Despite my desperate need for caffeine, served in a coffee mug or intravenously, the first thing I do at the office is slide onto the corner of Madge's desk. I owe her an apology.
She shouldn't be here—it's only the morning after the funeral—but tearing workaholic Madge Mellark from her clients would be harder than pulling apart two fragments of soldered metal. She even tried to come in the morning following her mother's heart attack, and we practically had to call in a SWAT team to take her away. She needed time to grieve.
She still needs more time to grieve, but I'm not here to tell her that.
I'm here to tell her:
"Madge, I'm so sorry for bailing on you."
She's in her swivel chair, suddenly gazing up at me with those faded-denim eyes, which are carbon copies of her brother's. Hers hold not even one freckle of the accusation I'd expected.
No, not expected. Hoped for. Because I feel like shit—Madge, my coworker and best friend since freshman year of college, lost her mother last week, and I told her I'd stay with her at her apartment after the funeral. We were going to eat raw cookie dough straight out of the tube and binge-watch Grey's until sunrise. But I ditched her. I haven't felt so guilty in years. Because even though her mother, Mayor Mellark, was a grade-A jerk loved by only her, her father, and the occasional politician or CEO snuggled in her back pocket, Madge needed her best friend last night, and I left her. And for a reason that arguably justifies death by firing squad.
So, I was hoping she'd be mad. Instead, she just pats the back of my hand. "Don't worry about it, Kat. Are you feeling better this morning?"
Oh, I'm feeling great. Apart from the Manhattan-sized hole the guilt's punched through my chest, physically, I haven't felt this revitalized in months, maybe even years, because last night was nothing short of a spiritual reawakening. But I can't tell her this. It'd topple the whole charade.
"So much better," I say, hand settling on my stomach. "It must've just been the alcohol." Last night, after I remembered our plans—only after it was too late to go back to the reception and pretend I'd never left—I'd called her to spew the first (and worst) excuse that came to mind: I got sick. Took an Uber home. Gonna try to sleep it off.
"How much did you drink? I don't think I even saw you once with a glass."
"I didn't have that much—" Or any— "so I guess my stomach's just getting weak in my old age." I laugh and try to swallow back the nervous edge to my voice. "Now I'm just waiting for the ol' hip to give out."
"You know, Dad needed knee surgery at thirty. You could be four years away from your first replacement at that rate."
"Yikes. Too real." I grimace. "But, in all seriousness—Madge, I feel awful. I wanted to be there for you last night."
She leans back in her chair. "Really, Katniss, don't feel bad. I ended up staying home—the last guests didn't leave until after midnight, and I was so wiped out from all the mingling that I just passed out upstairs."
This should make me feel better. But the cavity in my chest only gapes wider, and I rub the back of my neck. "Let me make it up to you sometime."
"Come to Dewey's with us tonight, then. Peeta and I are getting drinks."
Responding to her brother's name, my stomach starts wrenching and spazzing like it's losing a fight with a Taser. And I'm losing a fight with the muscles in my face, because they also want to start jerking in all different directions, and I have to keep my cool. I have to act like I have every other time Peeta's been brought up.
And… how was that, exactly? I know the hang time of her question is stretching way too long as I rack my brain for the standard reaction, the one I've been instinctively deploying for the six years that he and I have also been best friends, but when the cadence of his name hums through my head, instead of those millions of moments, all that comes to mind is one image: furrowed brow, taut jaw, breath caught somewhere in the tight tendons of his neck, eyes fighting the desire to squeeze shut so they could stay trained on me, on us...
I shudder.
"Katniss?" Madge nudges.
I realize I've left her waiting, just like I realize that my cerebrum isn't about to save me any time soon, so I keep as straight a face as I can and nod.
"Yeah. Sure. Dewey's will work."
No, Traitor Cerebrum suddenly interjects, Dewey's most certainly will not work. Not if Peeta's there.
But I have to make it work. I flex my knuckles, digging them into my temples, hoping to relieve the pressure as I remind myself that I have no choice but to make it work: One misstep and the truth will come gushing from the seams of my being in one unstoppable, destructive deluge. It'll drown us all. And we'll all be dead. Dead, dead, dead.
All because I broke my years-old promise to Madge, Peeta, and myself last night—the promise that I would never, ever do anything stupid that'd loosen the screws bolting together her, her brother, and me, the city's most dynamic three musketeers.
Which is something that sleeping with Peeta Mellark would unquestionably do.
I'm having a staring contest with the meat and cheese platter, flaunting my self-control as the salami flaunts its ever-so-seductive existence, when I feel the air behind me shift and grow heavier.
"I can only hope that one day, someone will look at me the way you look at deli meat," a voice says, and I fight a smile.
"Ah, if only that degree of love could be replicated."
Now I turn, greeted by Niagara eyes and a smile that could resolve wars. I instantly scowl, socking him in the arm.
"Ow!" he chokes out, and he moves to massage the swell of muscle—tight and rounded from years of lifting heavy sacks of flour at his bakery—as soon as my knuckles pull away. "What's the deal, Everdeen?"
"That smile is dangerous, kid. At least act like you're mourning. The guests might start getting the right idea."
"Sorry, no can do. Skipped Theater 101." I try to infuse my glare with more venom, but that's impossible with Peeta Mellark. He sighs. "If it makes you feel better, there's no conga line going through my head. I'm not rejoicing over her death. Especially since Madge is so heartbroken."
I step in, replacing his fingers with mine as I rub his arm. "I know." And I do—because although Peeta's relationship with their abusive mother made Capulet-Montague interactions look chummy, Madge loved that woman, and Peeta loves Madge. He hates seeing her in pain. "At least Madge is within a two-room radius of the only dozen people who could stand the woman," I add.
"A dozen?" His hand claps over his heart. "Your generosity moves me."
"Oh, something's about to move you, alright—" I tighten my fist; my windup is theatric, slow enough for him to catch this punch mid-air. I expect him to swat my hand down, but instead, his palm curls around my fist, bringing it to his chest. Delicately, he unfolds my fingers like an invitation, spreading them against his heart in an unexpectedly tender motion, and his eyes go soft.
"Katniss?" he says, voice velvet.
I blink at him once, twice, three times.
"That," he murmurs, "was one of the most pathetic threats I've ever heard."
Work drags by like a sloth in the sun, made only worse by the anticipation chewing away at my stomach. Before last night, knowing I had an upcoming evening with Madge and Peeta would be the shining light to guide me through endless paperwork and eight hours of merciless AC blasts. Now, the Imperial March plays in a menacing loop in my head, and I feel nauseous.
I tell myself I don't know why I slept with Peeta, because that's the only way I can digest this situation. Until last night, I can't recall even being attracted to Peeta, let alone eager to jump his bones. Of course, I've always found the boy beautiful, ever since the first time he visited Madge in our freshman dorm room—I can remember being charmed by my roommate's brother, older than us by two years, whose hair and eyes were the same shade as hers, only his hair curled in golden locks around the edges of a KC Royal's baseball cap—but the pull I always felt toward him was the same as the pull I'd feel toward the sunrise: drawn in by its beauty, intrigued, satisfied, made calm.
But the sunrise doesn't make you want to take your top off.
It had never felt like more with Peeta. This is partly because the closeness between Madge and me has always given Siamese twins a run for their money, which made my regard for her brother, upon meeting him, take on a form very similar to her own. Thus, the three of us have been inseparable for six years.
That feeling—or lack thereof—is also, of course, partly due to my own refusal to let it become more. During a drunken 3-AM heart-to-heart-to-heart about four years ago, when the three of us had collapsed into a cuddle puddle on Peeta's living room floor, I promised them that I would never do anything to ruin this. We all knew, but didn't have to say, that one of the easiest ways for me to break that promise would be having revolutionary sex with Peeta.
I'm not sure what flipped that switch last night. I wish I could blame it on booze, but both Peeta and I were sensible enough to steer clear of the open bar last night. I wish I could blame it on grief, but the amount of affection we felt for that malicious tyrant could fit inside a grain of sand. I wish, even, though less so than the others, that I could blame it on him, that I could say he initiated it, and I was too shocked to say no, but Peeta's the type of guy to have consent stamped right at the top of his moral constitution. And neither one of us initiated it, anyway. It was like the thought—the need—the whatever-it-was—came to us both at the same time, like a scent that wafts between two people, and their heads snap up in curiosity, in recognition, and it takes root and just… happens.
