He wanted to argue back, but then he thought... Yes. Yeah. A total coward.

“Just stop thinking bad thoughts.” Before he could interrupt, pretend he didn’t know what she meant, she continued. “You’re not allowed to think bad thoughts in my tree.”

He suddenly remembered the pages of homework he hadn’t completed and felt a stab of guilt and anxiety in his stomach.

“Stop it, Jack.”

“Okay. All right.” He leaned back onto a thick branch and propped his feet up, mirroring her position. “What should I think about?”

“Only beautiful things. Delicious things.”

He glanced over at her, and she was truly beautiful, with her red-brown hair and her toasty skin and all the things he knew about her, all the things he still didn’t know. And it was May, the real first breath of spring, Baltimore before it was stifling and humid, and yeah, he had homework to do, and he’d be going home soon, and something...something was dreadfully wrong with him that he didn’t want to kiss her, but—

Beautiful things.

His mind flashed on different hair, blond, and pale skin, sea-gray eyes, refined features. And if he closed his own eyes and let the image float, incorporeal, a fantasy, he could almost pretend that what he was feeling wasn’t wrong at all.

He allowed himself, in that moment, to imagine a different life.

For the next two years he spent Tuesday afternoons in the Japanese maple with Meg.

It became one of the best parts of his childhood. Their childhoods.

All these years later and she was still that girl to him, even though clinging to their youthful romance was one of the worst mistakes he had ever made, and in this sorrowful and necessary abandonment of their past, he wished that they could climb a tree again.

He watched her in the mirror, and he also wished that the image behind him was blond and pale and nasty and sarcastic and wild.

He had to move forward.

He wanted Theo so badly.

He had to let go.

“What do you want, Jack?”

His shoulders tensed up in the mirror, Meg’s voice breaking through the constant surge of memory that had been plaguing him more and more as he got older. He never meant to hurt her.

And he missed Theo so much that he could hardly breathe.

Could he really say it?

“I want...him.”

“Well.” She cleared her throat, shook her head, and rolled her eyes. “Okay. I was talking about the clothes.”

Oh no.

“Meg...”

“It’s fine.” She looked at him for a moment, studying his flushed face, and she murmured, “I think you always have. Wanted him.”

He laughed, shamefaced, but it felt incredible to have that essential and painful truth spoken out loud.

He wished he had known, back then. Had let himself know.