The Girl in Blue

21- The Girl Laughs

Lana

"Lana, please tell me that you can help out tonight?" Carmen pleads with me as we're having lunch on Monday with Sutton. "The decorations for the gala are coming in and I need people to help move them into the storage room."

"I can't tonight," I tell her apologetically. "I'm meeting with Levi."

"Really?" Sutton wonders, seeming surprised by that.

"We meet every Monday," I tell her slowly. "Why is that so shocking?"

"I guess it's not shocking, I just don't know how that's going to work out with how weird things were after the party," Sutton explains to me. "How he darted out of the room without saying goodbye and everything."

"Wait, what's going on between you and Levi?" Carmen pipes, now wanting the full story.

"Nothing is weird," I insist. "He was kind of drunk and started asking me about why I'm not in a serious relationship but it wasn't a big deal at all. I don't know why he left in such a hurry, maybe he was late for something."

"Really?" They both look at me suspiciously.

"Or maybe," Carmen adds after a moment. "You were together all night, sleeping together on the couch."

"Oh my gosh," Sutton laughs, understanding exactly where Carmen is going with this and I hate it, but I do too. "He totally had a boner."

"Stop," I uselessly plead with them.

"If you think about it, it's the only thing that really makes sense," Carmen explains to me with a small shrug. "But what happened the night before, did you make things weird so that he'd want to leave fast?"

I take a bite of my salad and shrug. "I guess we kind of had a nice night when we got back to the apartment. After Tristan passed out, we just stayed up watching movies and yeah, it was really nice. I wanted to kiss him for like, half of a second, but that won't make things weird. He doesn't even know about that."

"Wow," Sutton starts to grin at me. "You've got a crush. Lana Ademo has a crush. I thought that I'd never see the day but here it is."

"A what? Crush? No, that's not what I said," I shake my head at her. "I do not have a crush on Levi, I just said that I thought about kissing him for just a second. I was buzzed, I wasn't thinking straight."

They both just keep looking at me and it's thankfully getting time for me to leave anyway to meet up with Levi for our project.

"Shut up," I mutter at their silence before I pick up my bag and leave the table. I grab my now-empty salad container and throw it away on my way out of the building. Into the fall weather I go, bundled in a comfy white sweater and a light floral scarf, I speed walk through campus to the arts building where we've been meeting this whole time to work on the film.

I don't think that it's going to be weird after what happened Saturday night. We're friends and although our conversations were a little... personal that night because of the alcohol, that's fine. I'm sure that Levi knows that it's all not a big deal and we can either talk about it or just pretend like it never even happened.

But one thing that I know for sure is that Sutton is stupid. I don't have a crush on him just because of me wanting to kiss him for a moment that night. I was tipsy, probably a little bit horny, and I just saw his lips in the glow of the TV screen and I thought that they looked like they would be nice to kiss. It was just an in-the-moment alcohol-soaked moment. I haven't had a crush on anybody since I was 13. And besides, I have Tristan. The only reason that I wanted to kiss Levi was because Tristan was passed out.