It just happened.
I hear Madge sigh behind me, and I whirl around to watch her shrug into her winter coat. "I'm headed out," she says. "I told Peeta to meet us at Dewey's around nine. That'll work for you too, right?"
My gaze snaps to the clock on my computer, which reads 5:16, and I realize that the workday, somehow, has ended. I turn back. "Nine sounds perfect."
"I'll see you there." She slings her purse over her shoulder and pivots, like she's about to walk away, but then she hesitates, and pivots back into place. Her eyes dig into the carpet at her feet. "Hey, I need to… get something off my chest."
"Please."
She disappears momentarily to roll the chair out of Annie Cresta's cubicle and slides it up to me, plunking down in it, our knees grazing. She leans forward, and I brace myself, hoping she'll finally berate me for my unforgivable abandonment.
"It's about Peeta," she says. "I think I—I might be mad at him."
Not what I expected. But still startling. Madge and Peeta, just like Madge and me, and Peeta and me, are fanatical bickerers. But they don't fight. At least, not to the degree implied by the acidic confusion in Madge's tone. The only matter they've ever had reason to war over was their disagreement about Mayor Mellark—Madge is loyal to people, and Peeta is loyal to causes, which is why Madge could resent her mother's politics but still love her while Peeta considered her a plague on morality—but they promised each other, too, that they wouldn't do anything to ruin their own friendship. Their mother therefore became a forbidden topic.
But, I suppose, since the woman just died, all that bottled-up dissonance finally bursting into the open would make sense.
"Did he say something?" I ask.
She shakes her head. "I know he and Mom didn't get along. And I'm glad he helped with the funeral—I know he knew how much it all meant to me—but I thought he'd at least stick around a while, you know? But way before the reception was even over, I looked everywhere for him, and I couldn't find him. His car wasn't in the driveway anymore. It wasn't even eight o'clock yet, Kat, and he left the reception without saying goodbye to me or Dad."
I don't know what makes me say it. Traitor Cerebrum, maybe.
"I mean, I left before eight o'clock, too."
I think I've said this to take the sting out of what he did, but I realize only after the words are hanging in the air that this could lead her right to the truth.
I wait for recognition to sink into her features. Instead, her eyes soften. "Yeah, but you were feeling sick. And you, at least, thought to call me afterward. He didn't say anything until this morning—just shot me a text that said, Hey, I'm really sorry for ducking out early. I hope you understand. Like—no! No, I don't understand!"
"The reception was hard on him," I say calmly, hoping that stirring her sympathies will throw a blanket on the fire. But she shoots me a look, so I continue, "Not nearly as stressful as it was for you, of course, but still rough, because he had to play-act the Dutiful Son to dozens of relatives, make up a hundred sentimental stories to tell, console people—I don't think that excuses running out without telling you, though."
"Did he tell you all this?"
I shrug. "We had a pretty profound conversation by the meat and cheese platter."
"Of course. Where else would you want to have deep talks?"
She grins, though it flattens quickly, eyes flickering back to our hands. "Makes sense, I guess. I'm just being overly sensitive."
"Madge, if anyone's allowed to be upset about anything right now, it's you." I nudge her knee with mine. "And don't let this conversation stop you from chewing him out over a beer. He messed up."
I'm grateful she's focused on her hands and not my face, because it means she misses the guilt tugging at the muscles around my eyes and mouth. Every inch of me screams to amend that last sentence to We messed up, so I mash my lips into a hard line, gulping back the sound.
Madge has sent me upstairs on a quest for a tennis bracelet, which I decide, after hearing about all its square-cut diamonds, must be called that because it's worth an entire tennis court, plus the balls, rackets, and a complementary Serena Williams.
It was a gift from her aunt, apparently. And if she "runs into that odious woman for two seconds tonight" and she's "not wearing the damn bracelet," she will also soon be "not wearing my damn flesh on my damn bones."
So I'm sifting through her jewelry box when a figure appears in the doorway.
"Someone, call the police!" Peeta whisper-cries into his invisible hand phone. "She's stealing my precious jewels!"
"Precious jewels. You can say that again." I push my hair behind my ear as I continue to rifle through the box. "This missing bracelet could be exchanged for enough rice to end world hunger."
"Let's sell it, then. My mother will turn over in her grave for the next millennium."
I stand, step toward him, fold my arms, stare. "And you can't even wait until after the funeral reception to say shit like this."
"Some people use humor to cope, you know."
"And some people are going to burn in hell."
His eyes spark, and, realizing I've made it way too easy for him, I slap my hand over his mouth before he can connect that statement to his mother.
"Let's not talk about her for the rest of the night, okay?"
"More than okay with me." He walks around me to Madge's vanity, bending over the jewelry box. "You're looking for the bracelet Aunt Effie bought her for Christmas?"
"So it seems."
I slide next to him, our shoulders and arms brushing as we pick through strings of gold, silver, platinum. The room is quiet, though the smooth jazz playing downstairs gently soaks up through the walls, the warm descants just an echo of the real songs. I feel oddly at peace, even though I don't quite know why.
His fingers pinch something small in one of the pawn-sized compartments. He pulls it out, curls it in his palm, then steps back; I turn around to eye him, about keeling over when I watch him lower onto one knee.
His eyes are moons, locking with mine.
"Katniss Everdeen," he whispers, and his palms open.
In them: a silver band that offers a single pearl, grey-pink and milky.
"Will you make me the happiest man on this planet," he murmurs, "and be… my BFF?"
My heart must've stopped beating for a moment there, because it angrily thuds to life, its rhythm making itself heard over the smooth jazz wafting from downstairs.
"Your best friend forever?" I swallow to steady my voice, trying to play along by stroking my chin. "I don't know, Peet. You're neck and neck with Madge."
"You—" He sputters, grasping his throat like he can't breathe. "You're cheating on me? With my own sister?"
"It's just—" I press the back of my palm to my forehead, looking theatrically to the ceiling. "—the way she spoons!"
He stands too quickly for me to process the sudden shift; by the time my eyes have adjusted, he's standing right before me, taking my hands in his to transfer over the pearl ring. Then his hands are around mine for the second time tonight, the gesture less measured now but still affectionate, holding the ring against my heart.
"Just give me a chance, Miss Everdeen," he whispers, his face so close to mine that I can taste the honey-vanilla on his breath, "to show you how to really spoon."
Even without the cinematic diction, the joke is still obvious, because this is Peeta and me in our element, and everything's always a joke. But there's something in the closeness of his body, in the silvery flecks dancing in the blue of his eyes, that's as sobering as a cold shower.
Or maybe it has the opposite effect. And I don't know why it would: Peeta and I must've been this physically close a thousand times before, but it feels like the threads of this moment are of a different color than before, just thin, tiny detailing that would be easy to miss, but they hold each piece of the moment together in a way that makes you realize—if you haven't missed it—just how monumental the tiny shifts can be. Maybe the soft swell of the jazz music changes the needlework, or maybe it's the intimate curl of our hands against my chest, around a pearl, so small and simple but beautiful.
This thought erupts in one instant. And it's not my thought, nor is it his—it's as if it generates in the mingling of our breath, unfolding invisibly in the air, and as we both inhale, the thought's pulled into our mouths and lungs, and I can see it work its way through his neck and face, blooming in his cheeks in soft, pink patches, and in his eyes, which are watching the same colors and light bloom in mine.
His breath stalls between his teeth just as mine does.
He doesn't say, "Oh," and I don't say, "Oh," but this is what is said in the roundness of our lips and eyes. And then the muscles around our features go soft with heat.
He doesn't kiss me. I don't kiss him. Because the kiss, like the thought, generates between us, and suddenly, we are consumed.
Caring about fashion is not in my coding. Never has it been. So when I spend almost an hour whipping clothes around my room, trying on an almost criminal number of outfits, I know I must be coming down with some terminal illness.
That, or something that might be even scarier: I'm dressing for someone.
Okay, so I know it's the second option. I've always been a little emotionally inept, but I'm not clueless: When I return to the mirror again and again, each time wearing something different but wondering the same thing—in what way will the blue eyes under the even bluer baseball cap pass over this—I know that I'm actually trying to impress Peeta.
