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“Wowzers.”
Felix’s hands were still on the side of her face, thumbs brushing across her cheeks, as they caught their breath following that epic kiss. It was the most romantic thing that had ever happened to her, and somehow the fact that he sounded like a Scooby Doo character in the next moment wasn’t diminishing that at all for her. There was no accounting for taste.
Pilar ducked her face into his plaid coat, her fist caught up in the fabric of his coat sleeve, still not quite sure this was really happening. He had literally pushed her away and used the word “friend” that day in the park. Hadn’t he?
When she looked back up at him, he was beaming down at her, and this was definitely happening, somehow. “So … not friends?”
He grinned, biting his lip. “Not just friends,” he amended. “I hope.”
A new wave of warmth rushed through her. “I didn’t think you felt that way.”
“Pilar.” She liked the way he said her name. She liked the way he said everything, with extra punctuation and emphasis, like he was on the pages of a comic book, every thought and feeling bursting out of him into the word bubbles above his head. “How could I NOT feel like that? Okay, you caught me by surprise the other day. Everything else has been so shitty, I wasn’t even in the headspace to properly … but in the middle of it, through all of the absolute suckage, you’ve been this Bright Point. We talk and we have fun and you're ... As soon as I stopped to think about it, it was just so obvious. You.” He waved his hands around their heads in some kind of emphatic gesture. “You make me happy.”
“Yeah?” His head bobbed exaggeratedly, and she couldn’t stop smiling. “’Wowzers,’” she whispered, a little bit teasingly, a little bit trying out the feeling for herself.
She wondered if she looked half that dopey as he did, looking at her. Then he dipped his head and she knew they were going to kiss again. And probably again and …
A door opened.
“Pilar?” Fuck, her mother’s timing. “Did you get lost on the way to the trash cans? You forgot the bag of … oh.”
They weren’t even doing anything by the time her mom came down the steps and into view. They were just standing near each other, but for some reason her mom looked between the two of them strangely.
“I was talking to Felix,” Pilar said. “He just got back from the wedding.”
“Yeah, just got back from the wedding.” Felix bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, bobbing his head up and down, and Pilar rolled her eyes, not entirely unhappily, at how suspicious he was making them look.
She reached for the bag of recycling. “Got it. I’ll be up soon, okay?”
“Okay.” Her mom’s voice was pitched slightly high, like it always got when she wasn’t totally comfortable with something but wasn’t going to say what she was thinking outright. Sigh.
By the time her mom was inside the building, Felix had taken the bag and put it into the bin. “Should we go someplace? It’s the middle of the night, but we don’t have to stand by the garbage cans. Huh, next to the garbage cans. I really know how to orchestrate a big moment, don’t I? I think I have a future in sweeping cinematography.”
“Oh, it’s okay, I didn’t really notice. Um … you want to sit on the front step? I guess, that’s kind of our spot.”
“Yeah, yeah, totally. Our spot, wow. One of our spots, really. There’s the coffee shop. The park bench. The couch in my apartment. The hallway near your locker. That alley we were just standing in, that’s a big one.” She noticed he was listing the scenes of all their main interactions, mostly moments she hadn’t known had even been important to him. “There are going to be so many spots. I like this one, though.”
So many spots. She liked the sound of that.
He settled in next to her on the step, closer than all the other times they’d talked here. She could feel the heat of his thigh next to hers. “Me too. So … how was the wedding?”
“Oh. Well, the ceremony was nice.”
There was a distinct “but” hanging in the air between them, so Pilar gently nudged him, even though she was a little nervous about what he might say. Since Lake was best friends with Mia, she assumed that Lake would have been at Mia’s dad’s wedding. It’s why Pilar hadn’t wanted to go. “And?”
“And … Lake was there. And she wanted to get back together. Obviously that’s not going to happen, because I realized I had feelings for someone else.” He shot her a significant look and bumped her shoulder lightly with his. “Just not looking forward to that conversation.”
“Oh.” Pilar sat with that a moment, expecting a wave of overwhelming jealousy, the kind she felt whenever Felix mentioned Lake, but it didn’t quite materialize. Felix was sitting next to her (she was the person he had feelings for!), and Lake was … huh. “That sounds really hard.”
Felix made a face, scrunching up his nose for a moment. “It wasn’t a hard decision in the end, but yeah. I guess, when you care about someone for so long, it doesn’t really turn off the moment you want it to. I don’t want to be the reason anyone is hurting.”
Pilar nodded. She didn’t feel all that great for being part of the reason either, as it turned out, even though she was really glad he was here with her. “You’re a good person, so of course you care. But she has other people who care about her too. She’ll be okay.” She tentatively put her hand on top of his in a comforting gesture, and also because she just really wanted to be touching him.
“Thanks.” Felix looked down at their hands, winding his fingers through hers more decisively, and when he looked up again, his eyes were soft again. “Seriously, thank you for saying that. Gosh. I feel like you’re my secret.”
“You want to keep this secret?”
“What? NO. I want to hit up the all-night Kinko’s and run up and down the streets like a newsie. EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT. Pilar Salazar is into me. Whew. Nobody’s going to believe it. I’m still trying to convince myself.”
