It seemed that my resistance and uncertainty had always been futile. Alex had suddenly become more important to me than I could ever have predicted. There wasn’t any way I could stop it, or even slow it down for that matter, nor did I want to. One minute he was a pleasant, shining distraction from my grief, and the next, he was the reason I woke up each morning with a smile on my face. He was the reason I began to feel comfortable closing my eyes at night because I no longer feared the nightmares that used to wait for me in sleep. Those, although still present on occasion, were becoming rare as dreams of a girl and boy lying together, rolling around in parks and walking home hand in hand began to take over. The light was outweighing the dark, and it was only just beginning to dawn on me how long I’d been stumbling around in the fog for.

It wasn’t just because of Elizabeth’s death, but because of my own stubbornness, too. I’d spent so much time feeling guilty for wanting anything, when my sister, for the majority of her life, had struggled with the restrictions of her faulty heart. My childhood had been happy, despite my constant worry. It had been filled with smiles and laughter, love and comfort – all the things a young girl growing up could ever wish for, but I had always felt bad taking my parents’ attention when Lizzy needed it more. I felt guilty for being the healthy one when she was a much better human being than I could ever dream of being. She was my idol and none of it had ever made any sense. I didn’t deserve a future when she couldn’t have one. I’d been young when I’d made the decision to lock myself away and stay in my bubble. I didn’t want to be a burden to anyone. I’d always been alive, yet sleeping, not wasting any time on anything other than wishing for a miracle that would save my sister.

When she died, I’d never imagined anyone would be able to change the default setting in my mind, but then he came along. He came along and he changed everything.

The more Alex woke me up, the more he forced me to think and made me feel safe, the more I realised just how much of a lifeless nobody I’d always been before him. I had never known what made my heart race with excitement and adrenaline until now. I’d never known how much I enjoyed taking note of all the little things in the world, the things that surrounded me every day, or the life that beat all around.

Alex was responsible for that.

I’d never had someone outside the family, not even a girl, who came by my house on an evening, just to lay on my bed with me, talk and keep me company. Alex’s fingers would stroke the length of my hair tenderly while I rested under his arm, showing him all the pictures of Lizzy and I growing up together. He would ask questions, push me to think, and offer me opinions on life from his viewpoint. He never looked bored, not even when I, myself, got bored of my own stories. He never looked anything other than interested, curious, and dare I say it, content. When he was around, I found a way to use my voice. I’d never been suppressed by anyone other than myself, but I guess I’d never really felt the need to sparkle too brightly, either.

It was wonderful. He was wonderful. Life was beginning to feel wonderful.

Alex was taking me high up in the sky with him, and I didn’t seem to care at all how hard I might crash back down to earth. He made me feel like that wasn’t even an option when I was beside him, laughing and joking, pretending that I wasn’t falling for him in a way that would leave me unrecoverable if he chose to walk away.

The next few weeks whizzed by in a blur of early morning rises, slow walks to school together and extended bus journeys home. There wasn’t anything I didn’t want to know about Alex, but no matter how many times I tried to steer the conversation his way, he always managed to turn it back around on me.

I was sprawled out on my bed, my hair fanning out beneath me as I looked up at the ceiling of my room with a huge smile on my face. My phone was pressed to my ear as I listened to him speak. He was quieter tonight, his voice hushed and croaky, but I didn’t think to question him about it. His slightly seductive tones were too much of a distraction for my recently freed inquisitive side to even bother to try and take over.

“Tell me,” he whispered again roughly. I could hear the grin in his voice, too. I could picture him lying in his room, staring up at his own ceiling, wearing a goofy smile on his face. It only made my cheeks blush and my legs squeeze tightly together.

“Stop it,” I giggled.

“I will. Once you’ve told me.”

I sighed, rolling my eyes as if he was standing in front of me and could see my feigned exhaustion. “Fine. Shorts and a t-shirt.”

“How short are your shorts?”

“Alex.” I laughed again, unsure how to even begin to respond to this type of flirtatious behaviour. I knew we were friends – best friends, in fact – and I had come to learn that where I was concerned, Alex went above and beyond what he would do for anybody else. But I had no idea if we were anything more or not. I didn’t dare to let my dreams wander that far ahead of me.

“You shouldn’t be embarrassed, you know. It’s just me. Your Alex.”

“My Alex.” I sighed softly, my smile still lingering as my eyes closed.

“And you’re my Nat. The girl whose laugh makes me happy.”

“I really make you happy?”

“I wouldn’t be around you so much if you didn’t. You and me, we’re the same in so many ways,” he said. Alex’s voice had dropped even quieter, and for a short while, we allowed that silence to sit between us as my thoughts echoed off the walls of my mind, wondering what he was thinking, yet in love with the idea of me bringing his life any kind of benefit, when he brought so many to mine.