Fearing I'll soon need a paper bag to breathe into, I curl up on the floor and dial one of three numbers I know by heart.
She picks up on the second ring.
"Hello?"
"Prim, what do you know about watermelon seeds?"
There's a pause. "That they… sometimes can be found inside of watermelons?"
"What about if you eat them? Can they actually sprout inside your stomach?"
"Katniss, you're a twenty-six-year-old with a bachelor's in food science. Please tell me you know that watermelon seeds can't germinate inside the body."
"Well, I know that it feels like I have a giant melon in my stomach..."
The line whistles with a sharp intake of breath. "Oh, dear God. You're pregnant."
"What? No!"
Another pause. "Then…?"
"No, I'm not pregnant, Prim. Just feeling a little closer to death with every coming second."
"Ah, existentialism."
"No, Prim, I'm—I'm really freaked out. I think I messed up. Big time."
In the background on her end of the line, a door opens and closes. Then, a male's voice: Thresh, her husband. Because my little sister may be four years younger than me, but she already has her life packaged neatly and wrapped with a bow.
Her voice is softer, more sober, when she speaks again. "What's going on?"
"I messed up everything in my life that's good." I lay out on my back, curling half my body under the bed. The shadows pool against my arm and leg. "At the reception last night, Peeta and I were talking, and something just… snapped. I don't know how it happened or why it did. But we ended up kissing, and then—" Prim may be an adult, but she's my baby sister who will always be smothered by my information filter—"we did a little bit more than kissing."
A third pause.
And then: "With Peeta?"
"Yeah."
"Peeta Mellark?"
"No, Peeta Pan."
"Wow. I always thought you'd be so great together, but I didn't expect... wow. So—this is good, yeah? Or, it will be?"
"I can't imagine something that incinerates my lungs is good."
"You haven't thought about it." Not a question.
"I'm trying not to, Prim. He's my best friend. Madge is my best friend. If there's anything going on between us, it'll completely mutate the group dynamic, and—"
"But you already slept with him, Katniss. That's changed things. And you can't undo that."
"Well, I don't know if it has to change things. I haven't seen him since, so I have no idea what this is going to do. We might end up pretending it didn't happen."
"Was it that bad?"
Au contraire, I think, but I refuse to focus on that part of last night, because if I had to base this decision on the sex alone, I would've called Channel 4 the second we were done to alert them to how legendary of a pair we are.
But I can't base my decision on the sex alone. I can't base my decision on the sex at all. There are too many other variables competing for my attention.
So, I tell Prim: "It doesn't matter whether it was good or not. My decision will be solely based on doing what's best for our friendship." I pinch the bridge of my nose. "And I have no clue what that is. I think it would be forgetting last night, but I don't know. I'll have to ask him what he thinks tonight—"
"You're seeing him tonight?"
"With Madge. Who doesn't know yet. So—that'll be interesting." I swallow. My voice becomes shaky. "Prim… I've tried on twelve different outfits tonight."
I swear, I can almost hear her jaw smack solid against the floor.
"You're in love with him."
"I'm not in love with him! I don't even know if I like him!"
She goes on like she hasn't heard me. "You must really love him. Don't think you ever cared about how you looked with Gale—"
"I'm not in love with Peeta."
"Does this mean you're going to start wearing makeup? We can go to Sephora together, if you want—"
"I'm not in love with Peeta!"
She giggles—a feathery, genuine kind of giggle that makes it impossible to be mad—and my lungs relax. "I'll drop it. I'm sure you know the situation better than I do, anyway," she says. "But here's what I know: Peeta's a really, really good guy, Katniss. I know he doesn't want to ruin things, either, so don't worry about fighting this battle alone."
I don't know how she knew exactly what I needed to hear, but suddenly, the watermelon is gone.
"Thanks, Prim. You're wonderful."
"Anytime," she says, her smile warm in her voice. And then: "So, tell me, Katniss. How wonderful was he?"
With a velocity that could blow Usain Bolt out of the water, I smash my thumb against my phone screen, cutting off the call.
We kiss and kiss and kiss, and Peeta slides a hand up my back and under my braid, knitting his fingers in the dark hair at the top of my neck. We each have one hand cupped between us, the pearl tucked in our palms.
He holds me to him. I shiver against his body, and suddenly he's pushing me back, sandwiching me between the back wall and the hard planes of muscle under his shirt. His lips sear heat into mine, then into my cheek and jaw and neck as his kisses trail to my collar.
"This is not the best place to be doing this," he murmurs against my skin. But he doesn't stop.
"Or the best time." But I don't stop, either.
"We should—"
"Yeah."
But it takes another minute before he finally braces his hands against my shoulders, gently pinning me to the wall as he tears himself away.
I try not to think, because thought and regret—in these situations—are soul sisters, and his lips and hands and breath have rendered me too vulnerable to stomach shame. So I strain against his hands, winding my fingers in his golden curls.
The sting of his refusal, then, makes itself felt in every square inch of my bones.
"We're not doing this," he pants, and he must notice the wounded tangling of my eyebrows, because he adds, "Not here. Not in my sister's bedroom."
I recover fast. "In your bedroom?"
A soft bell-chime laugh, seductive in its effortless lilt, collects in his mouth, and he kisses me with it. "Because nothing complements mourning like the squeal of upstairs bedsprings." He kisses me again. "We should go to my place." Another kiss. "Or yours." Yet another. "Any venue that isn't a funeral reception."
Terror grips my lungs, wringing them out at the thought of the forthcoming car ride—so much can happen in ten minutes. Doubt, disgust, desperate backpedaling… "But think about how much it would've horrified your mother."
"Careful. Thought we weren't talking about Satan herself anymore." His thumb sweeps over my cheek, tucking a few stray hairs behind my ears. "I'm not changing my mind, if that's what you're worried about."
Damn Peeta. Reads me easier than a stupid children's book.
"Unless you change your mind first," he adds. But then his lips brush over my jaw, pressing two hot kisses to the skin where my ear and cheek meet, and he doesn't realize—or maybe he does, and that's the point—that's he's eliminating that option before it can be considered.
Dewey's is only two blocks down O street from my apartment, so I walk, even though it means casing myself in more layers than an onion to protect myself from the January chill.
When I arrive, the nerve endings in my nose and cheeks have dissolved into near-numb pins and needles. I brace myself for Madge's laughter and Peeta's refusal to call me anything but "Rudolph," because teasing is our love language, and that's just how we roll.
Thinking about him, even for a fleeting moment, brings the insta-Tasered feeling back to my stomach. And it only amplifies when I slip through the door to see him with Madge at a nearby booth. His floppy curls peek out from the rim of his blanched baseball cap—the same one he wore when I first met him, the same one he always wears, even though Madge and I have collectively bought him three different ones over the past several Christmases—and his cheeks are flushed along the apples. My own cheeks mimic the coloring, partly because this is the first I've seen of him since his goodbye kiss this morning, and partly because the blush reminds me of this morning, in the early hours, when it was paired with other irresistible expressions and sounds.
Rattled, I try desperately to pull myself together. I'm grateful when I realize I've got extra time, because Madge and Peeta don't look up from each other to remark my entrance.
And then I'm alarmed, because the tension strangling their body language—rigid shoulders, incisive glares, knuckles white from straining against their beer bottles—is more ostentatious than a hydrogen bomb. When she said she was mad, I had no idea Madge meant this.
I stand in the doorway of the bar, too dazed to move. I can hear Madge hiss, "I didn't ask you to come for Mom. I asked you to come for me."
"And I was there for you, Madge!" His voice is sharp, but the edges are pierced with pain and exhaustion, as if this is the tenth time he's said this. "I was there for the planning, for the funeral, and then for two full goddamn hours into the reception!"
"You shouldn't have left early. You know how bad that looks? You were her son."
"Who used to moonlight as her punching bag!"
I see more than hear Madge's broken intake of breath, distress firing a tremor down her arm that knocks over her beer. Peeta slants forward to catch it, but not before it sprays the cuff of her sleeve. She shoots out of her chair.
"I—I need to clean up," she stammers, making a beeline to the bathroom without even seeing me.
The instinctual desire to avoid conflict tugs me toward the door, but a more human, sympathetic urge makes me gravitate toward Peeta and Madge's table. So I stand, cemented in the doorway, unable to give into either rivaling force.
