I'm Your Wreck

21- Oh. Hm.

For five minutes, while my grandmother was talking about the new black-eyed susans in her garden, I miraculously stopped thinking about Banks. I clung onto that distraction like it was my only lifeline, asking her so many questions about gardening that I would never remember the answers to just because it was getting my mind off of him.

And then, my Cousin Becky served dessert and it was a mango tart.

I visited the smoothie booth at the union so many times, just to see Banks, that the taste of mango made me think of him now. Not only that, but my other Cousin Ryker wore an Eagles band shirt and that was one of the bands I always heard him listening to through my floor.

He sent a Happy Thanksgiving text to the group chat, which felt like progress even though it really wasn't. He was currently having Thanksgiving dinner with Ollie, Jordan, and Abigail from next door who was Canadian and decided not to go home for a holiday her family wasn't celebrating.

I wondered if he was thinking about the kiss as much as I was. If maybe, he was just forming his game plan in his head before he felt comfortable enough to talk to me. Needed to sort out his thoughts so that when we came back together in a couple of days, he'd know exactly what to say.

As I sat around the dinner table trying to stomach the delicious mango tart, I looked around the dinner table at my cousins and my aunts and uncles and grandparents and wondered what they would think if they knew that all I was thinking about was that my friend kissed me. That I was kissed by a dude and it was consuming everything inside of me like the sweetest virus.

My parents did stand up for Banks when I told them the story of the guy on the sidewalk, which gave me hope that maybe they wouldn't find it utterly offensive. But I never talked politics or social issues with my family, so I had no idea how they would react if they knew.

There was no way in hell I would tell any of them until I knew for sure what was going on, because I was absolutely clueless.

I had no idea where Banks's head was at and after so many excruciating days of obsessing over five seconds of time, I still had no idea where my head was at either.

"Why are you checking your phone so much?" my mom asked me, her voice quiet as to not attract the attention of anybody else around the table. "That look on your face makes me think there's a girl?"

"There's not..." I stopped myself from telling her that there wasn't a girl, because although that wasn't a lie, it felt like giving away too much of the truth. "I don't know. It's not really anything, just something weird going on."

She poured half a glass of red wine and slid it across the table cloth to me. "All the best love stories start out as 'something weird going on'," she said with a sly smile.

"Not a love story," I said quickly.

Although I did love Banks, at least in the way that I loved all of my friends. I punched a stranger in the face for him for fuck's sake. I nauseated myself on tropical smoothies just to hear his voice for an extra twenty seconds a day. I told him that he was my zen and as stupid as that phrasing was, it was true.

"Hey, don't stress about it too much," she said, running her fingers through my hair in a way she used to do as a kid when I was upset. Now, I was so much taller than her that it was almost comical to see her reaching so far to get to my hair. "If it's meant to be, it'll be."

I sipped at the wine and checked my phone again. No new messages. I texted Ollie.

Liam: How are things going?

Because I couldn't sit here doing nothing.

Everybody spread out in the living room after dinner was finished. The football game was on and everybody was moaning about how stuffed full they were from dinner.