Nothing Like the Movies

Wes

“Stop laughing.”

“I can’t, though.” Mickey popped up from his squat behind home plate and threw back the ten balls that’d been in the dirt beside him, shaking his head with a stupid grin on his face. “She’s going to destroy you.”

“No, she’s not.” Yeah, she probably was, but not for the reasons he thought. I caught each ball and dropped them on the mound by my feet, wiping my forehead with the back of my arm. It was already hot and humid, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. I’d convinced Mick to break into the high school field down the street with me, even though it was a Sunday, because I wanted to test myself.

And so far, so good.

“I have a full-scale offensive planned that is guaranteed to get me in the door,” I informed him, so ready to go hard with this. “A brilliant, carefully crafted plan that is fail-proof.”

He dropped back down and held out his glove. “Sounds stupid.”

“You sound stupid.” I flipped the ball, running my index finger along the seam before taking a deep breath.

“Seriously, you’re gonna try too hard.”

“The thing is, I know Liz because we grew up together,” I said before winding up and letting loose with a fastball. “I know what she likes and how she thinks, because I’ve known her since kindergarten. And I know that if I go big on the romantic gestures, it’s only a matter of time before she goes out with me.”

“Dude,” he said, dropping the ball he’d caught and holding out his glove to catch another. “She must’ve changed since you knew her, because no way would Buxxie like that romantic bullshit.”

I threw hard, relishing the smack of the ball hitting Mick’s glove. And though he might have a point—obviously we’d both changed over the course of two years—I was confident her romantic side was still alive and kicking, just buried underneath the surface.

“No offense,” I said as I grabbed another ball. “But I know what I’m doing.”

“My apologies,” he said, sounding anything but sorry. “So tell me about this brilliant plan, Einstein.”

I threw a curveball, watching it drop over the plate. “For starters, I’m going to need to borrow your car tomorrow night.”

“No way,” he said as he caught it. “I’ll drive you somewhere, but no one borrows Alice.”

“Do I want to know why your car has an old-lady name?”

“Don’t besmirch my ride, you dick.” He pushed up his mask. “Where do you need to go?”

I started telling him my plan, the perfect romantic plan to sweep Liz off her feet, and he started laughing again. Hard. As in, so hard that he couldn’t stay upright and ended up sitting on his ass, in the dirt, cracking up.

“You’re an asshole,” I said, even though I was laughing too.

“An asshole who can’t wait to drive you to Liz’s,” he said, wiping his eyes. “This is going to be the most entertaining spectacle I’ve ever witnessed.”

I flipped him off, unfazed, because I had confidence.

I didn’t know much, but I knew Liz.

I knew if I was ever going to have a chance at getting her back, I needed to apologize and show her that I could still be the guy she fell in love with two years ago.

That I was the same guy.

And what better way to apologize to Elizabeth Buxbaum than with hundreds of flowers?

I mean, did I discover the following day that two hundred daisies were a hell of a lot more than I’d pictured? Yes. Did I look like an idiot, wheeling a cart overflowing with flowers down Gayley Avenue? Also yes.

But I didn’t care because I knew it would work.

It wouldn’t win her over, but it would work to soften her.

It had to work.

“How the hell do you think we’re going to fit those in here?” Mick yelled, getting out and coming around to the back of his Mazda.

“Pop the trunk. We’re going to jam them in,” I said.

“Won’t that crush ’em?”

“I only need the petals,” I said, gesturing for him to open the trunk. “So it’s fine for them to get smooshed.”

“You’ve officially lost it,” he laughed, reaching into the cart and grabbing an armful of daisies.

After getting the flowers crammed in the trunk, we had to stop at two different dollar stores for a crap-ton of candles (they didn’t have enough at the first one). And by the time we got back to the dorms, he’d notified Wade, Eli, and AJ, who were all waiting in my room with cameras and mockery.

“Well, would you look at little Wessy,” Wade yelled as I came inside and dropped a few bunches of flowers onto the table. “Is he the sweetest or what?”

