Because of Him

44

Chapter Forty-Four

News travelled fast.

By lunch, nearly everyone knew about the.. incident with Kacey. They also knew that Logan and I were a couple. Not acquaintances, not friends - a couple.

          The pressure of having to hide our relationship was finally lifted off our shoulders, and for the first time since we got together, we could hug and hold hands and kiss whenever we wanted to, out in public and at school just because we wanted to. Some people smiled at us as if to say, good for you! Some seemed astonished that we even had the guts to come out as a couple when everyone knew about Kacey's hatred for me. Others widened their eyes at the sight of us, turned to their friends and whispered in their ears that we were holding hands.

          But most importantly, I would finally be able to rub it in Kacey's humiliated face.

          I wasn't scared of what she had to say about me. I didn't care anymore. After seeing the priceless look on her face when I pulled away from Logan's kiss, the wide-eyed stare and slack jaw, I wondered why the hell it had even taken me so long to finally realize her opinion and words meant nothing to me.

Logan was proud of me, to say the least. He also wore a dazed smile for a whole week after I revealed our relationship. I felt bad for making him hide his feelings for me at school and having to be the one to suffer the consequences, but he said that that kiss was enough for him to forgive me.

           By the second week, everything felt like it was finally coming together. There wasn't much to stress about anymore, except the usual typical things like graduation, college and my boyfriend.

The only thing I hadn't been paying enough attention to was Emmie, and I hadn't realized it until she got home from work one Saturday night.

I was sitting cross-legged on our black-leathered couch with a blanket draped across my lap as I watched an episode of Catfish: The TV Show. The front door opened and Emmie stepped in, carrying a bag of Chinese takeout.

"Hey, Emmie," I greeted with a smile and glanced down at the bag. I gasped. "Is that Chinese food I see?"

       "You've seen correctly," she replied cheerily and shut the door with her heel. She set her things down on the dinning room table and then walked over to me with the takeout in her hand and kicked her shoes off as she came. "Oh, is this Catfish?"

          "It is," I nodded. "This one is about that girl and her online "boyfriend" of four years."

           "Of course," she sang and handed me a box and some chopsticks as she plopped down beside me.

"I don't know how these people are so oblivious," I said. "I mean, if the person won't meet you after years of dating, that's clearly a bad sign."

She sat there quietly, eyes trained to the screen. Then she turned to me and with a guilty smile on her lips.

          "Did I ever tell you that I had a pen-pal boyfriend when I was a teenager?"

          "A what?," I laughed and looked at her incredulously.

         She chuckled and nodded, giving me a one shoulder shrug. "He was from France and very sweet. We never met, but he did ask me to be his girlfriend after half a year of writing to each other. We later lost communication and I never knew what became of him." She smiled sadly to herself. "But it did cross my mind that maybe he was some old fifty-year-old man who was pretending to be a teenager. And now that I think about it, it was extremely dangerous because he had my address and everything."