Aparri x reader ~our love~

Two pt. 1

It was just over a year ago.

12 months, 9 days, and six hours ago, actually.

But 13 months ago, everything was... Perfect.

I close my eyes, leaned over my candles, and pray to the Cake Fairy or the god of birthdays whoever was in charge that Julian, Mia's friend. and my best friend that's a boy would finally kiss me. It was the same secret Wish I'd made every year since Mia and I were ten and Julian was 12 and I accidentally fell in love with him.

Mia, Julian, and their parents celebrated my fifteenth birthday and her backyard with my parents just like always. When all the singing and clapping and candle blowing stopped, I open my eyes. Julian was right next to me, beside me, sharing the same air. Mysterious. The back of my neck went hot and prickly when I smelled his Apple shampoo the kind from the green bottle he stole from his bathroom because he liked how it made his hair look in for one charge this second I thought my birthday wish my finally come true, right there in front of everyone. I didn't even have time to think about how embarrassing that might be one Julian tan, full of cake color arched from behind his back on a not so slow motion trajectory right into my face.

While cake in the face with clearly progress from the previous year's Super Bowl coach style Shook Up soda over the head, something in the list translation was still getting lost and it blew across my candles into the sky. I made a mental note to clear find my demands next year and bullet point with terrible examples from Hollywood Classics that screamed, shoveling both hands and to the mingle confection of the picnic table.

I scooped out to join Corners overloaded with frosting flowers.

Then, I charged.

I lunged.

I ran.

I chased Julian around the yard in laps until he dropped to the ground and wrestled the extra pieces from me, grabbing them into my face like a mud mask. We went for it at 10 minutes, laughing. And rolling around in the grass, Mia and our parents cheering and yelling and throwing more cake and see the ring, candles and all. When we finally came up for air, there wasn't much cake left, and the two of us were coated head-to-toe in blue rainbow chip frosting.

We stood up slowly, laughing with her mouth wide open as we have hardly called it a truce. That's not the picture Julian's arm around my shoulders, bits of cake and color chocolate chips in the grass clinging to her clothes and hair, everything warm and pink in the glow of the Setting Sun comment the whole summer stretched out before us I didn't even matter that Julian was going to college in the fall he'll be going to Cornell studying American literature, just over an hour away, he'd already started talking about my and me as we can visit.

And the novelty of the birthday cake wrestling match finally faded, Julian and I went inside to clean up. Behind the sliding deck door, shielded in the cool dark of the house from everyone out back, we stood in front of the kitchen sink not saying anything I stared at him in a sideways kind of way that I hope to expose the secret thoughts in my head thoughts that, despite my best efforts to contain them, went further than I let them go before.

   I held out a sticky hand and threatened him with another gob of frosting in an attempt to break the silence, afraid he'd hear my heart pounding under my T-shirt. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump-thump-thump.
Julian scooped some frosting from my outstretched hand and moved to close the space that separated us, changing absolutely everything that ever was or wasn't between us with a single raised eyebrow.

"(Y/n)," he said, dragging his frosted fingers through my hair. "Don't you know what it means when a boy pulls your hair at your birthday party?"

No. Just then, I didn't know what anything meant. I couldn't remember how we'd arrived in the kitchen, why we were covered in cake, why my best-friend-that's-a-boy was looking at me so differently, or even what my name was. I bit my lower lip to prevent my mouth from saying something lame without my brain's permission, like "Oh, Julian, all my wishes have come true!" I felt the stupidity rising in my throat and bit down harder, staring at his collarbone and the small piece of blue sea glass he wore on a leather cord around his neck, rising and falling.
Rising.
Falling.

Seconds? Hours? I didn't know. He'd made the necklace the year before from a triangular piece of glass he'd found during their family vacation to Zanzibar Bay, right behind the California beach house they rented for three weeks every summer. According to Julian, red glass was the rarest, followed by purple, then dark blue. To date he'd found only one red piece, which he'd made into a bracelet for Mia a few months earlier. She never took it off.