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"Can I ask you a question?"
“Hmm?” Felice replied. Simon sat next to her, all curls and sunshine. He was really so beautiful, she realized, and it was hard to unsee now. She questioned how she hadn’t seen the light he exuded sooner. It made her happy that of all people, Wille had.
“What exactly happened between you and Wille?” At the words, she turned her head towards Simon and took off her sunglasses.
“Has he not told you?” She asked incredulously.
Simon was silent for a moment, pushing around the lake’s rocky sand with a stick. “We kind of decided not to talk about it. At first, it was my idea. But then I brought it up and he got sort of quiet, and it just felt like too much, at the time, for either of us.”
Felice nodded, looking off in the distance at Wille and Sara’s figures. They were paddling through the water by the dock, completely illuminated by sunlight. The conversation was inevitable, but she could sense Simon’s nervousness radiating off of him. It made her chest fall to know that while she didn’t feel exactly guilty, their carelessness had hurt him.
“We kissed in his room, and lay down for a bit. But nothing under the clothes. Thank god for Henry, really,” she said, and they both laughed.
“Yeah, that would’ve made things a lot worse for everyone.” She studied Simon with care. He was still looking intently down at the ground, a small colony of shells and leaves surrounding lines in the sand around him.
“Did he kiss you first?” Simon asked, his voice smaller.
She had asked herself the same question many times. It felt like a shared moment, messy ends that she and Wille had to tie up together. Had she taken advantage of his vulnerability? Had he used her prior feelings for him to feel better in the moment? It was hard to say. Either way, it was a kettle that boiled over, and it scalded everyone in its path.
“I think it was both of us.” She said, and Simon’s face scrunched up slightly as he nodded. It hurt to see the pain on his delicate features.
“That’s sort of what I thought,” Simon stated. A moment later, he asked, “was it the first time?”
Felice was going to give Wille a stern talking to after this. She’d assumed that Simon would at least know about her feelings for Wille, and by extension that unfortunate day she kissed him at the family luncheon. Her heart hurt, suddenly, for Simon. She had to remind herself that they weren’t together at the time; either time, in fact. Felice had no clue about Simon and Wille the first time she kissed him, and the second time they kissed Simon was officially dating someone else - and had made out with Wille himself while dating said other person. It certainly wasn’t the worst crime of everything that had happened in the last year.
“No,” she leveled. Simon nodded, then shook his head.
“He really pisses me off, sometimes.” But he smiled and looked at Felice, and she smiled back.
“He’s lucky you’re stupidly in love with him. I don’t know how,” she teased, swatting him with her fan. “When I stopped liking him like that, I quickly realized I actually couldn’t stand him.”
“Hey!” Simon laughed, shoving her lightly back. “That’s my boyfriend you’re talking about.” Her heart fluttered for him. The more she learned about Simon, the more she liked him. It came out in all the small things: his snarky comments, his quiet confidence in his voice, his back and forth with Sara. But it was also in the way he doted endlessly on his sister, and stood up for himself, and refused to take Wille’s shit (something she knew had been a work in progress after everything that had happened, but even so.) How he held his head high at Hillerska despite the bullshit, which she was still learning more about every day.
“Simon?” She said, swinging her legs apart and sitting up to look him in the eye.
“Yeah?” He finally dropped the stick and looked at her.
“I really admire you, you know.” It could have been a trick of the light, or a freshly blooming sunburn, but Felice thought she saw a faint blush on Simon’s cheeks. “And I’m really sorry, for everything. I wish I could’ve been there more.”
“Don’t be,” Simon shook his head, looking back out over the lake. “You were there plenty, for Wille, anyway. That’s what he needed. What we needed.”
Felice nodded, accepting this answer. By now, Wille had found some kind of big stick and was chasing Sara with it in the water.
“At what point do we stop this,” she chuckled. Simon shrugged, an amused smile on his face.
“Not our job.” They laughed together.
“I’m happy that we get this.” Felice said, and reached her hand towards him. Surprise played across Simon’s face, but he reached his hand out and clasped hers. “I want to get to know you, really know you, outside of Wille.” He smiled tentatively.
“I’d like that. I’d like that a lot.”