As the pros and cons of each alternative scroll from temple to temple, my decision is made for me. Because Peeta, either out of luck or some paranormal sensitivity to my presence, looks up from his hands and meets my eyes.
The invisible cable towing me backward snaps, and in an instant, I'm seated across from him, every word in my head drowned into oblivion by the apologetic tide of his stare.
This is not how I wanted seeing him again to be. Or maybe it's exactly how I wanted it to be—with a more pressing matter scorching the edges of our tongues and teeth, demanding our focus so that we can't possibly talk about anything else. I hope that's what this is. Because how can something ruin a friendship if it's never even acknowledged?
"I hope you brought popcorn," Peeta laughs, trying and failing to veil the guilt at the edges of his words. "The Rumble in the Jungle, 2.0. I'm Foreman, she's Ali, and I'm about to get knocked on my ass."
Your fantastic ass, I think, and the idea sends pink clawing at my cheeks and neck. "Is she really that mad?" I divert.
He drags his palm down his face. "The police won't even find my body."
"Well, at least I'll miss you."
I almost have an aneurysm when his fingers tangle with mine over the table, appreciation and remorse warring in his smile, because I can't remember, for the life of me, if his eyes always glinted like this when he looked at me, or if this development has happened over the past calendar day.
I wish I knew what he was thinking. Then, it'd be a thousand times easier to decide what I'm thinking. Right now, the uncertainty hangs like fog in my head, wrapping everything I think and do in grey mist.
"So," he begins, giving my hand a squeeze before releasing it. "How was your day, Everdeen?"
I consider saying, Felt like shit. But then he'd ask why, and I'd have to explain the guilt, which would inevitably tap open the forbidden topic. So then I consider saying, Pretty great, actually! But he'd ask about that, too, and there's no way in hell I'd fess up to the euphoria, physical and emotional, that rules you after having what's arguably the best sex of your life.
So, I settle on: "I'm alive, aren't I?" Because what topic is safer than general existence?
But Peeta will never stop surprising me.
"So it seems," he says, cracking a grin. "It's a miracle we both survived last night."
Instinctively I flinch away from him. Either my body is desperate to distance itself from the subject material, or my ego is damaged and afraid of what he means. Could it have really been that bad?
The panic must manifest in my expression, likely in the slight downward twist of my lips, because suddenly Peeta's eyes crinkle with amusement—the kind you see in a mother keeping her baby from draping spaghetti over his ear, or in a quarterback watching his coach fall victim to an icy Gatorade bath. If his smirk were more derisive in nature, I'd have cause to get defensive… but Peeta is to malice as the moon is to oxygen, so I can't mask my humiliation as anger. Damn Mellark and his inexorable virtue.
"We should just pretend it never happened," I sputter out when nothing else comes to mind. Usually, Peeta and I dazzle each other with our wit, but this situation has left both my mouth and my reservoir of insults dry. All I'm armed with are my true feelings and a lifetime supply of embarrassment.
Mercifully, he doesn't dwell on my ruffled feathers. Instead, he says simply, "World Series champs don't give back their trophy in the morning."
Oh, no, no, no. "You're comparing me to a trophy?"
"What?" His amusement disintegrates into horror. "No—no!"
"Misogyny is not a good color on you, Mellark." He should know better than anyone to avoid comments like this—he's witnessed me sucker-punch handsy chauvinists at the bar before.
"You need to brush up on your metaphors, Everdeen. If anything, I was comparing you to a champion, not a stupid hunk of metal." He takes off his baseball cap to ruffle his curls. "I was trying to say that when something good happens to you, you don't turn your back on it."
I take a moment to dissect his words. So, last night was… something good. Something to hold on to.
Through a throat gritty as sandpaper, I rasp, "What are you saying, Peeta?"
I think I know. But I want him to spell it out, strum the melody of this sonata to make sure I'm reading the music right.
He opens his mouth. But before he can speak, a shadow casts over the table.
"My sleeve's going to smell like beer forever," Madge says, hovering awkwardly at the mouth of the booth. The starchy viscosity of her words tells us that although she's still upset, she's not about to smash a bottle over anyone's head.
"And your favorite sweater, too," I say. "Poor thing."
She looks down at the navy, cable-knit pullover. "You've been a good friend, Blue." Then her eyes meet mine. "How long have you been here?"
"About three minutes." I feign obliviousness with a shrug.
"Well, I think I'm coming down with whatever you had last night," she says in a pained mumble, avoiding our eyes. "Anyhow, I think I'm going to bounce."
"Madge—" It's Peeta who speaks now, but she just shakes her head and grabs her coat from behind me.
"I'll call you both when I get home, okay?"
Before either of us can open our mouths, she's hightailing it out of the bar.
I pitch a glare at Peeta, but he's already one step ahead of me, scrambling out of the booth and after her. He intercepts her by the door; their voices are too hushed this time to allow eavesdropping, and I can see only his face, but the soft warmth of his features, and the hand that slides up her arm to gently cup her elbow, all ring of sincere apology.
But Madge just shakes her head and slips past him, out into the cold.
Sliding back into the booth, he drags his fingers down his cheeks like he's trying to tear away the skin. "I don't know how to fix things," he groans. "We never fight, Katniss."
"I know."
"She's going to hate me forever."
"Which isn't fair to you. I deserve half the blame—"
"I think her argument is that I had an obligation, which you didn't."
"So… I deserve two-fifths of the blame, then." His slight smile dimples his cheeks, and I continue, "She's upset about your mother, and she hasn't had the chance to relieve all this tension building up from the grief. Now, if I would've actually stuck to my promise, and wallowed with her last night—"
"Ah." He drums his fingers on the table, narrowed eyes unreadable. "You regret it, then?"
I'm not ready to answer this. I'm still not sure where he stands and am thus unsure of where I stand, except that it's right down the block from Utter Insecurity and cattycorner to Oh, Shit.
I weigh my words carefully and say, "I regret hurting Madge."
He nods in agreement. "We should get matching shirts that say Asshole 1 and Asshole 2."
"And show up at her apartment with a boombox on our shoulders."
"That'd never work," he says, shaking his head. "She hates Say Anything."
"I thought she loved that movie!"
"No, I love that movie. Madge thinks anything out of the '80s should be incinerated."
"And why am I friends with her again?"
"For the hand-me-down tennis bracelets." His eyes glimmer.
And then I feel even worse. I smack my forehead. "We never even found that last night, did we?"
"Too busy finding other things."
I look up to meet his wiggling eyebrows, and I consider throwing Madge's forgotten beer bottle at his too-pretty face, but ultimately decide assault should be plan B. "You better be referring to your car keys, Mellark."
"Nope. Something else that starts with a C—"
A disgusted retching sound rips through my throat, and I bury my face in my arms on the table. And I refuse to look up; seeing my traffic-light cheeks will only give him more ammo, and I already feel riddled with bullets. Plus, I want too badly to riddle him with bullets. I need to wait for the anger to dissipate.
"Aw, come on," he coos, voice soft but not without its amused edge. "Is Katniss embarrassed?"
"Katniss is nearly homicidal," I grunt back.
"I'm sorry." Though he laughs, the fingertips that slide over my elbow communicate earnestness. "I probably crossed a line."
"Or fifty."
"You're too fun to tease, Everdeen. Sometimes, I can't help but lose my head."
"Let me help you find it, then." My eyes snap up. "It's about ten feet up your ass."
I hope to see his cheeks develop a rouge tint of their own, but his eyes only widen, hands coiling into air guns. "She shoots, she scores!"
Peeta is incapable of feeling embarrassment. And I'm incapable of hiding the buttons he's become so talented at pushing.
I'm also incapable of hating him for it. Because somewhere, under the white-hot veneer of mortification, I like his teasing, too. It's one of the reasons we work so well. (As friends, I mentally correct Traitor Cerebrum.)
But of course, there's only so much teasing I can handle.
"Peeta," I begin, hoping he'll register the sincerity of the strain in my voice. "I love our bits, okay? But I can't joke with you about... this."
Though our friendship is rooted in tongue-in-cheek jests, it's also grown from genuine respect, so I trust that Peeta will be able to drop our discussion of last night if he sees how much it bothers me. Maybe then, we can go back to talking about easier things. Like John Cusack. Or deli meat.
So I nearly choke on my tongue when he nods and says, "Alright. Then let's talk about it seriously."
