“Not even Joel, Tucker. I mean it.” T.J. knew how twins worked, Alice and Celia never kept anything from eachother, not ever, and she knew that Joel and Tucker were the same way. But T.J. did not want Joel to know about this. She didn’t want anyone to know about this. Tucker had a girlfriend, a girlfriend who most people considered frightening. If there were anything left for T.J. to be afraid of, she’d probably have been afraid of Lizzie Grimm. Thankfully, fear was no longer one of her emotions.

Ugh. What was wrong with her! Even as she stood there insisting that he not tell anyone about her moment of insanity, she could not help but thinking about doing it again. She was not soppy. She had never been soppy. The other girls in her year were all soppy, and they were all annoying as fuck, and she hated them. She hated herself. But then she’d hated herself for a while now. Her inability to stop thinking about kissing Tucker was the just the most recent transgression. Fresh in her mind, impossible to erase. She pressed her teeth in to her lower lip trying to forget, desperate to focus on anything else. Pain didn’t cut it anymore, especially not something so  mild.

“We should go. This, being a girls’ loo”

Her first kiss had been in a girls’ loo with a boy she didn’t even like. She did like Tucker. She did. He was funny. They were friends, when she wasn’t too mad at everything to be friendly. But they were just friends. They. Were. Just. Friends. She didn’t fancy him. She didn’t find him attractive like that. He didn’t make her breath quiver with his very presence. He didn’t make her face flush crimson or electrify her skin, or any other phrase fit to adorn the pages of a trashy romance novel but completely inappropriate for her life. This entire situation was completely inappropriate for her life. Perhaps she’d accidentally switched lives with Cora or Lizzie Grimm or Millie. They were more interested in boys and T.J. was only interested in quidditch.

Or, you know... we could, I don’t know... talk. More.”

“We’re not going to...” She started to inform him that she was not going to continue kissing him, but maybe he really meant talking and she didn’t want him to think that she was thinking about kissing him again. She wasn’t. She was simply refusing to think about it. “I don’t want to talk to you.” Part of her wanted him to kiss her, but he couldn’t, he was with Lizzie and she was not okay with being the other woman. She wasn’t even okay with being the woman. Willing herself to move away from him, she found that the soles of her shoes must have fused with the tie of the floor, because she simply couldn’t. So instead she said again. “I don’t want to talk to you.”She wanted him to hold her head back while he kissed her forehead softly, proclaiming his love for her and his favoritism of lost causes, before he held her tightly against her wishes and kissed her fervently while Atlanta burned in the background. Now wait that was Rhett and Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. What the fuck was wrong with her?

“I can’t talk to you. I’m glad you don’t want to play quidditch anymore.” She said, talking to him anyway, even if her legs would not move her away from him. “I can’t date someone on the same team as me. Not that I want to date you. I don’t want to date you. I didn’t mean that... I meant that It would be awkward... Since I’m not speaking to you anymore... But I don’t want to date you. And I don’t want to kiss you. And...” She groaned in frustration, punching him lightly in the shoulder. “Shuddup Tucker. This isn’t funny. Stop smirking! You are such a jerk.” A jerk with nice lips, and pretty eyes, and she wondered if his hair was soft. “I fucking hate you.”