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Tessa is seventeen when she realizes that she’s in love with Scott Moir.
They’re driving around without any sense of where they’re going, as they always do whenever they have free time on an endless summer day much like today. When he picked her up, a strawberry banana smoothie had been waiting in the cupholder, Tessa scrawled across it in Scott’s messy handwriting.
They’ve been ice dancing partners since she was seven and he was nine, but were in each other's lives' before that, so it’s not really a surprise to anyone that they spend all of their off-ice time together.
What is surprising, to her at least, is that she’s not scared by the fact that she’s in love with the person she sees the most, outside of her family. She’s not scared that it’s going to ruin their partnership, because she doesn’t think it’s going to (Later, she’ll realize that it won’t). She’s not scared that Scott would never talk to her again if she told him how she felt, because she knows that he isn’t like that; he wouldn’t make it weird (He wouldn’t find it weird, but she doesn’t say anything).
“Is something wrong?” he questions, and it snaps her out of her thoughts, drags her gaze away from the passing trees over to him, where he’s tapping his fingers along to the beat of the song that plays softly on the radio. “You’re awfully quiet today.”
“No,” she answers, turning up the volume on the song, “I’m just thinking.”
“Oh, yeah? About what?” Scott reaches over to turn the song down, but just as he pulls away, she turns it up again. His car is a hand-me-down from his older brothers, so all it can do is play songs from the radio. Danny, one of his brothers, got a CD stuck in it once years ago, and no one has ever been able to get it out.
The song that fills the car is one she knows well. They both know it, although they don’t say anything about it, not even as Tessa nods her head along to the tune.
“I don’t know, just. . . This might sound stupid, now that I’m saying it out loud. Do you ever feel like we could win gold at the Olympics someday?”
It’s a naïve question, one she knows he doesn’t have the answer for, but as he turns down the radio again, Tessa knows that he’s going to try to answer anyway.
“Yeah, I think we can.” And with that, he smiles at her crookedly, sending her heart thumpthumping away in her chest.
“Really?” she asks, feeling her own mouth curl into a smile.
Scott laughs.
Now that she’s realized that she’s in love with him, she feels like every time he so much as looks in her direction, it means something. Every smile, every laugh, feels like it’s just for her.
“I really do, Tessa. Not only are we really dedicated to our partnership, to each other . . .”
She tunes out after that, picturing her and Scott standing at the top of the Olympic podium, gold medals shining around their necks.
“T, are you listening?”
Tessa turns to look at him; he’s looking at her, even though he shouldn’t be, he’s driving. “Yeah, absolutely.”
Not one bit, Scott.
He grins in that crooked way again, and suddenly, oh so suddenly, she wants to reach over and kiss him. But, given he’s driving (not to mention he doesn’t know that she likes him, loves him, whatever), that wouldn’t be the smartest idea.
And then she’s thinking about what it would feel like to be kissed by Scott.
She bets it would be amazing, because the only kiss she’s ever had are from her parents or family members, and always on her cheek.
Never the romantic kind with a boy (With Scott, she thinks quietly).
He’d lean in first, she thinks, at least that’s what happens in the movies. Next, she would lean in, and they would smile at each other before Scott kissed her softly and sweetly, like in the movies. She’s never been kissed so she only knows how it goes in the movies.
When their lips would finally meet, music would reach a crescendo, and flowers or something would fall from the sky (Truth be told, she knows this wouldn’t ever happen. Knows that this probably isn’t possible, not in an in-the-moment kind of kiss that she’s picturing, anyway).
“. . . And then Kayla, like, kissed me. It was weird, because I didn’t . . . I never thought that she liked me, not like that, anyway–”
Who is Kayla? she wants to ask, but Scott takes one look at her face and smiles again.
“You haven’t been listening, have you, T?”
“No,” she grumbles, turning away from him to watch the trees outside.
His hand is outstretched when she looks at him again, like he’s going to either pat her shoulder or ruffle her hair.
Instead of doing either of those things, he lets it drop into the console between them.
“What?” Tessa asks, feeling like she should know why he isn’t talking.
“Nothing, it’s just that I feel kind of awkward talking about this stuff with you.”
