Chapter 4, Hypothetical Heart (Farewell Fairwood #2)

Chapter 4

I pick up my phone as I flip the page of Billionaire Baby Daddy. Our group chat is going nuts talking about upcoming plans for the weekend.

GENEVIEVE

I’m done being designated planner, Logan can take over.

WINNIE

We just need to figure out where we’re meeting, who’s driving, and what time.

I don’t even get the chance to think of a plan before Eloise is answering for me:

ELOISE

Meet at the Callaghan house, either me or Logan can drive, I don’t care what time.

ELOISE

See how easy that was?

I laugh as I read through the texts. It’s typical for the girls to hijack the group chat and only reply to one another while Jameson, Luke, and I sit back and watch. We only reply once a plan has been made.

That works. Meet at my house at 3, I’ll drive us to dinner and we can leave from there.

LUKE

I like the sound of that.

JAMESON

Sounds good

ELOISE

Oh, look who decides to reply now.

GENEVIEVE

DINNER? Who said we were getting dinner?

We’re growing boys, Gen, we at least need to be fed.

GENEVIEVE

Whatever. We’ll meet at Logan’s at 3.

This weekend, we’ve all decided to spend the weekend at Genevieve’s family cabin in the north end of Connecticut.It’s a little over a two-hour drive, and we’re going to have the place all to ourselves.

It’s almost March, and before we know it, we’ll be in North Carolina the first week of April for spring break, but all of us can feel a burnout on the horizon, so being able to get away from Fairwood for a weekend will be a nice refresher.

I look back down at the book I’ve been reading. I’m almost halfway through it now, and I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t entertaining.

I open a separate text chain with Winnie, typing out a new text.

I just got to the part where baby daddy comes into play.

WINNIE

She’s pregnant already?

It’s in the title of the book. How could you possibly be surprised?

WINNIE

I just didn’t think they had done anything yet.

I grin when I realize she’s subtly trying to ask if I’ve read anything erotic yet.

I know this is what she has been worried about since I first told her I was going to read the book.

I didn’t think it was appropriate for me to talk about the sex scenes I’ve been reading.

WINNIE

You are reading MY book.

What am I supposed to say, Win? How hot I thought it was when they did it against a mirror?

I’d love to see the way her cheeks flushed when she read that text because I know that they did. Winnifred Carter is way too easy to rile.

WINNIE

OH MY GOSH.

ANYTHING BUT THAT.

I DO NOT NEED NOR WANT TO KNOW THAT.

What? Isn’t this why you read these types of books? They’re hot.

WINNIE

I’m done talking about this.

Goodbye.

Come onnnn.

Do you want to hear about the time they did it in the back of a limo instead?

WINNIE

NO.

I DON’T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT ANY OF IT.

Instead of texting her back, I look out my bedroom window, which directly faces Winnie’s.

I’m struck with all our memories of living next door throughout our childhood. Like trying to string cans from either window to try to talk before we got phones or writing notes to one another and pressing them against the window.

Her bedroom light is on, so I know she’s in her room—she’s not the type to leave a room without turning the light off.

I call her phone, and she answers on the second ring. “I don’t want to hear a single inappropriate word from your mouth.” Her voice is harsh, but it also sounds far away.

“I won’t, I won’t.” I smile, almost laughing. “Am I on speaker?”

“Yeah, I’m making my bed.”

I laugh. “Why are you making your bed this late at night? You’re going to get in bed soon, anyway.”

“It’s not about the look of a made bed, Logan. It’s about the feeling of climbing into a made bed,” she counters .

“Look out your window,” I tell her.

When I see her blinds shift, I also hear her sigh through the phone as her eyes peer through the small opening. “You know this is creepy, right?”

She opens the blinds fully, revealing her entirely pink bedroom, her canopy bed perfectly made.

“Good thing your blinds were closed then.” She’s in her pajamas, a pink silk tank top and matching shorts. I can’t even imagine what I would have done if I’d looked out my window to see Winnie changing. My imagination has run rampant enough with thoughts of her for the entirety of my teenage years, and seeing her naked would only fuel the fire.

I hold up a finger, hanging up the phone before opening my window and climbing out onto the roof. If my mom finds out I did this, she will more than likely be pissed, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

Winnie grabs a blanket off her window seat, laying it out on her own roof so she can sit opposite me.

“How was ballet?” I ask.

Winnie does ballet both for the school and for a professional dance school. Madame Bacri, her teacher, instructs both of them, which is how Winnie got started with classical ballet back in elementary school.

This means she not only has practice as a class during the school day but practically every night afterward as well.

“It was fine. We’re trying to polish our routine for spring performance.” She looks down at her hands, a tell-tale sign that she doesn’t want to talk about it.

I don’t completely change the subject, but I redirect it to myself. “I wish I would have done a sport through high school.” A little late for that realization, Logan.

“What sport?” she asks.

“I don’t know.” When I think back to why I never played football with Luke, or soccer, or basketball, I can never give myself a good enough answer other than I didn’t want to.

