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Life with the McClouds after escaping I.N.S.A.N.E. was simple in a way Conrad had never known, and he was grateful, beyond grateful that they had opened their home to him. For the first time in a long time he belonged somewhere. With her, though it took a few years for him to realize his home was wherever Piper was.
For Conrad Harrington Ⅲ, falling in love happened slowly, like the shifting of the color spectrum from dark to light, a progression so subtle that the difference couldn’t be told between the shades until the color had shifted altogether.
The changes started small. It began with knowing her favorite color and the way she liked her apple pie (with a scoop of ice cream on top.) It was walking home with her from school (terrible, boring, but he went because she was there) and watching her skip along beside him, asking her nonsense questions or rambling on about everything and nothing.
It was waking up everyday and coming downstairs in the McClouds home and seeing her sitting at the breakfast table, swinging her legs in the seat. It was watching the way that she flew, like nothing in the world could possibly keep her down. It was trusting her in a way he hadn’t trusted anyone since his parents had shipped him off to I.N.S.A.N.E.
Never had there been a boy in as much denial as Conrad was. He told himself that she was only a friend, but that didn’t stop his chest from warming every time she looked at him with a dimpled smile.
It wasn’t until the last year of high school that all of those experiences stacked up into something tangible. With graduation and the future ahead, Conrad had come to the realization that he couldn’t imagine his world without her sky blue eyes. He found himself staring at the freckles on the bridge of her nose, like stars across her face and wishing that he had the words to explain what she meant to him. For all his intelligence, words fell short.
For Piper McCloud, falling in love happened all at once. A sudden electric spark of realization that knocked the breath out of her, with a similar shock to how she felt when she fell on her back after jumping off of big rocks and hay bales when she was first teaching herself to fly.
The two high schoolers had been sitting in the shade under an old tree by the baseball field, at the annual picnic they had gone to every year since Piper caught the baseball that sent her to I.N.S.A.N.E. She had said something and he had laughed, a rare and carefree laugh that made her chest squeeze as she looked at him.
Oh, she realized as she looked at the two spots of color on his cheekbones, the way he was looking at her like she was the only thing he could see.
Piper had always been impulsive, but really who could blame her as she pulled him into a kiss. The rush felt like falling from the sky and then pulling up and soaring. She felt the same happy buzzing of being airborne in her chest as he kissed her back. Conrad twined his fingers in hers as he pulled away, a smile just for her on his lips.
And she knew then that she loved him. Maybe she always had.