Hold Me Close

Daniel got a girlfriend. She was horrible too. She slept with so many people and was just trashy. He wasn't even the one to tell me. I found out from other people, and the way they sat together made it obvious. Daniel and I started texting again, and I brought up the fact that he never told me. I told him that I did have feelings for him and that I still cared, not saying I liked him, just that I had feelings for him that were still unknown. I told him that if he dated someone else, I wanted to know about it. He apologized and explained that it wasn't going well with them. Daniel jumps into relationships, he tried to jump into a relationship with me. He doesn't slow down, and just enjoy the process. This talk turned into something more. We talked for a while about how we felt, and it probably wasn't a good conversation to have when he had a girlfriend. But it was a conversation that needed to be had. One thing that was said, will probably always be on my mind. I told him that I was just going to waste his time. He wanted a relationship, I didn't know how to have one. He told me that his time was a waste already.

I really liked this boy. We could really piss each other off, but we could also make each other really happy. I could tell him everything but I couldn't tell him that I really like him. I'm good at closing people out, I can just turn off my feelings. It's like I didn't want people to get the satisfaction of me liking them. It made me feel weak, like I was giving them all the power.

Daniel and the girl he was dating broke up about a week later. Me and him started talking more after that. Weeks go by, and me and him continued talking. It was the first time that we went weeks without fighting or me picking out his flaws and exaggerating them.

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I stood on the sidewalk outside the front of my school, waiting for my mom to come pick me up. I was going home because I had no classes left in the day, even though it was only around noon. It was windy out, the kind of windy where you have to constantly hold your hair back from your face. Just as I was flipping my hair out of my face, I turned to look at the door to the school. Daniel was walking out, probably going for a smoke. We hadn't really been talking in person a lot lately, so I just let him walk by. He passed by behind me and headed for the back alley behind 7-eleven. I turned to watch him go, and hoped maybe he'd turn around and come back. As I watched him walk away, I noticed the feeling in my gut wouldn't go away. The feeling that you get when you really like someone. It kinda hurts, but it feels good at the same time. My mom had pulled up in front of me, and I turned back to the front and got in the car. I sat there thinking, and then pulled out my phone and texted Daniel, 'I think I like you.'

His reply, '..I don't know what to say to that.'