Heartthrobs Don’t Date Wallflowers (Texting the Boyband)

Chapter 7

seven

It took me over an hour to get home. My data plan sucked so I couldn’t connect to Maps while I was walking, which left me wandering aimlessly around Bibridge, trying to find my street. But since Mom only made me memorize the name of our street and not the name of any of the streets around it, that was a little easier said the done. By the time I actually found my block, I was so delirious from hunger that I almost didn’t recognize it.

I groaned as I stumbled inside and kicked off my shoes. I didn’t dare to look at myself in the mirror—I didn’t need to do that to know that I probably looked like I rolled out of bed and immediately ran a marathon without any training.

“Stupid new school,” I muttered to myself as I raided the kitchen for snacks. “Stupid new town. Stupid new house.”

We were abysmally low on food, but I managed to find a bag of chips tucked in the back of the pantry behind some cans of beans that I swore we’d been dragging from house to house for the past five years. Could beans go bad? Eh, I guess it didn’t matter if we were never going to eat them anyway.

My backpack slid off my shoulder and landed on the ground with a loud thump, narrowly missing my foot. After that walk home, I didn’t have the energy to bend down and pick it up, so I just left it there and dragged myself to the stairs, which I swore grew while I was at school.

Seriously, when did this staircase become as tall as Everest?

I was strongly debating setting up camp and attempting the climb after dinner, until I remembered that we still didn’t have a couch in our living room because of some issue with the furniture delivery company. So my choices were either forcing my way upstairs and getting to lay down on my warm, comfy bed, or collapsing on the hardwood floor down here.

It was a hard choice, honestly.

Which was probably a sign I should get in shape.

My legs were so exhausted from the walk home that I practically pulled myself up using the railing and by the time I was upstairs, my whole body was shaking from the exertion.

Okay, I definitely needed to get in shape.

But I could deal with that tomorrow.

For now, I wandered into my room and collapsed face-first on the bed with another groan.

“Hey Siri,” I said, my voice muffled by the pillow. I waited for the phone to ding so I knew it actually understood me—impressive that it could with the way I was sitting—then said, “Call Poppy.”

“Got it,” the robotic voice replied. “Calling Not Zesty.”

“Who?” It took a second for my mind to catch up with what it said and I jolted up. “Wait, wait, no!”

Too late. The phone was ringing. I dove for it, ready to slam my hand on the “hang up” button but then I realized he would get the notification regardless. He would see the missed call and think that I meant to call him. Possibly even call me back.

No, no, no, no.

“Okay, it’s okay,” I told myself, once again trying to channel Poppy’s calm, everything-will-be-alright energy. I wasn’t very good at it. I was stuck between wanting to press it and wondering if him answering would be better, since at least then, I could explain. “I’ll just tell him it was an accident. That’s all. Everything will be fine.”

Who was I kidding? Everything would most certainly not be fine. He wasn’t going to answer anyway. No matter what, I was going to have to send him an “oops, didn’t mean to call you!” text and hope that he wouldn’t think I was that freak who tried to call him after three texting conversations.

Then the phone clicked, and he went, “Hello?”

Suddenly, I forgot how to speak. My mouth went completely dry. What if he only thought I was fun over text? Or what if something about calling him like this ruined whatever friendship we had going right now? But then he said, “Hello?” again, and I knew I had to say something.

So I stammered out, “Hi.” Then, because I was the most awkward person alive, I had to awkwardly tack on, “Not Zesty.”

The sound he made was somewhere between a groan and a chuckle. “I never should have told you that nickname.”

His voice was smooth and buttery, and he had an accent that I loved. Some sort of British accent, I was pretty sure, but I couldn’t quite place it beyond that. His voice sounded so familiar—like it was on the tip of my tongue, just waiting to be realized—but I couldn’t focus on it right now, because my mind was screaming, oh my gosh, you are calling with Not Zesty! and that stopped any reasonable thoughts from coming through.

“Hi,” I said again, because it had been too long, and something needed to be said, obviously.

He chuckled. “Hi back.”

The silence that followed wasn’t awkward—not in the way that silences usually were when I was sitting with people and didn’t know what to say. Instead, it was kind of comfortable and I surprisingly didn’t mind it in the way that I normally would.

“I called you by accident,” I blurted.

“Oh?”

“Yeah, Siri thinks your name sounds like my sister’s, apparently,” I said. “Poppy, Not Zesty—the same really.”

“I hear no difference. ”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek and laid back on my bed and stared up at my ceiling. On a whim the other night, I had decided to stick some glow-in-the-dark stars up there to make the room feel more lived in. They looked a little stupid now, and I was questioning my decision, but I wasn’t going to take them down. That would’ve been just as much work, with no gain. At least now they gave me something interesting to look at.

