Aiden reaches over the console for my hand. I was already reaching for his, and we meet in the middle. He glances over at me, a tiny smile playing around his lips. It’s late and dark, but the streetlights are casting their orange glow on the roads. Bars of light glide over Aiden’s hand where it rests on the wheel. They roll up his arms, flash across his face, and disappear. Catching on his eyelashes, each time.

Aiden notices me studying his profile. He smiles again, then ducks his chin, looking away. I’m starting to wonder if he’ll always have these random bouts of shyness around me. We know each other in the most intimate ways possible, but it still happens, sometimes. Out of nowhere.

It always makes my heart do a weird, happy little jump.

I’d been chattering away as usual; realizing that I’ve fallen silent, I give myself a little shake. What was I talking about, again? We just left the Ghost Office for the evening... oh, I was telling Aiden about last night.

“So, we just drove around,” I say, picking up where I left off. “Noah didn’t say much, but I think he felt better, afterwards. He said he did in his text, at least. So I was like, you probably miss the Corvette, huh, and he said he didn’t. I don’t know how that’s possible, because I have to assume that the difference between driving my car and driving a fucking Corvette would be pretty, uh, significant. Don’t get me wrong, my car is a gem, and a treasure, but - you get my point. Anyways, I got home at like, three in the fucking morning, but it was worth it, for sure, if Noah really does feel bett-”

I break off, confused. Aiden is pulling the car to the side of the road, but we’re nowhere near my place. Without a word, he puts it in park, unstraps himself, and gets out, letting the door slam shut behind him.

“Aiden?” I scramble out of the car, wondering if I just said something wrong. When I straighten up, Aiden is striding around the car, coming right to me. “Babe? Did I-?”

Aiden seizes me by the collar of my flannel, backs me up against my car, and crushes our mouths together.

I’m caught completely off guard, but my body responds before I even really process what’s going on. Something inside me leaps towards him, and my hands fly up to the smooth, strong line of his jaw. The urgency of the kiss lights a match within me, which in turn sparks a wildfire. I find myself kissing Aiden back just as hard. My fingers drop from his face to grab handfuls of his shirt, pull him even closer.

When he draws away, I’m dazed, out of breath. I forgot where we are, what we were doing - everything.

“Um,” I stammer, still holding Aiden tightly.

“Sorry.” He smooths his thumb in a little arc over my chin. “Just - had to.”

“Oh. It’s okay.” I smile up at him, so hard that my cheeks ache in protest. “Don’t be sorry.”

Aiden looks down at me, his eyes roaming my face, his lips turned up in a small, warm smile. He blinks, and takes a step back.

“Where are we, again? Or - where were we going?”

“We…” I look around the dark, empty street, trying to place myself. “We were - driving home. We’re - oh, my god. Aiden, you know exactly where we are.”

Aiden frowns, then stares down the street. It’s a familiar one, definitely. I hadn’t noticed we were on it. It’s not on our usual way home. Was - was Aiden just driving us around, listening to me talk?

“Oh, shit,” he says, realizing. “We’re what, two minutes away from school?”

“Mhm.”

Our high school is right up the road, around a left turn, hidden by the trees. Aiden makes a face.

“What’s that expression?” I ask, and he shrugs.

“S’like… only bad memories at that place.” He winces, fidgeting with his snapback. “Hate thinking about all the stuff I did and said to you there.”

My heart aches. It makes me sad to think of Aiden walking around those hallways, weighed down by so many secrets, so many huge things left unexpressed. Carrying a responsibility that no teenager should have, and carrying it alone.

An idea occurs to me.

“Hey.” I poke Aiden’s chest, and he glances up. I catch his eye, then nod in the direction of the school. “You wanna go?”

“Go where?”

“To school.”

Aiden recoils immediately. “What? Why?”

“That place is full of bad memories, so - let’s go replace them with something better.”

Aiden stares down at me, startled by the suggestion. It takes him a moment to recover.

“Well - I mean, what time is it? It’s gotta be locked, closed-”

“Bad excuse.” I tap his nose. “Zero out of ten. Extremely transparent.”

“Transparent?”

“Come on, dude. You were always sneaking out, skipping class, sneaking back for soccer practice - I know you know a way in. Probably multiple ways. Also, we literally stole something from a museum, so don’t stand here and tell me you can’t break us into a high school.”

Aiden tosses his head back, sighs deeply, and rolls his eyes, like I’m coercing him in a major way. I can read his face pretty well, though, and I can tell that’s not the situation. He’s not sure about this plan, but he is curious about what it would feel like, to go back.

