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AMBAR SEES LOUIS running up to meet her as she stands outside her house, fiddling with her sweatshirt's strings. As she does, she gets that overwhelming feeling of butterflies—more like bees, and millions of them—in her stomach, and she can't help the smile that appears on her face when he stops beside her, smiling just as wide.
"Hi," he says. She giggles.
"Is that all we say?"
Louis looks amused. "It's just saying hello."
"Well, then," Ambar tells him. "Hi."
She's carrying a bag with junk food she already had in her house—Doritos, and some random package of cookies that was already opened. Louis offers to carry it for her, and she calls him a gentleman before attempting to hit him with the bag. He takes it as a no.
Ambar leads the way, sort of. She's ahead of Louis, but she's walking backwards while she rambles about her day. She has the tendency to do that, when she's getting comfortable with someone: she doesn't shut up. Louis doesn't seem bothered, only a little concerned because Ambar keeps bumping into things, but he's listening to her every word with glistening eyes. Ambar almost wants to point them out to him, but she thinks it'd make things a little awkward, even when they're in that stage where their attraction towards each other is a little obvious.
"My brother," Ambar is saying. "Is in law school, so he's barely around anymore, but he was at home this morning and we watched Criminal Minds together, so that was—"
She cuts herself off—or, more like, she gets cut off by an outside source, because she walks her back straight into a streetlight, hitting her head on the metal pole and groaning mid sentence. Louis gasps.
"Oh my God," he says, and he sounds like he's trying hard not to laugh. "Are you okay?"
"That hurt so bad." Ambar rubs her head. "Okay, no more walking backwards."
Louis laughs. "No idea why you were doing that in the first place."
Ambar makes a noise, and she doesn't want to tell him that she wants to be able to look at him while she's talking to him, almost as if he'd disappear. She's just getting to know him, but she feels like he's just a fragment of her imagination and he'll disappear from between her hands like air. Not that she's holding him, though. That'd be a little awkward, she thinks.
She ends up not answering, just grabbing his hand (she is holding him now, but it doesn't count) and leading him faster towards the convenience store down the street from their spot. Louis doesn't complain, and Ambar thinks she feels him tightening the hold on her hand. She wants to melt into a puddle of like, honey or whatever the poets say nowadays.