My head nearly combusts. "I didn't mean—"
"We'll have to have this conversation eventually, Katniss."
"I guess." Mumbling, I tack on, "In our graves."
"The sooner, the better."
"But we're in a bar, Peeta—"
"Whoops. Didn't know we weren't allowed to leave." He's grinning, and then he moves to grab his coat.
"Peeta, I don't know…"
He's rarely serious, so when he leans into the table, lustrous eyes melting into a gentle, solemn blue, I know I'm done for.
"I need to talk to you, Katniss," he murmurs. "I've hardly been able to think of anything else all day."
I give Peeta a three-minute head start, watching him sneak downstairs to start the car. The residual taste of his lips is debilitating as it sweeps through my nervous system, leaving me near-numb and tingly. The rational, prudent Katniss has dug her own grave and laid face-down in it; in her place stands an imposter, a girl ruled by the heat in her head and chest.
Not an imposter, I correct myself, because the creature filling out my skin is just as Katniss as ever, only with her veneer of logic and reasoning pared away. Maybe that's what's left me feeling so raw.
When three minutes have ticked by, I flit down the stairs. I expect the universe to provide the sanity I can't—I anticipate that Madge, somehow, will know something is up, and she'll intercept me in the foyer to coax my plans from me.
But she's not. Madge is nowhere in my path; I don't even turn a head as I slip through the throng of guests.
Too easy. I don't know how to read the symbolism of this missing resistance.
In the car, Peeta is waiting for me. We're both silent as we drive away; for a second, fear gnaws at my stomach, because what if he's now picking up the common sense I ditched somewhere on the second floor of the Mellark Manor?
As if he can sense my stress, he raises one hand from the steering wheel, sliding his palm over my shoulder and around the nape of my neck. His fingers, warm and calloused, knit into the soft hairs there, and his thumb glides up and down the tendon that stretches from my jaw to my shoulder. Goose bumps radiate out from his touch, and I shudder.
It's only been a few seconds since my doubt first spiked. And somehow, a moment later, nothing has felt more soothing than this silence.
We keep huddled together as we suffer the wrath of Snow Miser, but even with my nose prickling like a sea urchin on my face, all I can focus on is the hand he has pressed against the bottom of my spine. He's done this a million times before—gently touch the small of my back to guide me—but now, even through my many layers, his palm sears hotter than ever.
My whole body feels like the victim of arson by the time we're in my apartment building, hiking up the stairs. I can't pretend it's from anything but nervousness—and how dare Peeta give this feeling to me? I'm a strong, independent woman, god damnit! I've never been so stressed over a stupid boy before. That was, arguably, the main reason things didn't work out between me and my only long-term boyfriend: Gale needed someone who could adoringly fall into step behind him, who needed him, not someone who one-upped him in mulishness every day.
For a flash of an instant, I begin comparing Peeta to Gale—he has Gale's ceaseless determination, but Gale's grit was more competitive in nature, whereas Peeta's has always centered around compromise—before I remember that this is definitely not a fair thing for me to do. What it is is dangerous. Peeta is my best friend who accidentally fell into bed with me. Peeta is not my boyfriend. Peeta doesn't want to be my boyfriend.
I don't give myself the chance to consider whether or not I want Peeta to be my boyfriend, because if comparing him to Gale was dangerous, this would be just plain suicidal.
So, swallow back all these thoughts, trying to focus on nothing but my hand as I shove my key in the door lock.
In his apartment, he flings his keys at the wicker bowl on the kitchen counter, missing it entirely. A helpless neat-freak, Peeta would normally move to retrieve them. But he just grabs my face in his hands, his mouth colliding with mine with almost ferocious desperation.
This is the first time he's kissed me since we were at the manor. I couldn't have expected—or even hoped for—his enthusiasm to regenerate so quickly.
But Peeta never stops surprising me.
I hang my keys on the hook by the door. Peeta heads toward the kitchen as I shrug out of my coat; I'm facing the opposite direction as I ask, "Can I get you anything to eat?"
But when I turn around, I find him already snatching a Tupperware of leftover chicken from the fridge. With anyone else but him and Madge, his carefree embezzlement of my food might bother me. But this is Peeta. And there's something oddly satisfying in how comfortable he is in my apartment.
For being such a food snob (who's continually offended that I, as someone who works for the FDA, don't "respect the art of culinary creation" like he does), he surprises me by sticking a fork in the chicken while it's still cold, tearing off a piece. He pops it in his mouth and makes a face.
"You're an awful cook."
"Only to someone who doesn't use the microwave."
"The chicken's not seasoned enough," he continues. "Could use some cayenne."
"I'll call Stouffer's and let them know." I fold my arms over my chest, glaring as he sticks the Tupperware back in the fridge. "So, you dragged us out of the bar so you could come here and criticize my leftovers?"
"It's called 'beating around the bush.' I thought you could use some easing into this conversation."
"By pissing me off?"
His lips quirk in a half-smirk. "Nah, that's just the cherry on top."
I want to be mad at him. I'm either a masochist, too forgiving, or some lethal combination of the two, because as soon as his half-smirk spreads into a genuine grin, my own lips begin to twitch in response.
Peeta and I are smiling against each other's lips, and I can't remember which of us started it; perhaps this grinning is like the first kiss, the first touch, where it began outside of us and engulfed us simultaneously.
We stagger into his bedroom, and I push him backward and onto the bed, where he falls, cheeks flushed and lips swollen. As I reach down for the hemline of my dress, his eyes gleam with something that makes my stomach catapult up into my chest.
I'm sure he's never looked at me like that before. As I watch him start unbuttoning his collared shirt, I'm sure my eyes reflect the same, unfamiliar hunger, too.
So what is this, then? How is this?
My hands have stilled. And some of that hesitation must hemorrhage into my expression, because Peeta stands. He's barely a head taller than me, so his lips align perfectly with my forehead; he plants a soft kiss there, steady and warm with intention, which is so unlike the previous, frenzied kisses.
I like this kiss, too.
"You look nervous," he says, his tone sincere and, yet, still lighthearted.
"I'm not nervous." I instinctively pout. He can't see this, but he chuckles, so I know he knows I'm doing it anyway—because he's Peeta, I'm Katniss, and apparently, that's all there is to his recipe of inexplicable mind-reading.
"It's okay. We don't have to do this." He toys with the zipper at the top of my dress. "We can watch C-SPAN instead."
I smack his stomach, which is hard under his shirt.
"I'm not backing out."
"Not even for a livestream of the Supreme Court?"
I shake my head. "Today, I'm choosing you over RBG."
"You're rejecting Ruth?" Peeta grips my shoulders to hold me stiffly away from him as he takes a step back. His eyes are wide, and he almost looks like he's choking. "Where's Katniss? What have you done with her?"
"I think she's still looking for the tennis bracelet."
Though the amused glint in his eyes doesn't fade, something new tints his expression. It's a strange medley of sobriety, innocence, and concern—too bad this mind-reading doesn't go both ways, because I'm desperate to know what it means.
And then he says, "And this girl, right here? Is she Katniss, too?"
Now, it makes sense.
I thread my fingers in his curls, brushing my lips against his. I give him a slight but confident nod, which is all there's time for before his lips crash back into mine.
As soon as I realize that calling out Peeta's bullshit has bought me a one-way ticket straight to Talk-It-Out Town, where we'll inevitably have to discuss last night's events, I stall by offering him real food. "Like, you know—I could make you a sandwich."
"Out of…?"
"Bread, and salami—" I remember I'm out of provolone. "—and more salami."
"After four years of living by yourself, it's a miracle you're still alive."
"Deli meat and I… we have a really healthy, symbiotic relationship. You wouldn't understand."
"You're right about that." He kicks my fridge shut, circling around the kitchen counter to dive onto the sofa. "But I don't want you to make me a sandwich. I want you to talk to me."
"I am talking to you."
He just chuckles, kicking his feet up on the coffee table. He motions to the empty cushion beside him. I don't want to sit next to him—I'm terrified of where that may go, especially if whatever yanked us into that first kiss yesterday contaminates the air again—but I also hate being that person, the one who stands awkwardly while the other person sits. It feels too much like a lecture.
So I compromise, sliding onto the coffee table and next to his feet. My fingernails click and scrape against each other as I fidget nervously.
