I wish my hands weren’t occupied with holding my food, so I could shove them into my jacket pockets.
“Well, I’m sorry for real stuff. For lying to you about the Weazel thing, mostly.” I gnaw on my lower lip. “The thing is — I was actually going to tell you that night. I took that picture because I was going to be a smart aleck about it. Send you the picture over the app as Wolf, so then you’d put two and two together and realize it was me.”
The implication, of course, is unspoken — that she’d have the space to put two and two together and pretend she didn’t realize it was me, if she didn’t want it to be. I see I haven’t done anything to fool her because her eyes immediately soften.
“Anyway,” I say, before she can address it, “that obviously backfired when you, uh, threw up instead.”
Pepper snorts. “Yeah. Safe to say, I’m off hot dogs for the foreseeable next hundred years.”
“And then — I was going to tell you when you were here. When we were kissing. And instead, I just kind of shoved my foot in my mouth and wrecked the whole thing.”
Pepper spots a place for us to sit in Washington Square Park, on a bench with a view of the little gated area that makes up the dog park. She sits, watching me studiously as I take the place next to her, with the kind of care I’m still not used to even after all these weeks of being on the other end of it.
“I wouldn’t say wrecked,” she says.
“Yeah. But you’re a meme now. And suspended.”
I don’t know why I’m pointing all of this out to her, except I have to — suddenly it all has to be on the table, every stupid thing we’ve said and done, every mistake we’ve made. She’s still here, and she’s still staring back at me, but I can’t trust it yet.
“True.” Pepper thins her lips, her eyes not meeting mine for a second. Before I can start spiraling into the panic I’ve been keeping at bay, she turns back to me and says, “But weirdly, this is one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.”
I laugh self-consciously, but only because I can tell she means it. There is something more personal in that, maybe, than any kind of insecurity we’ve told each other, than even the kiss we botched. Even if it was just for a few hours, Pepper knows the landscape of the inside of my world.
It’s not enough to erase everything that’s happened, but maybe it’s a step.
“And your mom…”
Pepper blows out a breath. “I don’t know. But I’ll deal with it when I get home.”
“My dad — he said he and your mom used to know each other.”
Pepper doesn’t seem nearly as fazed by this as I was. “Yeah … I thought as much.” Off my look, she shrugs and says, “I may have made some less-than-polite remarks on my way out the door this morning.”
I wince. “Hard same.”
“Whatever it is though — it’s their problem, not ours.”
I’m relieved to hear her say this, mostly because I don’t want to have to tell her what went on between them myself. I feel like it’s the kind of thing she should actually hear about from her mom, and not through a game of telephone from me.
Still, it doesn’t make this any less complicated. It feels like this whole thing has been a giant heap of Monster Cake from start to finish — good, but messier than either of us could have ever anticipated.
“Could we just — start over?” I ask. “No Twitter, or Weazel, or parents, or … screens in the way.”
Pepper smiles this easy, patient smile. The kind that a few months ago I never would have been able to picture on her. There’s something so grounded and assured in it that I know it’s not just her — it’s rooted in something between us. Something steady and quiet, a kind of understanding that maybe has been there all along, buried deep under the tweets and the jabs and the occasional staredown in the hallway.
“I’m all for leaving that behind. But I don’t want to start over,” says Pepper quietly.
She leans in, then, and pauses just in front of me. I’m so wrapped up in what’s about to happen, I don’t realize for a moment that she’s waiting for me, for permission to do this thing that seems so natural, so inevitable, that even in the beats before it happens I can’t imagine it not happening.
I bridge the distance between us, and then we’re kissing again — and this time it’s slow, and small, and simple, but fills me with the kind of full-body warmth nothing else ever has.
We pull apart, smiling like idiots, and just stare at each other for a few seconds. Then some hipster on the bench next to ours who doesn’t know how to mind his own beeswax pointedly clears his throat.
“We should probably, uh. Eat these before they get cold,” I say, just barely managing not to stammer.
“Right.” Pepper unwraps hers, face still red, her fingers fumbling. She pauses just before she lifts it to her mouth. “So is this the Grandma’s Special?”
The grin that bursts on my face almost cracks from the cold air. “Wow. My mom really does like you.”
Pepper is poised with it in front of her mouth and raises an eyebrow at me. “Do you trust me?”
“Not a bit. Take a bite.”
She does, and I prop my head on my palm and lean in close enough she has to muffle a laugh as she chews.
“Well?” I demand. “Finally willing to concede that our grilled cheese is vastly superior?”
She looks like she’s about to give a begrudging nod, but then her eyes go wide. “The secret ingredient.” She peels apart the grilled cheese, staring at it and then up at me, her face so incredulous. “It’s sweet bell peppers?”
It isn’t the first time I’ve wondered how Pepper would react if she knew. But somewhere along the line that imagining shifted from a nightmare to this moment now, with a full Pepper grin so infectious, I can’t help but match it with one of my own.
“Shhh,” I say, grabbing a half of her grilled cheese and taking a bite. “It’s a secret.”
“Yeah, well.” She leans forward and kisses me on the cheek, shy and quick. “I think we’ve had our fair share of those.”
Pepper
In the text I sent my mom this morning, I told her I’d be home by 3 p.m. so I make sure I’m in the elevator on my way back up by 2:55. I use the ride up to collect myself, dusting some of the flour off my shirt, trying to dim the smile that keeps creeping its way back on my face.
I’m expecting a fight, or at the very least some kind of passive-aggressive exchange. My mom didn’t tell me not to leave the apartment, but I can’t play dumb — even in my lacking experience with actually getting in trouble, I know skipping downtown is pretty high on the list of things I don’t want my teenage daughter doing when she’s suspended. Never mind that it’s pretty high on the list regardless.
But when I open the door, my mom isn’t angry. She isn’t even irritated. She’s sitting on the couch, clutching a mug of something and wearing a ratty old robe I haven’t seen since our Nashville days. She stares over at me with puffy, makeup-less eyes, looking so much younger in this state that for a moment I have to blink the image of Paige out of my eyes. She tries to look stern, gearing herself up for the scolding we both know I deserve, but then the tears start leaking out of her eyes, and whatever she’s going to say dissolves right out of her.
“What happened?”
She shakes her head, but the stream of tears thickens and the panic only coils tighter in my chest.
“I just — you left, and I…”
“I texted you.” I sit next to her, at a loss for what I should do. I’ve never really seen my mom cry before, at least not like this — not when I’m the only one around to do anything about it. “I came right back—”