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Author's Chapter Notes:
Title comes from Come Clean by Eisley.

That first date, drunk on the roof of her building watching stars and airplanes, he talks about going away. Slurred words about foreign countries and people who don’t know their names or anything about paper. And there’s a humming in her blood, beneath her skin, a warmth, a surge of life. She wants to touch him. She wants to kiss those corners of his jaw and say, yes, let’s go away. Anywhere, wherever. But it’s too soon for that and he’s asking her what phase the moon is in and making a joke about astronomy. Something obscene about taking off Orion’s belt. It isn’t funny but she laughs anyway.

She’s trying no to think about the years before and how she’d always been so hesitant and he’d always been so desperately hopeful. These things that collided in such an awful way, leaving her alone for the first time in ten years, turning her into a contradiction: terrified yet emboldened.

She had two bottles of wine in her apartment and now she has none. Well, she has two more sips of one. She takes one and he takes one and then it’s gone. He’s silly when he’s drunk, keeps making faces at her and telling her she’s pretty. It feels like high school and the first time a boy noticed her like that. She sadly thinks that maybe this is the first time a boy’s noticed her like this. And she rolls her head on the back of the lawn chair to look at him. Boyish and awkward, composed mostly of limbs that don’t fit in his chair the right way. He says, “What?” And she says, “Nothing.”

She keeps getting bitten by mosquitoes, but she doesn’t mind. It just means summer which now means this, him, them.



unfold is the author of 102 other stories.
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