Now & Then (A Newland High School story)

1:00 am

"Can we just end this now?"

"I just don't understand why Kristin keeps contacting you." I stop walking, crossing my arms across my chest.

"I've told you before. I don't know." Aric is clearly getting frustrated, but our voices remain at a whisper. It's late, and the last thing we need is someone calling the cops for a fight in their front yard.

We've been leisurely walking for awhile now and are quite a few blocks from my house. Unsurprisingly, we haven't run into another person. It felt like we were in our own secret world...until Aric's ex-girlfriend started messaging.

They've been broken up for over a year now, and she doesn't go to our school so she should really have no reason to keep getting in touch with him. But she is relentless.

"Tell her to leave you alone."

"That makes it worse. If I respond at all she thinks it's an invitation to harass me. Trust me, it's best to just ignore it."

"And that's what you do? Every time?"

"Yes." He holds out his phone. "See for yourself."

In the back of my mind, I know this might be a test. Do I trust him? If I did, I wouldn't look at his phone. But Aric and I have been officially dating for three months now, and she's still doing this. There must be a reason.

Screw it. I'm looking.

I take his phone and start scrolling through the text chain titled 'Evil Ex'. Sure enough, it's completely one sided. She seems to send one every week or so. There are no outgoing messages.

"You could have erased yours though." I place the phone back in his hand.

It slips into his pocket and in the next second his hands are on my face. "Lilly, look at me. Do you think I'm lying to you? Do you think I'd do that to you?"

I hold his stare, not because I don't know what to to say, but because I have a tendency to get lost in his gaze. It makes me feel warm inside. And the sincerity in them is undeniable. "No, I don't think you'd do that."

"Thank you." He sighs. "And besides I told you that relationship was only about sex."

Now it's my turn to sigh. I step away from him, forcing his hands to drop, and begin walking again. "And I've told you that doesn't make me feel better about it."

"Well it should," he scuffles forward, catching up to me. "I wish you could just get into my brain somehow, then'd you'd see the difference."

"I have no desire to visualize that. Thank you very much."

"That's not what I meant."

"I know."

Aric has tried explaining it to me so many times, but I still can't grasp it. How could he have sex with someone he had no feelings for? How could being in a relationship that's not centered on our physical bodies be a bigger deal to him than one that was?

His hand grazes along my knuckles, asking to hold mine. I answer by lacing our fingers together. I'm not going to let her ruin my mood. I look ahead and see that we're getting close to the school's baseball field.

"Let's go sit in the dugout for a bit," I tell him. "And then I should probably go home."