Admit It

25; sparks

The pale, deep, and sky blue pebbles felt cold beneath Shawn's skin as he laid on the driveway. The soft, warm hand played with his, and the even softer, warmer voice whispered random things as they stared at the sky for seemingly no reason, considering the trees that his father had cared for so much ringed the house so densely that the sky was barely visible from the house.

"What's Aaliyah doing?" asked Camila, slightly shivering from the cold although he had offered to go inside to his bedroom multiple times since the start of the afternoon. It was past noon, but he had only woken up the third time Camila called him, around an hour ago.

"I don't know. I put the DVD player in her bedroom the other day and she's barely left her room since. I left her all our old DVDs, they're mostly Disney, so I don't know if I forgot to take something inappropriate out of the mix."

"She's 13, Shawn," she said, turning to him. "You definitely did way worse things at 13 than watch a rated-R movie."

"But she's a girl!" he argued.

"You realize who you're dating, right?"

"But she's my girl, she's my baby sister."

"Whenever you talk about Aaliyah, you suddenly turn into a 46-year old, overprotective father who thinks his teenage daughter is still 7 years old. She's going to be okay," Camila said, and Shawn shrugged as if he didn't entirely agree. "Let's go inside, I'm so cold my fingers are going to freeze off."

"You're kidding right?" Shawn said as she tried to pull him up from the ground without success. "I literally offered for us to go inside every 5 minutes for the past half an hour."

"I wasn't cold then, I'm cold now." When she tried to pull him up again, he instead pulled her body down, making her stumble and fall onto his chest. She rolled her eyes but still kissed him sweetly. Shawn wasn't sure if it was just him, but every soft touch of her warm lips to his skin made his heart beat in the slow steady rhythm of his favorite love song and his mind construct starry, nighttime dreamscapes the same when they did the first time it happened in the quiet fields. He knew that was why he always liked to hold her hands, or simply feel her weight and touch in some way when they were around each other, to convince himself that the evenings they shared weren't dreamscapes, and that beautiful things sometimes did exist.

"Let's go inside and I can give you your Christmas gift," Camila said and picked herself up off of him.

"It's only Christmas Eve, though," he said.

"My mom is having some of her college friends over all day, so I probably won't be able to see you tomorrow. And, we don't normally bake cookies, so I was hoping I could steal some of Aaliyah's cookies for Christmas Eve. You know, for Santa." She winked. "Wait, stay still for a second." She reached up and used her thumb to wipe something off of his lips, letting her hand linger on his jaw an extra second longer. "I just got some of my lipstick on you."

"The lipstick I chose out for you this morning?"

"Yeah, the red one. You don't need any, though," she said. "Of course you're a boy and your lips are more pink than mine."

"I like kissing you with and without lipstick, sweetheart," he said, laughing. "I don't know why you asked me to pick out your color this morning, though, Aaliyah is much better with that color theory stuff."

Camila blushed at the true reason she'd asked him to choose her lipstick that morning, her mind instantly moving on to wonder how he would react when the first sounds played from the speaker, and to doubt herself on whether it was too simple or if that was the magic of it, whether she should've done more for someone she cared about so much or if she did just enough because she knew he would see the truth behind it. She carried the gift in her back pocket along with her phone, and she could feel it like it was burning through her purple colored jeans. This was her favorite pair of jeans, her only lavender pair, and she was pretty sure it was Shawn's favorite of hers.