"Okay," I concede.
"Let's talk."
"Yeah. Let's… talk."
"About last night."
"About last night."
"About—us."
"About us."
"About your pitiful lack of original ideas." He leans forward to curl his palms around mine, the mock-sincerity almost cloaking his subtle attempt to calm my fidgeting. But it peeks through just enough. "You know, Everdeen, plagiarism is a serious offense."
I roll my eyes, but I'm secretly (or, not so secretly, because Peeta's a goddamn clairvoyant) grateful for his refusal to be too solemn. I can't believe that's what I thought I wanted earlier, because our conversations are always punctuated by silly jests, and having it any other way would feel so wrong.
It was that way with the sex, too, Traitor Cerebrum pipes up, and I want to smack my forehead in admonishment. But the thought hangs there anyway, dragging with it a deluge of poorly repressed memories of last night, and suddenly, I'm drowning.
By the time I resurface and hastily compose myself, I look to Peeta, and die nine times.
Because he's pinning me with that self-satisfied, entertained smirk, and I know he knows I've slipped.
Sex is supposed to be passionate, rough, serious, focused.
At least, that's what I've always thought, until tonight.
Because as I peel away my tights, and Peeta kicks off his pants, we can't stop laughing at each other, and I think that maybe, maybe, this is how it's supposed to be.
"Should we put on some music?" I ask, crawling backward onto the mattress as he stands at the foot of the bed. Once his pants are successfully flung toward the corner of the room, he's in only his boxer briefs, and I'm lying in my bra and panties, and hell, it's so, so hard not to stare. Because there's just so much I haven't seen—at least, not in this light, with moondust and thirst eclipsing all else. I try not to gawk at the hard grid of his abs, or the light smattering of ashy blonde hair that intersects them, leading from his navel to the waistband of his underwear. I really do try not to gawk. But oh, how miserably I fail.
When my gaze flickers up from his body to his face, I find that he's failing miserably, too. His voice is distracted as he asks, "What genre would you prefer?"
"Not smooth jazz." I rub my forehead, and he chuckles. "I don't know, Peeta. What's good sex music?"
"Smooth jazz."
"No."
"Well, that's all I ever have sex to."
I know he's joking, but I can't help but prod, "You must be horribly inexperienced, then."
The sound that rips from his throat is somewhere between a cough and a snort. "Au contraire. Prepare to be blown away, Everdeen." He dives onto the bed and I squeal, feebly pushing him away as he smothers me with his body and blitzes me with kiss after kiss after kiss. I can feel his teeth at my neck, nipping lightly at the tendons, and then he's nuzzling my throat with his nose. I can't help but giggle. And I can't help but feel at home.
"You're thinking about it," he prods.
"I'm thinking about…" I swallow. "C-SPAN."
He laughs and leans back, resting his skull on the back of the couch. "So, you're thinking about it."
I rub circles into my eyes with my fists until my vision turns red with flashes of white. I hope this will blind me to the memories.
But they only surge back at full throttle.
Peeta Mellark has never not been beautiful. He stuns and spellbinds in his collared shirts; in a t-shirt and his Royals baseball cap; in his dough-encrusted work apron; in his pajamas.
But the hypnosis reaches an all-time high when Peeta is wearing nothing at all. It spikes only more when I'm wearing nothing at all, too, because then the beauty of his body harmonizes with the unbelievable reverence in his expression, like he's watching a shooting star tattoo light into an inky sky.
He's kneeling at the foot of the bed. I'm splayed over the covers. I should be feeling self-conscious and nervous and hesitant, because each of those emotions comes hand-in-hand with nakedness. Or, at least, they always have.
Now, I'm not afraid. Peeta isn't either. I know this, because for a man whose expressions are often coded in a language I don't know, the enthusiasm rounding out his eyes and tweaking the corners of his mouth is unmistakable.
In yet another moment of inexplicable synchronicity, our eyes quit roving over each other's bodies at the same time. They meet in the gloom. They both communicate: We're really doing this.
Because we are really doing this. We are best friends, we are drinking buddies, we are secret-sharers, we are welcoming shoulders, and we are affectionate bickerers. We are Katniss and Peeta. We make each other laugh and snort milk, and we recite the screenplay of The Empire Strikes Back when we get bored. We are complements. We are best friends.
Who are looking at each other like we are so much more.
"You're my best friend," I blurt out.
"You're mine, too." He says this like he's saying that kangaroos have pouches, or marinara is made of tomatoes. That he can be so calm about this makes me almost violent.
"But so is Madge," I add. "And this could really hurt her. This could hurt all of us. It could completely wreck things between you two, or her and me… and especially you and me. And hell, I'll shave my head or get a face tattoo before I do something—barring temporary insanity—that could ruin what the three of us have." I rake my fingers down my cheeks. "Sleeping with you and not telling Madge has really complicated things."
"I won't argue with you there," he says, carding his fingers through his curls. "But please humor me for a moment: Just because something is complicated, does that mean it can't also be good?"
"I like how things were." I didn't think this answer precisely addressed his question, but his lips twist down as if it has, and not in the way he wanted. "I don't want to lose any of that."
"What are you afraid of losing?"
You, Traitor Cerebrum shouts, and then it adds more diplomatically, and Madge. "For the past several years, things have been so balanced," I tell him. "And I love that. I love that the three of us can play chutes and ladders for six straight hours, and that we all know each other's cocktail orders—"
"No one's going to forget anyone's favorite drink, Katniss."
"—but you know what I mean, right? It's just so… easy. The way things are, I mean. That's what I'm afraid of losing."
"But what about last night? Was that not easy, too?"
I balk, heat flashing in my cheeks. "You better not be calling me easy."
"Not at all." His response is cast too quickly for my anger to take root, and it shrivels up into relief almost instantly. "You're quite the contrary," he continues, "and that's exactly my point—I mean, I know you. I know you don't just sleep with anyone."
I don't. There'd been Gale, but we dated for three years. And then there was that brief fling with Finnick before he met Annie, but I've always chocked it up to all that NyQuil, and—"What are you saying, Peeta?"
"I'm saying that last night—for two people who are pretty sexually prudent—was incredibly easy. Not easy in the sense that we were both desperate or careless, but easy in the sense that… it just fit." His voice softens. "I don't know, Katniss. I don't know if that's how it felt for you, too."
My stomach wrenches. I want to tell him it didn't fit, because over the course of this conversation, I've inadvertently talked myself out of wanting more than what we have, and if I can just tell him that his feelings were not shared, that the two of us were on different wavelengths, then that'd hammer the final nail in the coffin of our sexplorations, and maybe, just maybe, everything could go back to normal.
But I can't lie to Peeta. I'd sooner try to reverse the tides.
In my silence, Peeta hears my answer.
We move together like sea and sand, coming back again and again and again, and the unyielding tempo dizzies me.
We're lying on our sides now, the curve of my spine sealed to his chest as he presses his lips to the nape of my neck. I can't imagine that having a fountain of hair in his face is pleasant for him, but having his breath ignite the nerve endings in the back of my neck, and his hands charting the planes and grooves of my chest, ribs and stomach, is bewitching for me, and I find myself too enraptured to move.
I catch the hand he skims down my sternum, bringing it up to my lips. "I feel drunk," I breathe against his fingers, and though he shudders against my back, his rhythm does not falter.
He kisses my hair. His hand trails down my stomach. Then, so gently that I can hardly hear him, he murmurs, "Your body's like fine wine."
"Gets better with age?"
"No," he says through a groan that I feel right where we're connected, "although that might be true. Can't really tell from one isolated circumstance—"
"One more tangent, and I'll—" I sigh as his teeth catch on the crest of my shoulder. "—revoke your talking privileges."
"Evil woman." His nose glides over my shoulder blade, his kisses working up my neck, across my jaw, and to the freckle behind my ear that he discovered tonight. "Your body's like fine wine—" Kiss to my ear. "—because—" Kiss to my jaw. "—it's really, really fucking exquisite."
"Peeta, you don't even like wine." But I can't hide the smile in my voice.
"But I hear that fine wine, objectively speaking, is exquisite."
"Well, then, thank you for objectifying me."
In more serious terms, I want to thank him for a million other things, too: for the mesmerizing sensation of his fingers skimming up my thigh, for constantly checking that nothing hurts, for making it his mission to find previously uncharted parts of me, for making me come twice, for laughing at all the right times, for making me laugh at all the right times.
