The need to protect my father’s legacy and my brothers and my mom and myself was so deeply sewn into my being that it had sprouted roots.
But, something in my throat tightened that Monday night on my couch when Sydney leaned up, kissing my cheek before she scampered off to use the restroom down the hall.
I paused the TV, grabbed my laptop, plugged in the external hard drive, and opened the journal I’d been neglecting since Sydney had stolen my time and attention.
Not that I’d complained.