I didn’t realize how cold I was until suddenly, my hand was in hers. Her warmth radiated through me, defrosting me as if I hadn’t been warm for a while. I let a cool breath into my lungs, and I allowed my shoulders to drop a little. Well, at least she knew now.

            “Did anything happen?” She whispered so quietly I could barely hear her. In my peripheral vision I could see that she wasn’t looking at me, but somewhere off in the distance. I abruptly turned to face her, studying what I could see of her profile. Her lower lip was between her teeth, and the corners of her eyes drooped, lacking the smiley crinkle that normally showed.

            “You mean…me and her…?” I trailed off. She nodded slowly, and I saw her swallow. “No, no, nothing happened. She tried to talk to me, and it just shook me up a bit” Okay, so I wasn’t lying. I just wasn’t telling her everything. She turned to face me so quickly that when she stopped our noses nearly touched.

            “You mean, you didn’t… do anything with her?” She asked, sounding baffled. I shook my head, suddenly aware of how close she was to me. The vanilla scent of her shampoo wafted its way into my nose, and my nerve endings began to tingle.

It was at that moment, that I saw the flicker. That little hint of a smile, pulling at the corners of her lips. The little twinkle that ignited in her big eyes, which blackened simultaneously with the sky.

            “I just…. I know how much she meant to you. I expected… I thought, when you said it was Ashley… I just…”

            “You thought I would cheat on you?” I said, almost a little hurt that she thought I could do that to her. Had I ever given her a reason not to trust me? Well, aside from me not telling her the entire story. But she didn’t know about that.

            “I’m sorry, Spence… It’s not that… I trust you, it’s just… well I haven’t been entirely honest with you” Oh god. What was this? I could feel myself staring at her. “My last girlfriend, Courtney… you know I don’t like to talk about her. Well, we didn’t just ‘break up’, like I told you we did. We went out for 2 years, and I found out that she’d been cheating on me all along. She was sleeping with some chick named Carmen. I walked in on them when I went to her house to surprise her on her birthday” Her eyes were focused so intently on my own that I couldn’t look away if I wanted to. The dark pools in her eyes now glistened underneath what looked like a glassy wall of tears that had been cried too many times over. “I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m used to being cheated on. I never thought after 2 years that Carmen would cheat on me, but she did. You’ve never done anything to make me think you would, but once your heart breaks, you become a little more wary of anyone who get remotely close enough to touch it” My own heart thumped with discomfort. Unlike the normal pain it experienced, though, this pain was duller. It was one out of sympathy. I knew what it felt like to be taken by surprise, to have your heart ripped open and stomped on.