“Who?”
“This foundation. They didn’t just give me shoes. They gave me hope. They gave me the right to believe that I was more than what anyone ever said about me. And sometimes, just sometimes, it was enough to make me dream that I could become more.”
And maybe I have become more. Not the more that Joss warns me about, but more than who I used to be. I affected someone. I took a chance, befriended Jonah, and found a way to reach him. The change I’d hoped for, it’s there in his eyes. He can try to fight it, but today altered him. It’s what I wanted and no matter what happens in the next few minutes, hours, days or years, for a few seconds, I was more.
“Tell me this changed you, Jonah.” I turn my head to look at him and I hold my breath, hoping for the right words from him. I saw the shadow on his face when he connected the dots between the child he once was and the children in front of him, but I crave to hear the words.
There’s hurt in his blue eyes, but there’s also this sweet hope. “It changed me. You...changed me.”
“Good.” I break our connection and stare at the ground. “Good.”
Jonah nudges my knee with his. “Why do I feel like you’re breaking up with me?”
Who knew a statement could be like a tiny dagger to the heart? “We’d have to be a couple in order for that to happen. I’m a girl who hangs at a cemetery and you’re a boy who needed a break from normal for a few
weeks.”
“We’re a couple,” he says.
I wish we had been. My skin prickles at what it could have felt like with his arms around me as he sat against a tree and pulled me close so that my back settled into him with his breath hot on my neck.
“We aren’t.” I rub my arms, feeling cold. A part of me is glad we never crossed lines. I like the memories of us as friends. I like that my heart can’t hurt because I never really gave all of it to begin with.
“We are.” Jonah jumps off the wall and holds his hand out to me. “I like you, Stella, and you can deny it, but I see in your eyes that you like me too. Today’s not over and I’m not the only one with a decision to make, so let’s be together. We have a couple of hours left before midnight.”
Before we turn back into pumpkins. “What happens at midnight?”
“I don’t know, but let’s find out.”
Jonah
With her hands shoved, straight-armed, into the front pockets of her blue jeans, Stella wanders around my house. I like seeing her here. She fits, but doesn’t. Everything surrounding her is high-priced, having been picked by Mom and a designer.
By the way she carries herself, Stella has class. More class than I’ll ever possess. Plus I like her style. From the roots of her dark purple hair to her rose barrette to her white cotton shirt, blue jeans that hug exactly right and purple shoes, she’s head-to-toe gorgeous.
Like a weary bloodhound trailing a scent, Stella leaves the kitchen in the direction of the living room and I follow. She hasn’t said much. Occasionally she’ll pause over something and squish her mouth to the side, but other than that—nothing.
In the living room, she peers into a three-foot-tall blue floor vase that sits in the corner next to the double patio doors. When she straightens, she gestures at it with one finger like it’s contagious. “Is it an urn?”
“No.”
She reassesses it. “Then I don’t get it.”
Neither do I. “What do you think of the house?”
“What do you want me to think of your house?”
“I asked first.”
“You did.”
I mentally throw my hands in the air. I can never find a way ahead of her. “Want to see my bedroom?”
She tosses me an evil smile that turns me on. “Are you going to throw me on the bed and have your wicked way with me?”
I lower my head and hold my breath to keep in a moan. “No.”
“Then sure.”