Admit It

22; whispers

A type of golden light like no other filled the air when Shawn walked in. The near-winter sky gave only a deep purple one, filtered through thick, dark clouds that looked like they would never leave, but when he walked into a space, it became gold like summer again.

Only a few days had passed since their walk in the silent, snow-covered streets, but it felt like weeks. After the snowstorm, school was canceled until the following week, which meant that time was theirs for the taking. Suddenly the slow days of studying quietly at desks became kissing each other outdoors as yet another round of flurries came down on their shoulders.

Shawn laid on Camila's bed on the Saturday following the storm, closing his eyes and savoring the feeling as she ran her fingers through his curls, over and over and over again. He thought of pulling her down to kiss him more than once, but didn't act on it, considering she preferred the slower, quieter moments such as what they were in now. The apartment was silent and unmoving as it seemingly always was, especially now since Mama had to be called into the hospital again. It was just the two of them, the cassette tape player with the crappy sound, and the book of Camila's handwritten and scattered lines of poetry that filled the air that near-winter evening.

"Do you ever wonder," Shawn murmured as she moved to lay beside him on the mattress, "how two people just find each other and spark in a world that's this huge? Not even just like us, like me and Brian, you and Lila. It's insane."

'It's how we've always worked, Shawn,' she wrote back. 'People just don't stop until they find someone who's just so perfectly and imperfectly... perfect for them and that's how we'll always work.'

"But, like, think of us. I was just at the library to get away from it all, it was the day of my parents' anniversary, the worse of the two anniversaries they had, and you had just moved to the city that early morning. There were a thousand other ways we could meet, and an infinite number of ways we couldn't meet. You could've just got stuck in traffic and went to the library an hour later than you did and I would have already left. Or I could've stayed home with Aaliyah and decided to start making dinner just a little bit earlier. And then at school, you would pass me in the hallways and not bat an eye or probably try to avoid me like everyone else does. And if any of that happened, then you wouldn't be here right now, staring at me, laying right next to me, holding hands with me."

Camila tightened her grip on his hand. 'I have this theory that if time wants two people to meet because it knows they'll just spark and have that beautiful moment and have the time of their live with each other, it'll tie this invisible string between them, so no matter how much life happens in between, they'll always find a way back to each other.'

"You read too much poetry," Shawn said, and she laughed. "But I love it. You think our string was tied when we went to Strawberry with our moms as kids?"

'Bunny ear, bunny ear, knotted in a bow.'

"Double knotted, sweetheart," he said, and kissed her through her gentle smile.

"I went to summer camp for 5 years or something like that but I can't remember a single thing about tying knots," he said, a bit off topic. "I was always sneaking off to play soccer with Brian or something else weird. We were absolute menaces as kids. Fucking maniacs, I swear."

'You went to summer camp?' she asked.

"Yeah, what did you spend your summers doing? Living as a literal Jane Austen character I suppose?"

'Actually, my favorite was The Secret Garden,' she corrected him, making him roll his eyes. 'I sat at home, read my favorite books, got annoyed at my brother, and took care of the one singular rose bush that we had in the garden.'