Julia knew, when she said it, that it didn’t sound very nice.  They way she said it – “If I wanted to go about it like that, I would just ask you to kiss me.” – she made it sound like he was only a second choice kind of boy.  And that wasn’t quite what she meant.  Jamie was special.  Julia loved him more than any other boy she knew, and yet it wasn’t quite the same as . . . well . . . sometimes she wondered if it could be . . . if everything lined up right . . . but that thought was a little too fragile to articulate very well, even to herself.  Except that Jamie articulated it perfectly, just as she was thinking it, in a way that made sense, even to her, and rendered her speechless.  

“If I had any good sense I'd be in love with you, wouldn't I?”

Julia held her hands still in her lap, but her foot worked at the back of her heel, scraping against her Achilles and the edge of her shoe until it came loose from her foot.  Her gaze lay before her, unfocused.  If he had any good sense . . . he would be . . . but he wasn’t . . . and she didn’t . . . and Julia thought she should say something, but what?  His nearness on the piano bench suddenly seemed so acute.  

“Maybe we messed up, becoming mates and all.  Nah, no way. I never want you to be the one breaking my heart.”

Julia finally looked up at Jamie.  He was pulling his grin back out, like he was developing a secret in his mind.  She felt the tension all over her own face, in the way her eyes felt tight and crinkled and her lips fidgeted slightly against eachother.  Her shoe had come all the way off under the bench. 

“I would never break your heart,” Julia told him.  And she wouldn’t.  She couldn’t.  The thought was unthinkable.  Julia’s attention flitted down to the floor, like when a butterfly flinches and abandons a flower.  She took off her other shoe, and bent to shift the both of them out of the way.  “Play something for me,” she asked from halfway to floor, where he couldn’t see the tension still knotting her face.  



Life unfolds in proportion to your courage.