My Secret French Confession

The hottest boy in school didn't speak a word of French.

So I used it to confess. Walked right up and told him I loved him. Called him my boyfriend, to his face.

Safest confession of my life. He'd never understand a syllable.

He was my French professor's son.

The next morning I was gone. New school, new city, no goodbye, no number.

Word got back to me later that he looked for me. Not casually. He tore the whole place apart.

Years later, I walked into my professor's house for dinner. And there he was.

He turned, found my face, and something in his jaw went tight.

"Long time no see." Quiet. So only I could hear it. "Girl. Friend."

Chapter 1

On my last day, with the whole gym roaring over a basketball game, I walked up to the edge of the court and said, "Adrian, je t'aime."

It's French. It means I love you.

I'd had a crush on Adrian Vance for two years and never once said a word about it out loud. He'd transferred into my class barely three weeks before I found out I was the one leaving. So I went out on the bravest, stupidest move of my academic career, and I made it in the one language I was betting he couldn't speak.

He'd just sunk a three when I said it. He froze mid-follow-through, head turning, his eyes landing on me with this slow, curious weight.

I shoved my phone back into my pocket (I may or may not have been filming him) and threw out a bright little you-got-this fist pump instead.

He studied me for a few seconds.

Then the corner of his mouth went up.

It wasn't a normal smile. It was the kind that looked like it had already read the last page of you and was just being polite about it. My stomach dropped.

Halftime came fast.

Adrian dropped the ball and walked straight over, folding into the seat next to mine like he'd reserved it.

He leaned back, easy, watching me. "So what'd you say out there?"

I swallowed around a mouthful of nothing. "I said go get 'em."

His eyes moved over my face, arms crossing over his chest. Taking his time. "That's not what I heard."

"Same thing." My heart was slamming. "I just said it in French."

Quiet.

I snuck a look at him. He was turning something over, and for half a second something sharp flickered across his face before he smiled and said, "Pretty."

I blinked. "Sorry?"

He slowed his voice down like he wanted me to feel every word. "The French. It sounded pretty."

The meaning of what I'd actually said came roaring back up my throat, and my face went hot enough to fry an egg on. I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

For reasons I did not understand, this delighted him.

He nodded at the court, one brow lifting. "Okay, Chess. Every time I score from here on out, you cheer for me. In French. That exact line. Deal?"

Every time he scored, I'd have to yell I love you.

Absolutely not. I had a shred of dignity to protect.

"That's basically team spirit," he said, to my silence. Then, settling the entire matter on my behalf, "Great. Done." And he jogged back onto the court.

I sat there, buffering.

Team spirit. Sure. That's what this was.

Here's the thing about me. I'm a coward with a rule-following streak. My whole crush lived in the shadows: stolen glances, a phone I definitely should not have been filming with. I did not do public. I especially did not do public in a language that meant I love you.

The universe disagreed.

He was back on the court maybe ninety seconds before he hit another three, then had the nerve to wave at me, waiting on his special little cheer.

I tried playing dead. It didn't take.

So I mouthed it at him. No sound, all shame.

Apparently that failed inspection. He dribbled his way back over, grinning like the worst person alive.

"Chess. Don't think I caught my cheer."

I looked left. I looked right. I would have paid money to be swallowed by the bleachers.

"Adrian," I whispered, dying. "Je t'aime."

He strolled off looking like a man who'd just won something.

And left me sitting there the exact shade of a stop sign, wondering why he kept smiling like he was in on a joke nobody had told me.

Chapter 2

Adrian played the second half like someone had slipped him a cheat code.

He scored, and scored, and scored. By the end I'd said Adrian, je t'aime so many times the words had gone numb in my mouth.

The final buzzer sounded. I grabbed my bag and ran.

I made it exactly as far as the front gate before he caught up.

He said I'd worked so hard cheering him on, the least he could do was buy me a drink, and nothing I said moved him. Next thing I knew, we were at the boba shop on the corner.

Given that I had not, technically, been cheering him on, I went red to the ears and shoved my phone at the register to pay first.

The screen stayed black. Dead battery.

I stood there malfunctioning while heat crawled up my neck.

Adrian huffed a quiet laugh, paid, and slid the straw into my cup before he handed it over.

"No world where I let you pay," he said.

"Thanks," I managed, my dignity somewhere on the floor.