“Screw you,” I said, going back out to get more flowers.

“I can’t believe this is for Buxxie,” Eli said, shaking his head. “Where are you going to put all those things?”

“Bend over and I’ll show you,” I said, quoting Clark Griswold as I hauled in the rest of the daisies.

“It’s like a promposal up in here,” I heard Wade say to AJ. “I can’t believe what I’m seeing.”

I couldn’t either, to be honest, but the joke was on them.

Because I didn’t give a damn.

I was bringing everything I had and leaving it all on the field.

Or on the balcony, in this instance.

Once I’d unloaded all the daisies, I put on headphones and cranked the playlist Liz made for me after prom as I sat on the floor and started plucking petals. “Feel You Now” was suddenly like my crafting pump-up music, and it also served to tune out my friends, who were taking photos as I worked and calling me “sweetheart.”

They promised not to post them until after I swept her off her feet, so it was fine.

By the time I was done, I had a few gallon-size baggies full of white petals, a few gallon-size baggies full of yellow petals, marker-stained fingers, and a stomach full of nerves.

So yeah—I was ready.

Once it was dark outside, I loaded everything—except the bouquet of hot-pink gerbera daisies—into my biggest backpack, and Mick drove me to Liz’s apartment building. I knew exactly which balcony was theirs—I’d staked it out with Mick on the way to flowers—and I also knew it was an easy climb up to the second floor.

Thank God the fancy building had garden-level apartments because that meant the second floor wasn’t so high that I was risking my life.

I was merely risking broken bones.

AJ had a class with Campbell, apparently, so he helped me out by texting: I need a favor, no questions asked. To which Campbell responded: Tell me what I’m doing. She’d agreed to make sure Liz’s drapes would be closed while I worked, and then as soon as I finished, Liz would be sent out onto the balcony, wherein she would see my display.

Then she’d look down and see me, standing below with my Love Actually knock-off posters. My Sharpie words weren’t necessarily rom-com-worthy sentiments, but I felt like they were us, and I wanted to make her soften more than I wanted to breathe.

Mick parked the car, so I strapped on the backpack and grabbed the bouquet.

“You sure about this, Bennett?” he asked, half smiling like he still couldn’t believe I was doing it.

“Yes,” I said. “You can take off. And thanks, by the way.”

“And you don’t want me to stay?” He eyeballed me like I was making a big mistake. “Just in case… uh, anything goes wrong?”

“Nah, I’m good,” I said, hoping that was true. Hoping she’d let me in after the big moment so we could talk and I could apologize.

“Okay, then.” He gave me a little smile and said, “Good luck, man.”

I watched him pull away, and then it hit me, that it was a little nerve-wracking, actually doing it. The back of the building was dark and quiet, like everyone had already gone to bed, and I sincerely hoped I wouldn’t die, get my ass kicked, or get mauled by an angry rottweiler.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a guy on the garden floor of the other building, doing something outside his sunken patio. Go to bed, dude. He looked like he was watering plants, maybe? He seemed focused on his work, unaware of my presence, so hopefully he stayed on task and didn’t notice the moron scaling the building next to his.

I looked up at Liz’s balcony.

Oof.

It definitely looked higher when you were about to climb up to it.

I took a deep breath, said a little prayer, then got to work.

I walked over to the garden apartment that was below Liz’s and stepped on the railing. My shoe made a noise, the ring of hollow wrought iron being kicked, and I quickly grabbed the gutter and stepped up onto the limestone that jutted out from the building’s facade.

I definitely did not want to linger in front of someone’s balcony after dark and get accused of being a Peeping Tom.

Or worse.

“What the?”

I glanced down when I heard those words, but I couldn’t see anyone, so hopefully that was just the sound of someone talking inside their apartment with the window open. My heart started pounding as I climbed farther up the limestone, using the gutter for balance.

When I got close enough to kick a leg out onto Liz’s balcony, I damn-near had a heart attack when I looked below.