Eventually, I let out a breath, groaning slightly as I turned over onto my stomach and pressed my cheek into my phone even more. “You okay?” I asked him.

“I’m good.”

“You don’t sound yourself tonight.”

He paused, and I wasn’t sure if I was meant to notice it as much as I did, but he only had himself to blame for making me more aware of other people. Alex moaned as he began to move around. I could almost imagine the way he was running a hand through the unrulier parts of his hair before he spoke again. “I’m good,” he repeated.

“You can talk to me, you know. About anything.”

“I’m just having a moment.”

“What kind of moment?”

“The kind of moment where I’m not sure whether I’m a man yet, or whether I’m still just a boy.”

Definitely a man, I thought to myself. There was a side to Alex that was beyond his years; it didn’t make sense to me. It felt like he should have had some sort of rite of passage to become so strong, so sure of himself, to be capable of speaking to a lost girl like me and making her feel like she was safe as long as she was with him. Maybe he had been through so much I didn’t know about already. So much that may have included the man he’d been arguing with outside our school. I knew, though, that no matter how many times I told him he could tell me what was troubling him, he probably wouldn’t.

“Do you have to choose today?” I whispered.

Alex sighed softly. “I feel like I have to choose every single day, Nat.”

“I like you just the way you are, even the wolf in you.”

I heard him pull out a chair, and I heard the legs scrape across a hard floor, but I couldn’t visualise where he was or what surrounded him. I’d never been to his house and wasn’t even one hundred percent sure where he lived. Alex liked to keep his side of life away from mine, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realised how much that probably should have bothered me.

“When did you become so important to me, Natalie Vincent?" he eventually whispered.

My small smile broke free, and I let my forehead rest against the palm of my free hand as I tried to control the ache in my cheeks when I answered him. “I don’t know.”

“I can’t remember life before you. Before us.”

Us.

That one, tiny little word again that was so clear yet so confusing.

“It wasn’t much fun for me,” I began to tell him, shrugging a shoulder that he couldn’t see me shrug.

“Tell me,” he breathed out. “Tell me more about who you were before Lizzy got really ill.”

“I mean…” I began but had to stop and swallow quietly, a small frown taking over my face as I stared down at the subtle pattern on my duvet. “Before the last six months of her life, things were good. I have no right to sound ungrateful. I’m not. I have the best parents. I live in a nice place and I’ve never wanted for much that I couldn’t have. I’ve had nice holidays and great memories. I’ve played in the sand, done all those things that kids should have done as kids. I’ve eaten too much cake, gotten over excited on Christmas Eve.”

“But…”

“How do you know there’s a but?”

“Because there’s never any electricity, any spark in your voice when you talk about yourself. What was missing?”

You, I wanted to tell him, but the realisation that he was the one thing that had always been missing from my life suddenly felt heavy.

“I guess I’ve just always been waiting for something to come along that wasn’t there before. Something I can indulge in without feeling guilty.”

“Me, too,” he answered flatly. “Me, too.”

I scrunched my nose up in embarrassment, dropping my head harder into my hand as I tried to hide from him, the world, and all my love-struck thoughts. “We got serious all of a sudden.”

“We did, didn’t we?” he agreed through a laugh.

Lifting my head, I stared up at all the photographs of Lizzy that were stuck to my wall behind my headboard. “You need to go and do your homework,” I eventually told him.

“Yeah, I know.”

“It has to be in tomorrow.”

“Yeah, I know.” I could hear the smile in his voice getting bigger.

“You’re going to ignore me completely and go for a run instead, aren’t you?”

“See you in fifteen minutes?”

“I’ll wave from my window,” I told him.

“You always do these days.”

That’s because I always want to see you, I thought to myself, but instead, I simply laughed quietly and hung up the phone. It was a strange world we were both living in, and I knew deep down in my heart that I hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of what Alex Law was about.

Just like I hadn’t even started to peel back all the layers of who I was, either.

I was learning so much about Natalie Vincent that my name no longer sounded as though it belonged to someone else. All my life, I’d heard people talk about Natalie. I’d heard my sister, my parents, and my extended family all reference me in ways that didn’t make sense to who I felt I was at the time. She’s so polite. Natalie is such a good little girl. Natalie is never any bother. Natalie doesn’t speak unless she really wants to. She takes a while to warm up to new people. Natalie doesn’t need much of anything. She’s not greedy. She’s no trouble. We hardly know we’ve got her. While inside my mind I felt like I had the potential to be more. I just didn’t know how to make myself loud enough or bright enough to stand out without feeling selfish.

But now, because of him, I was starting to open up my own mind and see myself in ways I’d never seen myself before.

I ran to the window of our house as I waited for him to jog by, and when my smile broke free, I let the butterflies soar and I felt the hairs on my skin stand proudly. If only he knew what he was doing to me. If only Alex saw the way he lit up the whole room I was in, even when he wasn’t standing beside me. Maybe then he’d know just how special he was, because something in the darkest corners of my mind told me that Alex had no idea what an easy man he was to fall in love with. No idea at all.