He shook his head, then looked down at me, unhurried, his eyes steady on mine. "Chess. We're friends now, right?"

I tapped my cup against his. "Obviously."

He considered that for a second. Then, smiling, "So how do you say boyfriend and girlfriend? In French."

Boyfriend. Girlfriend.

I bit into a pearl and answered on autopilot. "Girlfriend is petite amie. Boyfriend is petit ami."

"Huh." He said it like a door had clicked open somewhere. Then, completely serious, "So you're my petite amie. And I'm your petit ami. Right?"

The pearl went down the wrong pipe. I nearly died in a boba shop at seventeen.

Because those are not friend words. Those are together words, the ones two people use when they're actually dating, and we were not dating, we were normal, regular, platonic friends, and I opened my mouth to say precisely that.

And then a small, terrible thought slipped in.

He can't understand a word anyway.

Nobody would ever have to know. It could just be mine.

So I ignored the gong going off behind my ribs, and I nodded.

Out of the corner of my eye I watched his whole face lift, like something enormous had just gone right in his day. I ducked my head and smiled too, my cheeks burning.

The wind came through warm and hard, the whole street gone sweet with the last of summer.

Two long shadows stretched under the tree by the bus stop, our uniforms snapping in the gusts. I watched the ends of his hair drift toward mine in the outline on the pavement, and my pulse climbed into my throat.

Adrian seemed to remember something. He dug a notebook out of his bag and held it out. "Just some stuff I wrote down. Take it if you want."

I opened it. Every function problem I'd been stuck on for weeks, worked all the way through, step by step.

My mouth fell open. "How did you know I needed this?"

The tips of his ears went red. "Yeah, well. If it's useful."

I hugged it to my chest. "So useful. God, I love you."

Here's the problem. I love you is what I say at home, to everyone, about everything, and it came flying out on pure reflex.

We both went still. We both went scarlet.

"Ithat came out wrong," I said, way too fast.

"Sure," Adrian said, flat, giving me nothing.

But when he turned his head, there was something in his smile I could only call fond.

The sky was burning orange along one edge when my bus finally pulled up.

He walked me on. I dropped into the window seat and waved him goodbye.

He lifted a hand.

"See you Monday, petite amie."

I wouldn't.

Chapter 3

See you Monday, girlfriend.

I nodded like it cost me nothing. "Yeah. Okay." Meanwhile my heart was trying to climb out through my ribs and I had no idea where to point my eyes.

He couldn't understand me anyway. That was the only reason I held together.

Adrian looked happy. He kept smiling.

So did I, if I'm honest.

The bus pulled away, and the second his face was gone from the window I grinned like an idiot at my own reflection.

It took until the stop had shrunk to nothing behind us for me to remember we would not, in fact, be seeing each other Monday.

At home I lunged for my charger.

First thing Monday was a lie. First thing right now was getting his number before I lost the chance. I wanted to say goodbye like a real person.

I never even got the screen to light up.

My mom lifted the phone out of my hand. "Leave it charging. Your aunt came to see us off. Dinner first."

My parents had worked overseas my whole life. I'd been raised handed back and forth between grandparents, and my mom finally pulling strings to move us out to join my dad was supposed to be the happy ending everyone had been waiting years for.

I was the only person at that table thinking about a boy. Dinner lasted a geological age.

When we got home I reached for my phone again and got stopped again.

"Flight's at seven. We're up at five. Wash up. Sleep."

I begged. I bargained. I lost. I went to bed furious.

I didn't get the phone back until we'd landed, half a world away, in a city I'd never set foot in.

By then the number was dead.

It had been a family line, set up on my grandmother's account, and with the move she'd closed it out. Every contact I owned lived behind that number. My mom kept me on such a short leash about screens, and about boys, that I had almost nothing anywhere else. No backup. No trail.

And Adrian? I'd never gotten his number at all. We were saving that for Monday.

There was no Monday.

I sat on the floor of a room in a country I didn't know yet. "Nobody thought to tell me the line was getting cut?"

My mom looked genuinely blank. "Your grandmother handled all of it. She said she checked with your school, made sure there was nothing you needed to deal with. She even said your goodbyes for you online. She told you to focus and not to worry about any of it."

I had no tears left in me. Thanks, Grandma.

When I said I'd lost everyone, my mom's answer was to remind me that school came first, and to clamp down even harder on my phone.