But I don't know how to say these things. I'm not good at saying anything. I blame Peeta and his freaky fluency in Katnissspeak—I've never needed to be articulate around him, because he just knows.
I pray that, in my sighs and in the kisses I press to each of his fingertips, he hears all the words I can't form.
"What do you want?" he asks. His fingers drum along the rim of my coffee table, and he's leaning forward now. The honey-vanilla breath, sweetened only barely with lingering Heineken, washes over my face, and I feel, for a moment, intoxicated again.
But as soon as I register his question, I snap out of it.
Because I sincerely don't know. I love how we were before last night. I love how we were last night, too. My brain, edges singed by the past day's emotional inferno, is too scorched to find a way to reconcile these two bonds, or even weigh them against each other.
"What do you want, Peeta?"
I ask this because I'm stalling. I ask this also because Peeta's attitudes matter to me, and when it comes to navigating emotional turmoil, he tends to make better decisions than I do.
Hesitation settles in the narrowing corners of his eyes; he's clearly wary of my motives for asking him this. But he answers anyway.
"I want to keep making fun of your obsession with salami," he says slowly as he weaves together a response that I know will ooze theatrics, because this is Peeta speaking, and he's an infamous drama queen. "I want to keep the love poems you've written to RBG hanging on my fridge," he continues. "And when I dredge up all those awful memories about my mother from when I was a kid, I want to keep being able to turn to you, and keep laying down with my head on your knee, because nothing calms me more than when you brush through my hair with your fingers."
He tilts closer as he speaks, the speed of his words hastening as they always do when he gets lost in his words.
"I want to keep staying up all night with you and Madge, arguing about foreign affairs. I want to keep up with our chutes and ladders tournaments, especially because it means we get to watch Madge flip the board when she loses. And I want to keep being able to meet up at Dewey's after work, just the three of us, where we can sit and bitch about customers and clients for hours."
And then his voice slows.
"I don't want to lose any of that. And I don't think we have to. Last night was..." He shakes his head. "Katniss, I didn't even know that I wanted more with you. I thought what we had was perfect, too. And if the 'old us' is what you want, I won't deny you that right, because I know you'd sock me in the jaw if I tried to guilt you into doing something you didn't want, and also because I respect your wishes—"
To help reign in his tangential tirade, I rest my hand on his knee. He jolts faintly at the contact, but then his expression softens, and he continues.
"It's like picking up the baseball you've had on your dresser all your life, turning it around and finding a George Brett signature along the stitches." He chuckles at my scowl. "Okay, in layman's terms—it's like finding out the charm bracelet you've been wearing your whole life is actually a tennis bracelet." At this, I smack him in the arm, and he laughs more freely. "You know what I mean." And then his expression sobers up again. "I—I've loved you for years, Katniss. You've been my right hand—and my left hand—and hell, both of my legs—since I graduated from college. But last night, when we were both holding onto that pearl, I blinked, and everything changed, and you were just… more. I can't explain it. I've been running through that scene in my head all day ad nauseam—minus the nausea—and I just don't know how to rationalize it. But what I do know is that being with you, holding onto you and losing myself in your laughter, is the eighth wonder of the world. I don't remember being that happy, or feeling that at home, ever. Christ, I know how cheesy this all sounds, and I know that you hate cheesy things, unless it's provolone—"
"I'm down with Swiss, too—"
"You like Swiss?"
I shrug.
"I had no idea you liked Swiss cheese. What kind of friend am I?" he laughs as he grips my shoulders. I would swear his eyes were almost wet if I didn't know Peeta to be a crackerjack at controlling emotional landscapes… but the closer I look, the harder it is to deny. "Katniss, I'm completely baring my soul to you here, so please be gentle with me, but I need you to know that I'm ready for anything you are. I'm not going to pretend that it won't be messy as we figure out what this is, or that it won't be awkward. But I think that while we're great at being best friends, we could be even better at being more, too."
"Too?"
"Too. Not instead of—the day we stop clowning around with each other is the day we're all destroyed by a giant meteor. We can't let go of that side of us. But I'm thinking, if you felt what I did yesterday, and it wasn't just a casual one-night fling for you, taking a shot at something more would be completely and utterly worth it."
Neither of us have spoken in half an hour, which must shatter our previous record of silent coexistence by about twenty-six minutes. But it's good, this silence. Because it's filled with things that may be even better than words: palms carding through each other's hair; fingers swept along jawlines, ribs, and hips; synchronized breaths and pulses. Lazy kisses. Frenzied kisses. Giggly kisses. Slow, connected, infinite kisses.
And then he splinters the quiet.
"I'm going to say two sentences. Let me get the second one out before you misinterpret the first."
I want to scoff at him for even insinuating that I'd distort his intentions, and then I almost laugh, remembering a conversation we had last year about what I'd title my future memoir. (Katniss Everdeen: The Reigning Misunderstander was our front-runner.)
I tuck a golden curl behind his ear, kissing his nose. "Go for it."
"So, as you know, I work at a bakery."
"Is that the sentence you were worried about me misinterpreting?"
"No, that was purely contextual."
"In that case, yes, Peeta, I do know that you are, in fact, a baker."
His fingers move between us and to my sternum, gliding along the subtle ridges of bone underneath the skin. I shiver.
"So, because I work at a bakery, I have to be at work by five in the morning, meaning that I have to wake up incredibly early."
Underneath his fingertips, a pang of rejection twinges in my chest.
Oh. So he's asking me to leave.
I hiss when Peeta starts chuckling, and he cups my jaw, kissing me through his laughter. "Your face fell about ten stories there. It should be clinically dead right now."
"Peeta, if you're telling me that you want me gone—"
"This conversation should definitely preface that memoir we were planning." He pulls away, eyes glimmering, but still brackets my cheeks with his palms. "Here's the second sentence: Though I have to leave early, I'd love to wake up to your beautiful, scowling face, so if you're alright with a few dresser drawers banging in the morning, I hope you feel inclined to stay."
The warmth that wells in my chest is terrifying in its vigor, so I mask it with anger. "You could've started out with that sentence!"
"Ah, but love," he whispers, kissing my forehead. "Where's the fun in that?"
I've been silent for a long time. Because of their emotional depth, Peeta's words take twice as long to process, and I can feel more than see his nervousness packing the air between us as he waits.
At the halfway point of my careful analytics, I say, "There are at least six thousand things that could go wrong."
"Give me a few."
"We could infuriate Madge, or hurt her, or both. Or we could realize that last night was just a fluke, and maybe we aren't that compatible."
"To the first: I worry about that, too. But she loves us. And we love her—which she knows. If we're careful and considerate, and we tell her as soon as we make a decision…." He trails off. "And to the second: You and I are resilient. If we try again, and it blows up in our faces, we'll be able to laugh it off and recover. It'd make for some great subject material in your memoir."
He's trying to lighten the mood, but the severity of this situation still knocks the wind out of me like an anvil dropped on my chest.
"But what if we can't laugh it off, Peeta?" I shove the heels of my palms into my eye sockets. "What if we try, and it's great for six months, and then you figure out that I'm a Taurus and hate me forever?"
"First of all, I already knew you were a Taurus." He reaches up to toy with the end of my braid. "Second, I think—I think that's a legitimate risk, but hasn't it always been? I'm sure it'd be magnified, but not even friendships are immune to breakups. But, that being said, I still think we'd find a way to come back from it. What we have matters to us both so much, and we're both too stubborn to let that go." He drops my braid, his fingers slipping under my chin to lift my focus to his eyes, rounded and glowing with a brand of dedication I'm not used to seeing him wear. "All risks weighed, I really think it's worth trying."
When I inhale, and my lungs swell in my ribs, it feels as if some invisible fishhook sinks into my chest and draws me in. I ache to lean closer, breathe in his honey-vanilla-Heineken air, give in completely. I think this is what I want. Because that shift in the air that he felt last night… I felt it, too, and surrendered to it. And Katniss Everdeen is not one to surrender; I know that this must mean something.
I think I'm ready to cave. But then, because I just can't let myself have nice things, I go ahead and say something stupid:
"Peeta, what if you stop liking me?"
