The Short and Long of It

So She Did.

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Matthew made a split second decision when he chose to sit on the bed with Daphne. The rest of their friends were sitting on the floor, propped against pillows and wrapped in blankets, and Matthew easily could have plopped down between Aiden and Marcella and been perfectly happy. Instead, he turned out the lights and hopped onto the bed beside Daphne, who was sitting cross legged with a bowl of pop-corn on her lap.

As Aiden pressed play and the opening credits of the movie began to roll, he turned around with a stern look, "Don't you dare spill popcorn on my blanket." After that warning, he turned back toward the tv.

"Care to share?" Matthew gestured to the popcorn in Daphne's lap as he scooted closer to her and wrapped Aiden's blanket around himself.

She didn't even glance away from the screen as she held the bowl out to him. The cool light from the tv flickered over her face, making the shadows on her face more extreme. Daphne was a severe kind of pretty. Her cheekbones were high, her nose was exactly straight, and her blue eyes were icy and sharp. She had a habit of shooting him freezing glares whenever one of his jokes crossed a line—which was often—that made his blood run cold for a second.

It annoyed him that she was so frigid with him all the time, especially when she laughed, grabbed Cole's wrists, and dragged him onto the dance floor or when she brushed his fingers through Marcella's hair, or traced over the lines of Aiden's face when he put his head in her lap. The closest he had gotten to that with her was when she grabbed the front of his shirt and dumped ice cream down his shirt.

Sometimes she gave him the shadow of a smile when he called her Elsa, Ice Queen, or Frosty. And as the movie that Aiden coerced the group into choosing started, she leaned back against the wall so that her shoulder brushed his and her thigh pressed against his.

Both Matthew and Daphne were aware of the two points of contact that connected them but neither of them said anything, because, as they both reminded themselves sternly, it didn't mean anything.

Daphne bit down on a kernel of popcorn, trying to focus on the movie's dialogue or the sound of her own chewing. Instead her mind kept flickering back to how warm Matthew was, or at least how warm the blanket that separated their skin was.

This wasn't a new conundrum to her, she always seemed to fall back into this pattern. She would become friends with a guy, a guys who never posed any real threat to her heart because he was annoying, shorter than her, and absolutely not interested in her, and then suddenly she would be thinking about how nice it would be to rest her head against his shoulder.

Luckily, Daphne had a great back up plan. If she avoided any physical contact and iced him out, he eventually would distance himself from her and get a girlfriend, and then Daphne never had to worry about having her heart broken, just bruised.

Matthew had thrown a wrench in her plans by plopping next to her on the bed, but all she had to do was remind herself why he would never have feelings for her. One, he's shorter than her and short boys are insecure about that. Two, he liked blondes and Daphne was not blonde, she was very boring brunette. Three, she was was awkward, he had said as much himself, and she had zero experience with boys. Daphne had never even kissed anyone, and Mathew had been arrested because he got caught having sex in the woods.

Matthew leaned over, not taking his eyes off the screen and whispered into the ear of Daphne, who was very much not his type, "Are you going to hog the popcorn for the whole movie?"