I have the athleticism for it. I’ve always been fond of staying in shape, and I very easily could have done it, but I simply didn’t have the interest.

Nothing drew me towards the long hours of practice when in reality, it all means nothing. Plus, my competitive drive would have killed my love for any sport. Every loss would have felt like a knife to my chest.

“The biggest thing that I’ve learned since starting ballet is that if you don’t like it, your body won’t do it,” Winnie replies. “There have been times where I wanted to do anything but ballet, and I was so close to quitting, and those were always the moments that my body gave out on me.”

Ballet has always taken a toll on Winnie. It’s a sport that requires a robust mentality, but a majority of the time, her love of ballet outweighed any doubts she had.

“It has taken a lot from me, physically and mentally. I will probably never look at my body normally, and there is a lot of joint pain that I’ll never live without, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love it.”

The thought of Winnie struggling with her body image makes me cringe. I’m just glad it’s dark enough that she can’t see it.

Our friend group has always kept a very close eye on her mental well-being. We are well aware of the psychological strain that a sport can have when it heavily focuses on your body image, and we never want it to negatively affect Winnie.

Somehow, though, I think that’s unavoidable.

“I’m not sure I could ever love something enough to let it destroy me,” I admit.

Maybe it makes me weaker than her, never wanting to love something damaging more than I love my well-being.

“That’s okay,” Winnie says. “I know that I shouldn’t love ballet, but it gives me a type of indulgent feeling, one that I’m not sure I could give up.”

“Because you love it?”

“Yeah.” She pauses for a moment. “I don’t always love it when I’m sore and my feet are bleeding, but I love that it’s something I’m good at. I like knowing that people in the ballet world think I’m talented and that acknowledgment of my hard work is the main reason I always go back.”

“You should go to bed, Win,” I tell her when I faintly see her yawn.

I can’t make out many details from across the yard, but I can see an outline of my favorite girl, her knees pulled to her chest and her chin resting atop them.

At my suggestion, she stands, grabbing her blanket and climbing back through her window while I watch her carefully. All of my instincts are telling me to move further toward her, to hold her, but there’s about a thirty-foot drop between us stopping me.

“Can you drive me to school tomorrow?” she asks once she’s standing safely in her bedroom. “My dad wants to take my car to the repair shop.”

“Finally getting her fixed, huh?” A few weeks ago, Winnie had an incident while driving home from ballet. It was raining pretty hard, and she hydroplaned straight into a ditch.

Her dad was still at work, in the middle of performing heart surgery, and from what I’ve heard through the grapevine, he demanded that Winnie call me to come get her, but of course she didn’t listen.

Instead, she called Genevieve, and I only heard about what happened once she was safe and back at Genevieve’s house that night.

She was shaken up and couldn’t go back to her house for a week following it–the same reaction she had when her mom died–but she’s been seeing her therapist every day about it, and I’m happy she’s realizing that the accident was out of control because she needs to understand she’s not a danger to herself.

I was livid when I found out because I wish she would have called me, but Winnie knew I would have flown off the handle if she called me while sitting in a ditch and didn’t want me driving in that condition.

Looking back at that night, I’m glad that Winnie didn’t call me because I would have been so terrified that I likely would have been the next patient in her dad’s ER.

So now, her pink Volkswagen Beetle is in the shop, and I would guess it needs both front fenders replaced.

“Yup, and my dad won’t let me pay for it, so that’s a whole other issue.”

“It wasn’t your fault. If your dad wants to pay for it, then let him.”

She shrugs, still not liking the idea of waving around the daddy’s money flag. “So, can you take me tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I say, climbing back through my window. “I’ll be in your driveway at seven.”

She crosses her arms over her chest. “I am perfectly capable of walking next door, Logan.”

“I’m going to pass your house on the way out of the neighborhood, anyway. It’s fine.”

I assure her it’s not a big deal a few more times, and she finally concedes.

“See you in the morning, Win.”

“Goodnight.” She blows an exaggerated kiss toward me before closing her window and blinds.

The gesture knocks me back for a moment, causing me to linger in front of my window for a moment, almost like I’m waiting for her to reappear before I snap out of my haze and close my window.

It’s well known among our friend group that my mom has always rooted for Winnie and me to one day end up together.

She and Winnie’s mom used to talk about what it would be like to see us together, to go to our wedding, to meet our kids. It was a dream of theirs, and when Susan died, my mom only wanted Winnie and me together even more, almost like she was carrying on their dream in her best friend’s honor.

It's never been shocking. The fact that two best friends wanted their kids to grow up next door to one another and end up together seems like a fairy tale.

A fairy tale that I’ve been willing to make true–likely just as long as my mom has–because for as long as I can remember, my life has been a constant waiting game.

Waiting for everything to fall into place, waiting for Winnie to feel the same way, waiting, waiting, waiting .

We tried it once, and it was the wrong time. And while right now isn’t the right time either—with graduation on the forefront of our minds and the both of us heading to college later this year—I’m confident that one day, the hypotheticals of Winnie and I will become probable.

I just have to keep waiting.

VOTE

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