I have my days; sometimes I’m outgoing, sometimes I’m not, sometimes I’m both.
He blinks over at me.
Opens his mouth to speak then snaps it shut. Hefts the box again to redistribute the weight.
So awkward…
“You must be the new roommate,” I say at last to break the silence Eliza refuses to fill, damn her. “I’m the old one.”
“I am.”
“Rome, this is Lilly.”
“Do I know you? You seem familiar.”
The guy fumbles with the box he’s carrying, nearly dropping it to the floor and blushing beet red in the process.
I wink at him.
This time he does drop his box, the undeniable sound of glass shattering echoing throughout the kitchen.
We all freeze.
Oh shit, that didn’t sound good, not good at all.
“Shit.” Rome drops to his knees and begins to pry open the box, his entire body sagging when both flaps are peeled back and he peers inside. He goes slack, shoulders hunched over in defeat.
Eliza goes around to stand behind him, and I join her as the three of us look inside.
“What is that?”
Whatever it was, it was sparkly and is now in a million bits, the base of something and its top broken into sharp chunks of debris.
I move to kneel beside him to get a closer look.
“That looks like it could have been an Emmy Award,” I say breathlessly, touching the shards of glass gingerly so I don’t get one stabbed into the tip of my finger. “What was it actually?”
“It’s—it was a Cambridge Stein Scholarship Award,” he says quietly at long last, after staring holes into the already broken glass. It still shimmers under the light.
I feel absolutely terrible, though I’m not the one who dropped the box and broke the award.
Still.
It’s obviously a very important memento for him, and now it’s in shambles.
“What was it for?”
He struggles to gulp in a breath. “I won an award to attend Cambridge University in the UK—I spent last semester there.”
Shit.
“That sounds prestigious.”
“It was.”
“I’m so sorry it’s broken,” I tell him quietly, placing a hand on his shoulder. “Guess we’re both having a bad day.”
He doesn’t ask what that means or why I’m having a bad day, only shakes his head once. I remove my palm, and he regains the ability to take air into his lungs. “It’s just a bit of glass. I have the memories from living there in here.” He taps on his forehead. “I don’t need this as a reminder.”
But still…
“We could glue it together?” Jack—Eliza’s roommate and boyfriend—strolls into the kitchen as the new guy dumps the pieces back into his box. “Might look like utter shite, but at least you’d still have it.”
“I love mosaics. I can do it for you!” I volunteer enthusiastically, suddenly perking up. “I used to take classes at a pottery shop in high school, and we did artwork with shards. You should let me try to get it back in one piece.”
“Really, it’s fi—”
But the box is already in my arms and I’m already standing, commandeering his busted award.
“Nope. I’m going to fix this.”
I am going to make this right.
After all, this was partially my fault. If he hadn’t been staring at me shyly and I hadn’t winked at him, perhaps he wouldn’t have dropped the box in the first place and his award would still be intact.
Yes.
I’ll fix it for him, one way or another.
3
ROMAN
Well that couldn’t have been more awkward.
Just kidding—it was worse than all that.
Who drops a box because a pretty girl winks at him? That’s something that would happen to a nerd in a movie—except in the movie scenario, the nerd would also have wet his pants and humiliated himself, so at least I didn’t do that.
I’m bad, but I’m not that bad, although one thing was glaringly obvious: I have a lot of work to do on myself when it comes to girls and dating and my comfort level with being myself around them. If I was a little more confident, I wouldn’t have dropped that box and gone frozen when Lilly looked at me.
“Do I know you?” she asked, and I was too stunned to say, “Yes, we met when we were freshmen, we sat for an hour on the stairs at a party and spilled our guts to each other. I can’t believe you recognize me.”
I’ve changed a lot in the last three years, and she has too. I could see plainly in her eyes that she’s matured—I could also see some hurt, although I obviously don’t have a clue what the story is behind the tired expression and the drooping shoulders when she was sitting at the counter.
Lilly was only too eager to jump up and help me without even knowing who I was. We may not have a history, but we did certainly spend a lot of time sitting and talking and sharing private thoughts with each other. I remember her telling me about her mother, and I wonder if that relationship has gotten any better. I remember telling her I still lived at home and recall the look on her face when I said I had never lived anywhere else.