His lips quirk in a sad smile. "I don't think that's possible, because over the past six years, I've only liked you more and more every day." And then the smile unrolls at the edges. "But no one can guarantee these things. I mean, what if you stop liking me?"
I don't see how I can.
"Answer this one question for me," he says, taking my face in his hands. "Do you like me right now?"
"Of course."
"I mean, do you like like me?"
"You sound like a middle-schooler."
He sighs in exasperation. "Let me rephrase in more adult terms for you, then: Do you, Katniss Everdeen, believe that your physical and emotional attraction toward me, Peeta Mellark, surmounts a level at which the average hominid would be comfortable maintaining a platonic friendship?"
"Well, we're not average, so your definition is null and void."
"You're making me work so hard," he sighs, resigned. Then he shrugs. "But that's alright. If this is just practice for whatever we have ahead of us, then I'm okay with it." He strokes my cheek with his thumb. "Look, Katniss. I like you a lot, and I'm getting the vibe that you like me a lot, too, even if you think I'm a royal pain in the ass."
"I do."
"Like me, or think I'm a royal pain in the ass?"
"Figure it out, Einstein."
He cracks up for a moment before reigning it in. "That's fair. But please, just tell me: Is this actually what you want? I only want this if you're one hundred percent certain about it, too."
My eyes pinch shut, brows scrunching together as I think, really think, about Peeta.
I think about blue eyes made bluer by his baseball cap. I think about his mouth on the inside of my thigh. I think about him waltzing around my kitchen, rearranging my spice cabinet. I think about him holding my hair as I puke from bad guacamole. I think about how he cups my breast in his sleep. I think about him French braiding my hair for me, since he can do it better than I can. I think about going on long jogs with him, and silently celebrating when he wimps out miles before I need to rest. I think about skimming my fingers along his abs. I think about him buying the wrong brand of deli meat for me, and feeling genuinely guilt-ridden about it.
I think about all these things and all the things I don't know to think about yet, and when I bring my fingertips to my lips, I discover a smile there.
There are no words to describe all these thoughts; even the silver-tongued Peeta probably couldn't phrase the depth of their pull, or the oath of their comfort.
But unlike last night, I do manage to come up with something.
And I'm confident that Peeta, whose roadmap to my brain is even clearer than mine, will be able to fill in the rest.
"Yes," I say. "This is what I want."
Peeta's a snorer. It's not a heavy, mechanical, chainsaw snore—which I've heard applies more to me—but a delicate sound, like the crunch of snow under boots. Its rhythm lulls me to sleep.
Almost.
Just as I'm drifting, only two heartbeats from slipping under, his snoring catches and fans into a sigh, warming the back of my neck as it sweeps over my skin.
"Did I do it?" he murmurs, half-slurred with sleep. But he's conscious.
I wiggle my hips a little, snuggling into him behind me. "Do what?"
"Show you." His voice is just a breath.
"Show me what?"
On my shoulder, he lays a single kiss, softer and sweeter than a pinch of candy floss. I smile before he speaks the words, as if I've known them all along.
"How to really spoon," he murmurs.
A laugh collects in my throat, but I'm too exhausted to give it the final push it needs. So I kiss his fingers that rest on my lips, captivated by the warmth of his frame around me.
And then we're both asleep.
The smile etched into Peeta's mouth, I decide, is my new favorite flavor. I kiss the corners of his lips, drawing the pink flesh between by teeth to memorize its taste.
"I was prepared for more persuasion," he says against my mouth as I straddle him on my sofa. His fingertips dig into the backs of my thighs, pulling me closer to him, and I gulp back a moan. "I could've shown you graphs and projections. I even put together a playlist on Netflix to parade all the success stories of fictional friends who decided to date."
"You're joking."
"Just about the graphs." He nuzzles my nose with his. "But not the playlist. You usually take more convincing."
"Huh. Guess I am easy after all."
His laughter fans against my neck as his lips graze my throat. "Or maybe you just want this as bad as I do."
"It kills me, you know," I rasp as his mouth latches onto the side of my neck, drawing the soft flesh between his teeth until it prickles with delicious heat. "How you knew what I'd want before I did."
"I didn't know for certain," he admits between charged kisses. "All day, I was stressing out, panicking that you'd talked yourself out of it before I even had a chance to make my sales pitch."
"What would you have done, then?"
He draws back, examining with knitted brows the sweep of skin on my neck that undoubtedly models a new, shiny raspberry bruise. "Dear god."
"It's fine. Scarf weather." My hand flutters in dismissal. "Answer my question."
"It's huge."
"Peeta."
"I swear, I didn't mean to do that—"
"Peeta."
"It's going to need its own zip code!"
"Peeta Mellark." I grip his cheeks with one hand, the stern line of my mouth wavering as his squished lips pucker like a goldfish's. "Forget about the hickey and answer my damn question."
When I release his cheeks, the pink silhouettes of my fingerprints still claim his skin. I smile.
"I don't know what I would've done," he admits after several moments of thought. "I mean, trying to sway you after you've already made up your mind is like inciting a fistfight with a brick wall, so I wouldn't have pushed it. But I think I would've needed to take some time away from this." He gently draws my fingers from his hair, curling his palms around mine and binding our hands to his chest. "Last night wasn't just a flipped switch for me. I can't turn off the new way I see you. If you didn't think of me that way, then I'd find the means to move past it, eventually, but I probably would've needed a three-month sabbatical in Siberia to get my head on straight."
"You'd exile yourself for me?"
"I'd do anything short of punching a brick wall for you, Katniss." He kisses my nose.
And then our lips find each other's again, and the rest is history.
Ignorantly, I once believed that two people couldn't fit on the floor between my couch and my coffee table, but Peeta and I make it work. With our bodies practically soldered together, there's even room for a throw blanket around us.
"I'm pissed," I grumble against his bare chest.
"At me?"
"At both of us! It took us six whole years to figure this out! How could we be so stupid?"
He chuckles, kissing my forehead. "Failed by the American education system," he muses.
"And to think that we figured it out at a funeral reception."
"Finally—something I can thank my mother for."
My instantaneous desire to smack him dissolves with the pressure of his lips against my hairline, and I want to be angry, because how dare Peeta turn me into such a softie? And after only twenty-four hours, too! Where will I be in a week?
But in the past, I never could harbor resentment for Peeta for more than a few minutes at a time. My newfangled perpetual-softie state only raises that threshold.
I end up kissing a heart pattern into his chest, enthralled by the soothing cadence of his pulse. My ear flattens against his ribs to encode its rhythm into my memory.
"We have to tell Madge." My voice is drawn into a purr as he strokes the arc of my cheekbone.
"As soon as possible," he adds.
"Tomorrow?"
"I'll ask her to meet us at Dewey's." His fingers sweep over the top of my spine. "She'll likely be upset. Especially since she and I are already at swords' points. But she appreciates honesty more than anything, so I hope…" He doesn't need to finish.
I hum in agreement, the sound subdued as it resonates against his chest, where it tapers into a soft exhale. His pulse synchronizes with my breathing, then, and I return to charting his heartbeat.
But my mental-mapping is disrupted by the sharp crack of knuckles on wood.
Peeta and I both jolt upright at the sound of the knocking, and because my back is to the coffee table, I end up smacking the side of my skull against the mahogany ridge.
"Ow!"
"You okay?" He cradles my head in his hands, brows crinkled in alarm.
My brain throbs, but I imagine the piercing ache will dull in a few minutes, so I nod. "Get the door for me, okay?" I plead, squinting through the sting.
He helps me onto the sofa first, covering me with the throw blanket. "I'll send them away," he says as he shuffles into his boxers and jeans.
"I have no idea who'd come here this late."
Shirt wadded in his hands, he skates over to the door, unlocking the deadbolt without first glancing through the peephole. I watch him as he peels the door back, just a sliver, so his body can block the visitor's view of the couch.
"Who is it?" I call out.
Peeta doesn't respond. But the answer is etched in the curl of his fingers, which go slack and let his t-shirt fall into a crumpled mound at his feet.
Ice splinters through my arms and legs, and I bolt upright, clutching the trim of the blanket to my chest. I feel dizzy. I know it's not because I hit my head.
Speak of the devil, and he doth appear.
"Peeta, what are you doing here?" I hear Madge ask. But the razor-sharp lilt of her voice, probably honed at the sight of him shirtless and answering my door for me, tells me that she already knows.