Because I’d miscalculated.

I was definitely high enough to fall to my death.

Shit, shit, shit.

I threw my weight over and landed on her balcony, a little harder than I would’ve liked, but thankfully it had a concrete pad that absorbed the sound. Pulse pounding, I took off the backpack, unzipped it, and started getting busy.

I set out the candles, one by one, lining them up to form a heart and then a larger heart around it. Once I finished that, I opened the daisy petals and sprinkled the white inside the smaller heart, and the yellow inside the bigger heart.

I stood back to look and, dear Lord, it looked good.

Liz will love this, I thought as I took a quick photo and put my phone away.

The nerves were still there, but now they were joined by excitement.

It’s going to work.

I pulled the big lighter from the backpack, leaned down, and started lighting the votives.

Which looked amazing in the darkness.

“What are you doin’ up there?”

Fuuuuck. I glanced down, and the guy from garden level was looking up at me from below with a scowl on his face and something in his hand. Is that a hose? It was too dark to tell from where I was.

“Shhh,” I said, holding up my hand.

“He’s trying to start a fire!” the guy yelled, and I realized the lighter was in my hand, the orange tip flickering in the dark.

“No, I’m not!” I released the button on the lighter, trying to yell down at the guy while also being quiet. Something with a motor was humming now, so I felt like he couldn’t hear me, but I also didn’t want to alert Liz to my presence. “Christ, I’m—”

My words were stopped by his pressure washer.

His fucking pressure washer.

That was the humming motor.

The guy pointed up with his pressure washer and sprayed me, the deck, the candles—fuuuuck. It was nearly impossible for me to see as he exfoliated my fucking head, but that high-pressured water wiped out the flower petals and blew out the candles.

“Will you stop it?” I whisper-yelled, trying to see while getting my face waterboarded by a dipshit with a pressure hose. I stumbled, kicking over candles, trying to shield my eyes with my hand as I said, “I’m not trying to—”

“What’s going on?” A woman appeared beside him, squinting up at the balcony while holding out her phone. “Is there another possum—”

“There’s an arsonist!” he yelled.

Yeah, I was pretty sure I was having a heart attack as my entire body went numb.

Shit shit shit, this was not going the way I’d imagined. I’d imagined falling to my death but hadn’t imagined getting fingered for arson.

I needed to get the hell out of there.

“House on Fire”—smart-ass mental playlist shit—screamed through my head as I threw my backpack over one shoulder, climbed over to the gutter, and turned sideways so I was partially hidden by the corner of the building.

It was no use, though, because they were staring at me—she was filming, for the love of God—as I navigated that gutter like I actually was a possum. The building had a security light that was serving as my spotlight, and I wasn’t sure how this could get much worse.

But then my foot slipped.

My foot slipped, and I started falling.

Thankfully I landed in an overgrown bush, so I didn’t die, but my ankle killed as I scrambled to my feet and started sprinting down the street, running away like the criminal I was. I didn’t stop for at least three blocks, hop-running on a wrecked ankle, until I hit a busy intersection where I felt safe enough to call Mick to come pick me up.

By the time he got there, my ankle had swelled to an ugly size.

“Thanks for coming, man,” I said, opening his passenger door.

“What the hell happened to you?” he asked, his eyes huge as he looked at my ankle, the scratches all over my legs from the bush’s thorns, my wet clothes, and my soaked hair.

“You wouldn’t believe it,” I said, climbing inside and shutting the door.

“Did Liz do this to you?” he asked, turning down the radio.

“No,” I said. “But I have a feeling she would’ve enjoyed the spectacle.”

I was in a crap mood for the rest of the night after my plan imploded, but I realized as the guys mocked me incessantly for being a lovesick pussy that it was nice to fail with friends. After a couple of years of being alone while also being proverbially pressure-washed by life, it sucked a little less when you had friends to mock you for it.

The next morning, after I finished lifting (and getting chewed out by multiple coaches for screwing around and spraining my ankle) and was headed for the exit, I saw her.

