Free 3 Sides to a Circle by Jolene Perry, Janna Watts Page A

chocolate-covered espresso breath, and beer, and Libby- ness. She wraps her arms around me and squeezes me in a hug.
    “You’re here with me. On top of the world. At college. With everything ahead of us.”
    I wrap an arm around her, the other hand still clinging to the stoplight. “Yes. I am. Can we get down now?”
    “I sort of wish I could kiss you. But I think it would fuck up this magic.”
    “Libby…”
    “Shh…we’re on top of the world. Quiet. Look around you.”
    We’re not on top of the world. We’re twenty feet in the air on a stoplight, but Libby makes it feel like its Mount Everest. I close my eyes for a second and feel her. I want something, but I’m not sure what. I’m almost overwhelmed with possibility and fear. This girl, this moment, it doesn’t belong to me. It’s not mine to have yet.
    “You can go now,” she says and releases me.
    “Are you staying up here?”
    She nods. “For a few more minutes.” Her voice is strange and quiet and worries me.
    “I’ll wait with you,” I say, holding tighter to the stoplight post.
    “I didn’t ask you to wait. I told you to go.”
    Her words hit me hard in the gut. I don’t even know what to say to them. “But…”
    “Go, Toby. I’ll be fine.”
    Her dismissal scrapes at me, and I start moving too fast down the rungs. I slip on one of them and I hear Libby gasp from above, but I’m too angry to look up. The whole night has been too much, and I’m not up for the challenge of deciphering Libby’s world.

Chapter Eleven
    Honor
     
    Sawyer and I walk up his apartment steps, and he stops before pushing open the door. “Okay. So I was dragged to that party by the other people who live on my floor, and never intended to bring a girl home because I never thought I’d see you there…” He cringes. “Not as though I would have planned to bring you back… I’m screwing this up. Shit.”
    And then it hits me—he’ s nervous. Maybe almost as nervous as me, which is crazy since he seems impossibly perfect. I don’t say anything, wanting to hear what he’s thinking.
    “My place might be messy. I get distracted when I paint, and my living room is my bedroom because the light in this apartment is good, and I’ve lived here since I started school three years ago, and I paint a lot, so…” I love how his words sort of tumble over each other.
    “Let me in, ” I tease as I bump him with my elbow. The charge of energy between us fuels my confidence.
    He pushes open the door and flips on the light, and I was not at all prepared for canvasses to be stacked agains t the walls, and hanging on every inch of wall space, which must be ten feet high because he’s on the top story. Tarps cover the floor except in the corner where his bed is. I’m frozen, staring at how personal it all is. His space. His room. His art. His mess.
    It would be a cool apartment without the art supplies stacked everywhere, a little dated with the light fixtures and cabinets in his miniature kitchen, but with the art? It feels almost sacred. Special.
    “ We could go in anytime.” He chuckles.
    I step in , a bit overwhelmed with color and the stifling sense of artistic passion and of Sawyer.
    They’re all portraits, but…
    His paintings make me feel something. They’re not precise pictures. They’re emotion with shape that hit me so hard I have to know what he feels when he paints them. Does the canvas magnify what he feels? Or does he feel so deeply that I’m just seeing the leftovers? Do people behind the camera lens feel this much? Maybe that would help me relax and understand that what they do is art, just like what Sawyer does is art.
    “Okay. Now I might have a million questions for you,” I say as I glance over my shoulder at him.
    Our eyes meet , and it takes a moment for his expression to turn from strained to a little more relaxed.
    “Good.” His smile is wide. “Because I still have a million for you too.”
    I’m sure people come in here and scan