The Search for Lily Myers ✓

18 | Gravitational Attraction

Were her feet not still slightly sore from dancing when she woke up, Amelia might have believed that the night prior had all been a dream. It had certainly unfolded in a bizarre enough way to be unreal, and everything had happened so fast. One minute, she was closed off, desiring to be nothing more than a shadow lingering in the corners of the ballroom; the next, she cracked open, her feelings all laid bare against Henry's lips.

Henry. She wondered what in the world he was thinking right now.

He'd said he was going to call her today, but as she lingered in bed and stared up at the slow rotation of her ceiling fan, she was suddenly worried that he wouldn't. Now that it was a new day and she was back in the quotidian setting of her own room, it was much easier to recall how curt he'd been with her when he walked away than how sublime it had felt during those moments when they had seemed to be in agreement, when his mouth moved with hers.

But she had to give him the benefit of the doubt and she had to give him time—it was hardly ten in the morning yet. He might be busy today, preoccupied, and Amelia was not the center of his universe or any other one. Even the sun, in all its brilliant, blazing glory, was only the core of one singular solar system within one galaxy out of trillions of galaxies in the entire universe. And what was she compared to that?

She could wait for a phone call.

She was used to anxiety. It was practically a cohabitant in her body at this point, a second entity that resided within her. But what she wasn't used to was Henry being the source of her anxiety, and as hard as she tried not to think about it as she went about her day, it really sucked. She was used to him being the opposite of what was weighing her down—a source of reassurance, an antidote. This was unknown territory and she wasn't a fan of it at all.

When it was mid-afternoon, when lunchtime had already come and gone and he still hadn't called, Amelia began to feel a little more uneasy about it. She paced around her apartment, wishing she had more chores she needed to do today to distract herself with. Eventually, she caved in and called Natasha.

"I think I might have screwed up with Henry," she blurted as soon as Nat had answered, her face popping up on Amelia's screen in an arrangement of blurry pixels.

"What happened?"

"Promise you're not going to judge me."

She didn't really know why she was asking now when Nat had already kept such a level head for her sake throughout everything that had happened with Colton. It was a defense mechanism, she supposed.

"Of course I'm not gonna judge."

"I might have..." Her cheeks were already flushed and she hadn't spit it out yet. "...kissed him a little bit."

Though she looked momentarily surprised, Natasha managed to wipe the expression off of her face. Mostly, at least—her eyebrows were still raised ever so slightly.

"I didn't know it was like that between you guys."

"I didn't really know either—or at least not the extent of it—until it just was."

"Well, how did he react? I'm going to assume the answer is not great since you called me."

"Not great," Amelia agreed grimly. "I mean, he seemed to like kissing me, I guess. But then the second it was over he seemed to instantly regret it. And he said he'd call me today but he hasn't."

"Maybe he's just busy?"

"I hope that's it," she sighed. "I really don't know what I'm going to do if I scared him off."