Fearless

“Can you pass the Lo Mein?” I asked with a semi-full mouth, nodding in the direction of the container.

Niall obliged my command by passing over the thing. When Niall decided on getting Chinese food, we’d both gotten excited over it, but once the food arrived, we realized what a snag we’d gotten ourselves into. We had no plates and no silverware. So we had to settle for some plastic sporks that we stole from his suitemates and eating straight out of the cartons.

“So I have an idea,” Niall voiced as he stuffed half a chicken finger into his mouth at once.

“And that would be?” I questioned when he didn’t finish his statement.

“I realized that I don’t know anything about you. So I think we should play a game of Truth, no holds barred. After all, I already know the worst things about you, right?”

I pondered that for a minute. To say that I wasn’t an open person was the understatement of the year. Which Niall knew.

But if I ever wanted to form a real relationship with him, which was where our friendship seemed to be heading (where I might have even possibly wanted it to head), then I was going to have to learn not to keep secrets from him.

“Fine,” I agreed after what I hoped wasn’t too long of a pause. “You start with the questions.”

“Alright, let’s start with an easy one,” he said, but the smirk on his face hinted otherwise. “Are you a virgin?”

I laughed. “That’s an easy question?”

“Yeah. They’re going to get harder. This one’s just a yes or no.”

I shook my head at him as I answered, “No, I’m not. Are you?”

“No.” He smiled at me. “Your turn.”

“How’d you lose your virginity?” I smirked at him, hoping that my question was harder than his.

He burst out laughing. “Uh, the usual way, I guess.”

“You know what I mean!” I responded, reaching over to swat him on the shoulder playfully. “How old were you, what was the situation…?”

“Uh, I was sixteen, and I was drunk at a party, and this other girl was drunk, and one thing led to another.” He shrugged. “Pretty much the stereotypical teenager first-time story. Now what about you?”

“Um, I was fifteen, and I’d been going out with this guy for a few months. We were in his basement watching something…I think it was a cheesy eighties movie. He kissed me, and then he wanted to take it further, so I let him, and the rest is history.” I chuckled a little bit and scooted away from the food so I wouldn’t be tempted to eat anymore, sitting so my back was against one of the desk’s legs. “Um…what are you going to school for?”

Niall smirked at me. “That’s not a hard question at all.”

“I didn’t know they had to be hard questions. I thought we were just trying to get to know each other.”

“Ouch,” he mumbled jokingly. “Alright. I’m going to be a Spanish teacher.”

I blinked at him. “A guy from Ireland with a brogue stronger than I’ve ever heard, and you’re going to be a Spanish teacher?”

“Sì,” he grinned. “I’m good at it, and I think the language is really pretty. Now can I ask you a question ?”

Whoops. I just realized that I'd asked two in a row. My bad. “Sure.”

“When did you know that you liked me?”

“Are we in third grade?” I asked with a teasing voice.

“Are you going to answer the question?” he repeated, mimicking my tone.

I rolled my eyes and sighed. “When you kissed me,” I admitted. “When you kissed me, and my heart started to race, and I felt like a teenager again, one who didn’t have to watch out for her older cousin… I knew that I liked you.”

He smiled at me, but it was kind of sad.

“What’s wrong?” I questioned, my eyebrows drawing together in concern.

“I figured that you started liking me before that,” he laughed hollowly. “Because I started liking you the second I heard you laugh at my pathetic excuse for a joke about trying to remember your name.”

“Hey, it’s not that I didn’t like you,” I assured him. “It’s that I didn’t let myself acknowledge it. You think that those feelings would have been easy for me to accept?”

He shrugged, but he didn’t answer me.

“But when you kissed me, I knew I couldn’t deny them anymore.”

He still looked kind of sad, so I got up and walked over to him, my bare feet padding on the hardwood floor. When I finally planted my butt next to him, I hooked a hand behind his neck and directed his face toward mine.

Our breaths mingled together as he kissed me back, translating all of the feelings he felt too uncomfortable expressing out loud into something I could understand.

When I pulled away, I took a deep breath and smiled at him. “Happy now?”

“Thrilled,” he told me honestly. “God, you kiss better than anyone I’ve ever met.”

I couldn’t help laughing a little bit. “Uh, thank you.”

“Sorry. That was weird, wasn’t it?”

“No, it’s perfectly okay.” I fluffed out my hair, making sure that it wasn’t falling flat on me.

“Whose turn was it to ask a question?” Niall mumbled, trying to change the subject.

“Um…” I struggled for a few seconds before giving up. “I don’t remember. And I don’t care.”

“Then one more for me,” Niall insisted.

I nodded to give him permission.

“Why did you lie to me when we made up the first time? Like, when you had the opportunity to tell me that you were too afraid to let me get close to you, you said that you thought I’d judge you.”

I swallowed. “You know the reason for that,” I replied simply. “Why are you asking questions you already know the answer to?”

“Because I want to hear it from you.”

I let out a really long, exasperated breath to let him know how much I didn’t want to say it out loud. “Because I don’t like to let people in. Because when I came here, no one really paid attention to me. I mean, among my professors, they all knew that I had issues at home, which was why I always passed in my papers late. But the kids didn’t, and they still don’t. So when you saw it first-hand, on the first night that we even talked more than in passing…that scared the shit out of me. But I couldn’t tell you that because you’d want to know more about her situation and why I kept it a secret, and that’s just a lot of information to reveal for me.”

He tried to keep a straight face, but he ended up cracking a smile. “I don’t think you took a single breath while you said that.”

“You asked,” was the only thing I could think up as a response.

“I did,” he agreed.

There was a short silence where all that could be heard was Niall’s soft breathing and the cracking of his toes as he curled them under his feet.

“That’s disgusting,” I tried to tell him seriously, but I couldn’t keep the smile completely off my face.

“Thank you,” he granted cheekily. “I try.”

I rolled my eyes and shoved him, and he smiled right back at me, his friendliness unwavering.