I didn’t want to fall into the trap of small talk, so I asked, “What are you doing right now?”

“Right now?” he asked. “Well, I just got out of the shower.”

If I’d had any sense of what he looked like, a mental image probably would’ve popped into my head. As it was, he was a little bit of a formless blob in my mind, so I had nothing—which was probably for the best because I didn’t need to imagine him walking around soaking wet and in a towel.

“And ten seconds ago, I changed into some old pajamas,” he continued. “And now I’m sitting at the desk in my room, trying to will myself to do homework, but I much prefer talking to you.”

I grinned, even though somebody preferring to talk to me over homework was pretty much a given. There were very few people who would rather do homework than talk to somebody, even if it was someone as awkward and shy as me.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

A piece of me wanted to lie, to say that I was doing something more interesting than I was. But I also knew there was no reason to do that. It wasn’t like he was doing anything interesting. He just showered and was supposed to be doing homework. Why was what I was doing any worse?

“Honestly, I’m just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling,” I said. I lifted one leg in the air, stretching it toward my face. “Now I’m stretching because it feels less lame than just lying in bed. And I’m looking at the stick-on stars on my ceiling.”

“Still there from when you were a kid?” He asked.

“Nope. I just put them up a few days ago actually.”

“Really?”

“Well, if you knew me, you’d know I’ve never lived in the same house for more than three years,” I said.

“Army brat?”

I laughed. “Most people assume that, but no. My dad’s a CFO of some big company. He gets moved around a lot for work. So, every couple of years, we pick up and go wherever they send him.”

He was quiet for a second before he mumbled, “Sounds exhausting.”

I shrugged, even though he couldn’t see me. “I’m used to it at this point. And it’s fun for a while—getting to see new cities and stuff.”

“Must be hard to have friends.”

It was. On top of already being shy, always moving around and constantly being the new kid didn’t leave much room to hold onto the friends I managed to get. It was why I was so close to Poppy—she’d been the only constant in my life all this time. And really, as much as I hated my ex for what he did to me, I knew that the relationship couldn’t have lasted much longer because I was going to be moving here and that long-distance wasn’t to work.

“And that’s the beauty of meeting you,” I said teasingly. “It doesn’t matter if I move away because you’ll never know the difference.”

“And you won’t know if I move either,” he said, his voice thoughtful, as if it was just dawning on him as well.

“Do you move a lot too?”

“In a sense,” he said slowly. “I mean… I didn’t move a lot when I was a kid but I have been lately. We’ll definitely be living in this house for the next two years, but we’ll be traveling a lot in the summer again, which means the only people I’ll have around to talk to are my...” He paused. “Uh, my siblings.”

“Been there,” I said. “My sister’s my best friend. I still call her every day.”

“Hence how you accidentally called me,” he said. I could hear the smile in his voice. “So, if you call her every day, she must not live with you, right?”

I froze. I’d gotten so comfortable in chatting with him that I hadn’t been thinking about what information I was okay with him knowing. Not that Poppy not living with me was some big secret or anything, but I didn’t like that it was out there now, whether I wanted it to be or not. I was never the kind of person to just speak without thinking like that—except when I was him, apparently.

I couldn’t leave the question hanging in the air like that, so I cleared my throat and tried to say in a casual voice, “Uh, no, she goes to school in another town.”

“College?”

For a second, I considered lying and saying yes, so I wouldn’t have to reveal more personal information than I wanted to. But if I did that, then I would have to keep up with the lie. I’d have to pretend she was older than me and fake my way through every follow-up question he was bound to ask me. I could probably manage it but I would be stressful and… well, I didn’t want to lie to him. I supposed I could , but it made my stomach twist.

“No,” I said, before I could talk myself out of it. “Actually, she goes to boarding school.”

“But you don’t?”

“She asked my parents if she could go,” I said. “Wanted more stability than moving around a couple years. Personally, I thought boarding school sounded worse.”

He chuckled. “My sister did the same. But it was after—” He cut off so suddenly that I checked to make the call hadn’t dropped.

“After what?” I asked.

He was silent for a long minute and I worried I’d pressed too hard by asking. He’d stopped talking, after all. My mind filled in the possible blank—after one of his parents died. After they’d moved to a new place. After…

After anything. Because I didn’t know him and I definitely didn’t know his life .

He cleared his throat. “Uh, after this big thing happened to me. It’s too long of a story to tell now.”

I could read between the lines of that one: he couldn’t tell me because it would reveal too much.

I couldn’t be mad that he didn’t want to share. If I had any secrets, I wouldn’t share them either right now. But I found myself wishing he would tell me anyway, desperately wanting to know anything he would be willing to share with me.