I know my Companion Plant. I know that he's not particularly good at resisting his curiosity.

It comes as no surprise when Aiden turns off my car, tucks the keys in his pocket, and reaches for my hand.

~~~

We go to the back gate. It’s locked, chained shut for the night. Aiden hooks his foot into one of the metal bars, takes two quick bounces for momentum, and vaults over.

“Seriously?” I stare at him through the gate. “It’s that easy? Wow. Our schools are not secure.”

Aiden huffs out a soft laugh.

“Come on, dummy. Just put your foot right there.”

I follow after him, less gracefully. He helps me down, and we start up the path towards the school’s main building. The hallway lights are always left on, and we can see their pale glow through some of the windows.

Aiden comes to an abrupt stop on the path. His face is suddenly filled with guilt, his eyes deeply unhappy. He swallows, his gaze stuck to the building.

“Hey.” I give his hand a squeeze, and he looks down at me. “That was then. This is now. We came here together, in my car. We came here like this.” I hold up our intertwined fingers. “It’s okay.”

Aiden’s eyebrows draw together, and he bites his lip. He looks back at the school, then sets off again, pulling me with him.

“You know,” he says, “After we got our off-campus passes junior year, we didn’t need to sneak around as often, because we could just drive out through the front gate. So, my points of entry to this place are super outdated. They’ve probably closed the security gaps since then. I don’t know if we’ll be able to get inside.”

“Well, worth a try,” I answer, then - “Hang on, you guys all had good enough grades to get off-campus passes? Ralph, Noah, and Grant, too? No offense, but half the time you guys didn’t even show up for class.”

“Noah and I had to stay off academic probation to keep playing soccer,” Aiden explains. “So our GPAs were alright. Ralph made himself a fake pass, I think, or - no, he bought an old one off a graduating senior?”

“Oh my god,” I groan. “Typical!”

“And Grant didn’t have one, so he went in the trunk.”

“What!” I twist to look at Aiden, letting out a startled burst of laughter. “Seriously? You guys would roll out of here with Grant in the trunk of the car?”

“Regularly,” Aiden says, and I laugh again.

“Your high school experience was very different from mine,” I tell him.

“I’d call mine pretty standard.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yeah, you know.” Aiden shrugs. “Homework. Soccer. Girls. Boys. Hard drugs.”

I let out another snort of laughter, pressing my nose into Aiden’s shoulder, and he finally cracks a smile.

We go around the side of the building, climb up onto the fire escape. We take the stairs all the way up. They let us out on a low section of the roof, hemmed in on either side by taller walls. There’s an emergency exit door set into one wall, and - it’s propped open, with a brick.

“What the hell?” I ask, staring.

Aiden points to an overflowing ashtray perched on the ledge.

“Looks like the faculty still take their sneaky smoke breaks in the same spot. They always leave this door open.” He shakes his head. “Sometimes I forget what a trusting town this is.”

There’s a silence. Aiden hesitates, kneading his palm.

I rest a hand on his back. “Look, if this is too hard for you-”

“No.” He takes my hand, meets my eyes. “Let’s do it.”

“Are you sure?” I ask, and Aiden nods, surprising me with a smile.

“Better memories,” he says, and opens the door.

~~~~

It’s a strange thing, to be back in my old high school. It’s a stranger thing to be back here in the middle of the night, when it’s completely still and empty.

But strangest of all is that I’m here with Aiden Callahan. That his fingers are laced through mine. That he casts an intimate smile at me over his shoulder as he leads me down the stairs.

I almost get dizzy, thinking about how improbable it is.

Aiden pushes the door open, and we step out into the hallway. He gives my hand a tug, pulling me in for a quick kiss. I twine my arms around his neck, make the kiss last much longer than he intended. Aiden smiles against my mouth, then lifts me off my feet. I break the kiss by bursting into laughter, swatting his arm so that he’ll put me down. He does, then ruffles my hair, grinning happily. He takes my hand again, and we set off down the hall.

I imagine our high school selves standing by the lockers, watching it happen. I could burst into laughter, imagining the looks on our faces.