“Why?” She’s almost afraid to ask, but she does so with her heart lodged in her throat.
Her skating partner takes a long moment to answer. “Well, you haven’t been kissed yet, and you’re . . .”
“You could change that,” she whispers, so quietly that she doesn’t think that he hears.
More silence.
This one is so long that she’s positive he’s going to say no, or stop the car and tell her to get out, but when he does neither of those things, when he actually reaches over, pulls her towards him, and kisses her, Tessa thinks that she’s dreaming.
I have to be dreaming. This cannot be my real life, she thinks, not knowing how to kiss him back but finding that she just does.
His mouth is warm on hers, and Scott has one hand curled around the small of her back, the other on her cheek.
There isn’t any music or flowers, but it’s perfect.
And it isn’t anything like the movies. In that moment, she thinks that the world consists of just the two of them, and she’s not complaining.
He pulls away, smiles at her, which makes her realize that the car is stopped; that, in the time she was thinking he’d turn her down, he was really pulling the car over to the side of the road so that he could kiss her.
“Who’s Kayla?” she asks after they’ve been back on the road for a few minutes.
Despite the nature of the question, Scott laughs. The sound is low and makes her want to kiss him again, this time tangle her hands in his hair and deepen the kiss, but that would be a little hard to do since Scott’s now driving.
“She was that girl I told you about, from my English class. I didn’t know she had a crush on me until she kissed me, and it . . . Well, I wasn’t interested in her.”
Oh. Another question sits on the tip of her tongue, but she’s too afraid to ask it. She would if she were older, maybe. If Scott’s friendship with her hasn’t been so long that she can’t think of a time when he hasn’t been there.
It lurks quietly in the corner of her mind anyway.
Are you interested in me?
Five words that can change everything.
(As if their kiss hasn’t already.)
If Scott hadn’t kissed her, if she hadn’t asked, she wonders what they would be talking about now, if anything.
The weather, maybe.
What a stupid thing to talk about with your best friend who you happen to be in love with, she thinks.
Sometimes, they reach a point in their car rides where they don’t talk about anything, where silence sits between as comfortable as a sweater on a cold day.
Right now isn’t one of those moments.
The silence between Tessa and Scott is thick and awkward, and she doesn’t want to be the one to break it.
So, she sits and stares out the window, watches other cars whiz by.
“Tessa.”
Scott’s voice is soft, like he’s almost scared to say the words that he wants to say.
“What?” she whispers, her voice cracking, not expecting him to hear her.
But he does (of course he does, her brain tells her), and, out of the corner of her eye, she sees that his hand is resting in the console between them, palm up.
She slips her fingers through his without saying anything, turns to look at him as she waits for him to answer.
“I’ve been in love with you for a long time,” he tells her, and her eyebrows crinkle together before she realizes that oh, he’s in love with me. “And it’s taken me a long time to tell you, because I didn’t want to mess up our friendship or our partnership. I just . . . thought you should know, I guess.”
At this, Tessa laughs. The words have sunk in and she’s feeling lighter than air, like she could float right out of this car and be walking on cloud nine right now, if she’d wanted.
“Well, I think you should know that I’ve been in love with you, too, Scott.”
The corner of his mouth quirks up in a smile. “Yeah?”
She squeezes his hand. “Yeah.”
“So,” she starts. They’re not driving anymore; they’ve stopped for ice cream, and, although they’ve talked since, it’s only been about small things, like a do you want to stop for ice cream? from Scott and an answering yes from her.
More importantly, they haven’t brought up the kiss. She suspects that he’s afraid to, like she’ll have forgotten about it, or something.
(That thought alone, that she could possibly forget about their first kiss, makes her want to laugh.)
They’re sitting side by side on a bench outside the ice cream shop, watching the sun set.
Scott looks at her, vanilla ice cream dripping down the side of his chin. She thinks it’s cute, so she doesn’t tell him.
“I think, if you want to, we should give us a chance.”
She feels like she’s much older than seventeen, but then she feels seventeen again as he gives her a boyish grin.
“I think we should, too,” he whispers.
When he kisses her, he tastes like vanilla ice cream and home.