I’d never be sure if she was my type—have I always had a fondness for redheads with green eyes?—or if she’d created my type.

She was the prototype.

There was only her.

She was walking toward the door, her eyes on her phone, and she almost ran into me.

And I totally would’ve let her. Run me down, Lib.

She sort of glanced up, muttering, “Excuse me,” under her breath, but then her eyes snapped into focus on me.

“In a hurry, Lib?” I said, my hand lightly brushing over her arm to steady her so she didn’t stumble.

“Yeah,” she said, looking like she had a lot of thoughts running around in her head. She had a crinkle between her eyebrows, and I wondered what she knew about my epic fail last night.

Did she know anything at all, or had she not even opened her blinds since I’d taken a dive off the building? I didn’t know, but I didn’t want to.

“See you later, then,” I said, walking toward the door.

The entire exchange had lasted three seconds—four, max—so why did I feel so alive, like the world was spinning faster now that we’d had contact?

“Wes. Wait.”

Any other time, the sound of Liz calling me back would’ve made me ecstatic.

But I just knew this couldn’t be good.

“Yeah?” I said casually, as if last night hadn’t happened.

How does she have such perfect lips?

She looked down at my wrapped ankle. “What happened to your ankle?”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

That’s brilliant, you dipshit.

“It’s wrapped,” she said, her green eyes full of calling-me-out as she looked up at me. Had she gotten shorter or had I grown? It was a ludicrous thought, but the way we fit was second nature to me, like memory foam, and her head was tilted back a fraction more than it used to be. “Did you injure yourself?”

Hell yes, I’d injured myself, but what was I supposed to say?

What does she know?

“I fell,” I said lamely, shrugging like it was a common occurrence for me to just fucking fall on the regular.

“Yeah?” she said, narrowing her eyes. “It seems like there’s a lot of that going around. Last night, the weirdest thing happened at my apartment.”

Here it comes. “Really?”

“Yeah,” she said, rubbing her lips together as she looked up at me. “So our crazy neighbor came to the door and said there was someone on our balcony trying to start a fire.”

Fuck, fuck, fuck. “No shit?”

She tilted her head, her eyes still accusing me. “No shit. There was no one out there, and this guy is kind of known as bonkers anyway, right?”

There was no way she didn’t know. “Right.”

I mean, was there a chance she was just telling me about it and had no idea it was me?

No way could I be that lucky.

“But then Bonkers’s wife says she has video.”

Nononononononooooooo.

“Really.”

She bit down on her lip, and I swear to God it looked like she wanted to smile when she said, “Really. It’s a video of some guy falling off the gutter.”

She knew, I knew she knew, yet I still said, “Weird.”

Her lips turned up into a tiny grin and she shook her head. “What’s even weirder is that he looks young, like my age, and he’s got a Bruins Baseball bag strapped to his back.”

“That is weird.” Come on. “Maybe he was trying to pull off some amazing romantic gesture.”

“Maybe he was acting like an immature jackass,” she said, the smile disappearing.

“I would think that you would appreciate the romantic angle,” I said, breathing in the smell of her perfume as I realized this plan might be more challenging than I thought. “Little Liz loved that stuff.”

“Little Liz has been gone a long time,” she said, breaking my heart with those words as she cleared her throat and readjusted the bag on her shoulder. “I just hope that guy learned his lesson before someone gets hurt.”

I stepped closer, so she filled the space between my body and the wall as I lowered my head so my mouth was closer to her ear. Acosta was loud as hell, and I needed her to hear me when I said, “Y’know, I don’t think he gives a fuck, Lib, because everyone’s already been hurt. He’s got nothing to lose and everything he’s always wanted to gain, so you should probably brace yourself.”

She turned her head a fraction, so her eyes were on mine.

“Brace myself?” she asked, trying to sound bored. But the breathiness of her voice gave her away when she said, “For what, exactly?”

I looked into those green eyes and said, “The hard press.”