“Allow me to be a typical teenager for a moment.”

“Okay,” I agreed reluctantly, raising a brow as I stood before him, looking up into those eyes of his.

Alex sucked in a big breath, his nostrils flaring as he lifted his hands to the zip of my hoodie and began to pull it down. His eyes never looked away from mine, and mine had no desire to steer away from his. We could have been on our own in a room a million miles away from everyone else, not standing in the middle of the dinner hall at school as we were. I couldn’t see anyone else around me. I didn’t want to.

“You don’t need to cover up so much,” he told me, gently pushing down my hood after he’d unfastened me from the confines of my hoodie. “It’s spring. It’s already getting hot. You’re warm, because your cheeks are flushed bright pink, and your hair…”

“My hair?”

“Is sweaty,” he said before he pushed both of his hands through the thickness of my hair and pulled me closer to his chest, laughing freely as he rocked on his feet from side to side.

“Get off me,” I hit back, unable to contain my megawatt grin as I stumbled away from him and began to remove my hoodie. I wrapped the arms around my waist, tying them in a knot while my eyes narrowed and I burned holes of pretend disapproval into the boy in front of me.

“Bare arms, Nat. Careful. I’ll think you’re trying to seduce me.” He winked.

“And if I was?”

Alex smirked again, his own eyebrows rising. His mouth opened to say something, no doubt a joke or a sarcastic comment, but he was cut off before he’d even started as a group of cackling socialites screeched out across the hall, erupting into a burst of laughter.

It didn’t go unnoticed by either of us that my name had been shrieked in the middle of all the chaos.

When we both turned to look their way, all eyes of the beautiful were on Alex and me. I looked away quickly, shuffling awkwardly on my feet as I pretended not to notice. Alex remained frozen, his eyes trained on them.

I reached out to grab his hand in an attempt to bring his attention back my way, but it was no good. His arms were rigid and when I looked down at his fingers, he was curling them into balls by his sides.

“Hey,” I called out to him, moving around so I could get in his line of sight. “Hey, ignore them.”

Alex’s jaw tensed and his eyes narrowed even further. “I hate those girls,” he growled.

“Hate is a strong word. They’re not important.”

“They said your name,” he confirmed quietly, and my heart sank into my stomach. I’d thought they had, but a small part of me was hoping I’d got it wrong. I’d never had much to do with any of the girls who were currently leaning into one another, obviously whispering about Alex and me together as they kept looking over their shoulders at us and giggling. The likes of Bronwyn Chamberlin and all her lapdogs held no appeal to me.

“They’re probably jealous that you’re standing here talking to me instead of them,” I told him.

Just like that, his attention snapped back to me and his shoulders sagged as his face softened. The confusion was there in his eyes as he stared at me, though. So was his anger. “They should be jealous of me.”

I rolled my eyes playfully, smiling as I shook my head. “Unfortunately, I don’t have the muscles you do.”

“I might need confirmation on that. Can I take a peek down your top?” he asked, the humour returning to his voice and flooding me with relief.

Ignoring him, I took a small step closer and tilted my head to one side. “Just ignore those girls. I don’t care what they think of me.”

“You’re stronger than you look.”

“I guess I am.” I smiled softly.

“Want to give them something else to talk about?”

I didn’t have time to answer before he’d gently reached up to grip my chin between his finger and thumb. That slow, seductive smile of his crept onto his face and our eyes made contact for the briefest of moments before he lowered his lips to mine once again. I was safe, home and content the moment I felt his tongue sweep softly over mine.

I couldn’t hear the rest of the dinner hall anymore. I couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of my own heart as I stood there with my hands hanging limply by my sides. My body didn’t have to do anything when he held me in his grip that way. He had the power in him to keep me standing, despite my legs turning to jelly, and as we kissed, I smiled against him.

I could get through life like this. I could get through whatever the world had to throw at me if he would always be there to do this.

To kiss me. To fix me. To be that part that had always been missing from me.

When he eventually pulled away, I forced my eyelashes to flutter open and stared up at him. Alex’s eyes were alive with mischief and boyish charm, and I would have bathed in that look of his for days, if only the next words out of his mouth hadn’t ruined it all for me.

“Damn, best friends are good kissers.”

It was at that moment, as the word friend stabbed me in the heart to poison my blood with disappointment, that I realised I was probably ten steps ahead of Alex when it came to the dreams I dreamed of him and I together.

Maybe the girls in the corner of the hall had a right to laugh at me after all, but I smiled up at him anyway.

“You’ll do for now,” I whispered to him with a smile on my face. I never knew a smile could hurt before that moment. Another thing Alex had taught me.