Neither of us would have ever, ever believed it.

~~~~

We walk down the hallway, hand in hand. The classroom doors are closed, but we can see inside through the small windows set into each one. Long forgotten memories shake themselves free in my head.

“Aiden - wasn’t this our English classroom? We were in the same elective, one year.”

“Oh, yeah,” he says, bending to look inside. “Yeah, you always sat in the front, didn’t you?”

“And you were always by the window,” I answer.

Another memory rises in my mind, and I whip around to smack Aiden’s arm.

“Ow!” He rubs his arm, fixing me with a wounded expression. “What was that for?”

“I just remembered that you would sit there throwing peanuts at me, you jerk!”

“Oh, yeah.” Aiden presses his fingers to his mouth. “I forgot about that.”

We stare at each other, then simultaneously break into laughter.

“That was so stupid.” I shake my head at him. “You asshole.”

“I’m sorry, okay?”

“And a waste of peanuts. Just an all-around dick move.”

“I’m sorry!”

“You,” I say, stabbing a finger at Aiden’s face, “Are a peanut criminal. Committing - peanut crimes.”

“Peanut criminal? That sounds like the name of a death metal band for kindergarteners.”

“Stop it,” I laugh, slumping forward, dropping my forehead onto his chest. “I’m trying to be mad!”

Aiden laughs, too, but then goes quiet. He puts his hand to the back of my neck and holds me in place. Lowers his head, and presses his nose into my hair.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, very softly. “For everything I did to keep us apart. I know this is just one - particularly stupid, tiny example, but… you have - you have no idea, how much I wish… ”

He falters, then fades off.

I close my arms around Aiden. Take a deep breath of cool air, of him, of vetiver.

“Aiden, I forgave you for all of that stuff a long time ago.”

“Honestly, how the hell is that possible? I don’t get you, man.”

“Well… yes, you did an awful lot to make me miserable back then, but - don’t you know how happy you make me, now?”

Aiden’s arms tighten around me. It’s a long moment before he lets me go.

We start walking again.

I find myself thinking about what Aiden said to me, about how long he’s loved me.

I trust him, and I believe him, I just - I still can’t wrap my head around it. It seems too big, impossible. My brain keeps trying to collapse it into something smaller.

But being here, with him… the true scope is starting to dawn on me.

Aiden said that he’s been in love with me since he was fifteen, which means that eleven years ago, he was walking down these same hallways with me in his heart. The whole time, I had no idea. No fucking idea.

Then he was gone. Years and years away, spent apart - and still, he never lost his conviction that we were supposed to be together. Even with everything going against him, and there was a lot going against him.

Aiden genuinely thought that no one could love him. He’d pushed me as far away as possible. He came with strings attached that he thought would scare me off. We had become strangers. By his own admission, he’d become a stranger to himself. And all along, he was constantly trying to convince himself that this could never happen.

He had everything in the world telling him there was no chance - and yet.

Somehow, even though it took a decade, Aiden found a way to make all the forces keeping us apart lose their power. He found a way back to me.

The craziest fucking thing of all is that even now, knowing the true depth of his feelings, I’m pretty sure - I am sure - that I love Aiden just as much as he loves me.

“Hey,” he says quietly. “Stop.”

We’re at an intersection of three hallways. The place strikes me as strangely familiar, and it takes me a second to figure out why.

“Oh, this is where my locker was.” I turn on the spot, trying to think which one was mine. “I had the same one, all four years.”

“I know.” Aiden looks down at me, a memory moving behind his blue gaze. “Jamie… this is where it happened. This is where you were, when I heard you. This is where I found you.”

I stare at him, then look around, seeing with new eyes.

After all this time, here we are together, back where it all began.

My heart is suddenly pounding hard and fast.

“Do you remember?” I ask. “Where I was?”

“By your locker.”

“Which one was it?”

Aiden moves down the rows, then taps the farthest locker at the end. “Easy to remember. All the way on the end. By the window.” He stops, looking at it, his expression unreadable. “Yeah, this - this is where I saw you.”

I move to join him there, touch a hand to my old locker.

“This is literally the same one. What’s the education budget in this town? No new lockers since you and I were high schoolers?”

“I don’t think there have been any updates to this place since my aunt was a high schooler,” Aiden says.

We both laugh, but fall quiet quickly. I turn to face Aiden again.

“What did you do?” I ask. “You didn’t come introduce yourself, I would have remembered.”

“Of course I fucking didn’t, I - I just stood there, until you left to go to class.”

“Sad.” I wrinkle my nose at him, make a pouty face. “You should have come and said hi.”

He traces his fingers down my cheek, regretful. “I wish I had. Makes me so pissed off at myself, just to think about it.”

“Well.” I wind my arms around Aiden’s neck, draw his face down to mine. “Better memories, right?”

Aiden lets out a soft breath, nuzzling our noses together.

“Better memories,” he murmurs, and presses me up against my locker for a kiss.