I paused for a second, then asked softly, “What’s one thing I’d know if I knew you?”

I was worried he was going to shut me down right away, but he hummed, like he was genuinely thinking it over. For some reason, that made my heart flutter. “If you knew me, you’d know I hate the taste of coffee but drink at least three cups a day.”

“Need the caffeine?”

“That, and when I first met my friend Luca, he bought me a coffee and I didn’t want to offend him by telling him I don’t drink coffee,” he said. Luca . The name sounded familiar but I wasn’t sure why. “So, he kept buying them for me and now here we are, two years later.”

I remembered the text he’d sent in the group chat earlier and grinned. Rob says we can stop for coffee . I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if I hadn’t re-read it a thousand times, trying to figure out if it was really him, but it was funny now that I knew more. It was too bad I couldn’t say that to him without revealing the whole group chat thing— which I could only assume he hadn’t noticed I’d been added to as well.

Even if a little piece of me wanted him to notice too.

“So, three cups a day,” I said. “Does he make you that much coffee every day or do you just drink it to keep up the act?”

“A little bit of both. He’ll buy me coffee any time he goes to Starbucks or he’ll make me a mug whenever he makes it, and then I’ve gotten so used to having that much caffeine that I have to drink it that much.”

“Do you live with him?” I asked.

“What?” He sounded genuinely surprised and maybe even a little angry, and I realized it was probably because I’d asked something more personal than we’d been talking about before.

“Uh, you said he makes you a mug every time he makes coffee so I just… Never mind, forget I asked.”

“It’s fine,” he said. “Sorry. I was just surprised you… Uh, yeah, I do live with him. That’s part of the whole my-sister-going-to-boarding-school story I mentioned earlier.”

I felt like I was trying to put together a puzzle but only being given one or two pieces at a time. I knew they all came together to make a bigger picture, but I wasn’t sure how. Luca. Living with his friend. His sister going to boarding school after something. He would be staying in his current house for the next couple of years, but traveling a lot over the summer. I guess his sister decided to go to boarding school after Luca moved in with him and that was why he didn’t go too? I wasn’t sure how that connected with the summer thing, though, and I obviously couldn’t ask for more information.

But I suddenly remembered why I knew Luca’s name—he was one of the people in the group chat. Tis Moi Luca , he was the one who took somebody’s shirt.

“Sounds like you live an interesting life,” I said. “Can’t imagine what that’s like.”

“Interesting sure is one word for it,” he said. His tone was weird and I got the sense that he was making a reference to something I didn’t know about.

I hesitated, wondering if I’d hit a nerve. “Not always a good thing?”

He paused, and I could almost feel him considering his answer. “It has its moments. Some days are better than others.”

“Oh,” I said, softening. “I’m sorry.”

He laughed, the sound lighter now. ”No need to be. Hearing your voice for the first time? Best thing that’s happened to me today.”

Okay, play it cool.

Don’t freak out.

Totally normal to have a mini heart attack because some mysterious guy over the phone just decided to ruin your ability to breathe.

The comfortable silence settled in again. It felt like we’d found this weird little bubble of space, just the two of us. He wasn’t trying too hard to be cool or flirty, and I wasn’t stumbling over my words like I usually did with boys.

“I like talking to you,” I blurted out before I could think better of it.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and I cringed at how awkward that sounded. But before I could apologize, he spoke.

“I like talking to you, too.”

I smiled into my pillow, suddenly feeling a little warmer. “I was kind of afraid I’d be boring on the phone.”

“Why would you think that?”

“I don’t know.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, though it wasn’t really out of place. “It’s easier to be funny over text. You’ve got time to think about what you’re saying. But on a call, it’s just… you. No filters.”

He made a thoughtful sound. “I don’t think you’re boring at all. If you were, I’d have found a way to get out of this call by now.”

I laughed, the sound surprising me. “Okay, fine. I’ll trust you on that.”

“But… I should probably get back to my homework soon,” he said, though he didn’t sound like he wanted to end the call.

“Yeah, me too,” I said, though in reality, my homework was sitting abandoned on my desk, nowhere near getting done.

“Let’s do this again sometime,” he said, his voice warm in a way that made me feel like he actually meant it .

“I’d like that,” I replied, my heart doing that little fluttery thing again.

“Goodnight, Princess.”

I’d read “Princess” in his texts a thousand times now but hearing it in his voice was different. I stammered out a goodnight, then let him hang up while I just dropped the phone onto the bed and let out a sigh. The stars on my ceiling glowed faintly above me, and for the first time in a while, this big and almost-empty house didn’t feel quite so lonely.