She laughed and bumped her knee against his. “God, you have no chill.”
“Um, hello, have we met? I’m Felix Weston, least cool guy on the planet. You knew that, right? Uh-oh. I’ve really blown things now. Well, it was bound to happen. You have a literal piercing in your tongue, and I’m ... oh, this is going to take me a while to wrap my head around.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. What did you mean, though?”
His face melted from animated to thoughtful, like it does. “Oh … now that I think about how to explain it, it sounds really self-centered.” He scrunched his nose and then shook the expression out again. “It was just seeing you with your mom, and then how you are with me again, as soon as she shut the door. There’s this whole other side of you I get to see sometimes that I didn’t even know existed until recently, and I think, maybe, not everyone gets to see that? And you say these lovely thoughtful things to me when I need to hear them, and you smile like … There! That smile. That one … that one right there.”
Now it was her turn to scrunch up her whole face.
“Staaaaahp,” she groaned.
“Oh, I scared it away.” He hadn’t really. It was embarrassing how much she couldn’t stop smiling at him. “Don’t worry, I’ll never blow your cover. No one ever has to know that underneath all this awesome badassery, you’re like, the sweetest person I know.”
She had a flicker of déjà vu, because hadn’t she described Felix the same way to Rahim? The sweetest person she knew.
“Hey,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“Nothing. You’re cute.” It was lame, but it was all she could manage at the moment, and so instead, she kissed him again. She could do that now.
***
She wasn’t sure how much longer she and Felix made out, but when she went upstairs, her mom was in the kitchen, conspicuously doing pretty much nothing. Closing the door quietly, she tried to slip past.
“Pilar, what’s going on? Is Victor okay? Have you heard something?”
“Mom! Not everything is always about Victor.”
“Okay.” Her mom gave her a long look, and suddenly she wished she had made up a story about Victor. “Is something going on with you? Or … Felix? Is it his mom?”
“No, no, nothing like that. I mean, it’s not bad, it’s not anything to worry about.” Crap, she was blushing again. She had to stop doing that.
And she had to stop telling her mom not to worry, because it always had the opposite effect.
“Pilar, I can tell when you’re keeping something from me. Did you get something else pierced? Does Felix know about it? Or a … tattoo?” She said the word tattoo like it was the worst thing she could think of and suddenly Pilar wanted one more than anything.
“No. Mom. It’s just … me and Felix, okay?” She rolled her eyes, thinking she might as well get this part over with. It wasn’t like she was dying to tell someone, anyone, even if that someone was her mom. “I guess we’re together now … or whatever. No big deal.”
Her mom stared at her. “You and … are we talking about the same person? Neighbor boy with the hair? Victor’s friend?”
Pilar snorted. “Oh my god, Mom, you know who Felix is. And anyway, I like his hair,” she added defensively.
“Don’t take the lord’s name in vain.” Her voice was sharp, but it sounded more like a reflex as she visibly struggled to process the other new piece of info. “So … you and Felix … you’re what, you’re dating now? For how long?”
“I don’t know, for like ten minutes! It just happened, we talked after the wedding. That’s what you interrupted with the recycling that I’m sure was so urgent.” Not that her mom would have known, but still.
“Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I was interrupting some romantic moment between you and Felix out by the trash cans!”
“Why do you say it like that? He’s nice. And we have so much fun together. And we just … I don’t know, I don’t why you have to so negative about everything. Can I just be happy for one second since we moved here?”
Her mom looked chastened, but Pilar wanted to disappear into the floorboards right now.
“No, you’re right, he is a nice boy. I don’t know why I was so surprised, he’s just not who I pictured you with. Of course, I pictured you bringing home someone with tattoos and a moped, so this is good. This is good. Hey! We should have him over to dinner sometime.”
“He’s here for dinner all the time! Ohmygod, you’re going to make this weird, aren’t you? I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Well, I’m glad you told me. And I will do my best not to be ‘weird,’ okay?”
Pilar snorted. “Okay, fine, whatever. Good night, Mom!”
***
In her room, she was still too keyed up to sleep. She laid down on her bed fully clothed and listlessly scrolled through her music, but nothing felt right for how she felt right now.
She and Felix were together now. And she was grinning at her ceiling like an absolute maniac.
She wondered what he was doing right now, if he was thinking about her too. She didn’t really have to wonder, though, because he was Felix, and he had told her exactly how he felt about her tonight.
It might be uncool, but it was also so … honest. He was just himself, all the time, and he always said whatever he was thinking. Unlike some people in her life. It was actually one of the coolest things about him.
She swiped her finger over his name in her contacts and didn’t even hesitate about whether it was okay to text him already.
hey
hey you, he responded immediately.
She smiled at her phone for a moment and then typed what she wanted to say. How she felt inside.
you make me really happy too
He texted back with a string of emojis that included fireworks and a beating heart.
And then: coffee tomorrow morning?
yeah definitely
They made plans to meet at 9 a.m. on the steps, and she smiled at her ceiling, knowing that meant he’d be at her door by 8:45.