So that was that. The one crush that had come this close, that had almost turned into something real, strangled in the crib.

The new school swallowed me whole. New teachers, new methods, a whole cast of strangers to survive.

I shelved Adrian somewhere I couldn't reach. Not because I stopped wanting to. Because I couldn't.

And once I was calm enough to actually think it through, the math was ugly. Even if he'd wanted me back, this wasn't the time for it. Half a world apart, both of us drowning in our last year of school. Maybe a clean stop was the kindest ending a thing like this ever got.

I hated that I never got to say goodbye.

But there was nothing to do about it now. I'd wait until exams were behind me. Reach out then. And if the timing was right, then maybe...

I sighed at the ceiling.

"Let fate have it," I told the empty room.

Then I made myself believe the kindest lie I had. That he'd forget me. That it was better this way. That some almosts are supposed to stay almosts.

It was the smartest thing I'd ever be wrong about.

Chapter 4

Over the winter holidays there was no trip back home. We were all overseas now, and there was nothing left there worth flying back for.

Which meant whatever thin thread still tied me to Adrian, and to everyone I'd left behind, went all the way dark.

Half a year later I got into the university I'd been dreaming about, and, finally and gloriously, my phone became my own again.

I got a relative to help me hunt down Jenna, my best friend from back home.

We did the whole ritual. The gossip, the crying, the I-missed-you-so-much. And then Jenna brought up Adrian.

"What did you do to that boy?" she said. "He looked for you like he'd lost his mind. Cornered me for months. I kept telling him I had nothing, and he would not believe me. The one number he had for you rang dead. He decided you'd blocked him. Ghosted him on purpose." A pause. "He called you a liar, Chess."

Guilt sat down on my chest. She wasn't wrong. In an age where everyone is four taps away, disappearing on a person without a single goodbye is a hard thing to defend.

Still. We'd shared exactly one boba's worth of friendship. "Why would he look that hard?"

"No clue. He asked around about where you were applying to school, sulked over it for a while. I honestly started to think you two had something going." She shrugged. "Then he got with a girl from another school. Chelsea. Chelsea Xie. Wild about her, from what I heard. Had a bracelet made, custom, initials and everything: C.X. The whole romantic production."

Something in my face locked up.

The question I'd been about to ask died quietly in my throat: could you get me his number?

Because I hadn't called Jenna just to cry about old times. I'd called her to find a road back to him. I'd been carrying the ask around all afternoon, waiting for the right second to set it down.

I put it away instead.

"Oh," I said. Flat. There was no hiding the drop in my voice.

"Oh, right. He told me, if I ever tracked down your info, tell him first thing"

"Don't." It came out steadier than I felt. "Don't tell him. We're not that close."

Whatever he'd said to me, he'd said before there was a Chelsea. He had a girl now. A bracelet with somebody's initials on it. A whole life I wasn't in. Reaching back in wouldn't be reconnecting. It would be me, feelings and all, pressing my face to the glass of somebody else's happy ending and calling it "just friends."

I wasn't going to do that to him. And I wasn't going to do it to myself.

Missed was missed. Walking away clean was the one move in the whole mess I could actually be proud of.

It stung. God, it stung, and I envied a girl named Chelsea more than I will ever say out loud.

But at the end of all of it, I was still just Chessa.

Jenna moved on to her new boyfriend, then asked whether I had anyone.

"Yeah," I said, from somewhere very far away. "A few."

I did not have the bandwidth to wonder why she started screaming. I made an excuse and hung up.

Then I sat out on the dorm balcony and stared at nothing while the thing I'd wanted for years quietly finished dying.

I dug two of Bri's beers out of the mini-fridge and held a small, sad funeral for a small, sad crush.

I was somewhere past tipsy when my roommate blew in.

Bri had a look on her face I already knew spelled trouble. She grabbed my shoulders and shook. "Chess. Chess. I saw the French professor's son today and I am not okay. The build. The face. He's still up in her office, I think. Come with me right now, we're going to go stare."

She could not stop talking about him.

I snorted and knocked her hands off my shoulders.

Hotter than Adrian? Please. I had never in my life laid eyes on a boy who cleared that bar.

That was when she clocked the bottles by my foot.

"...What is wrong with you?"

"Heartbreak," I said.

"What? Over who? Since when?" Three questions, all panic.

"It's a crush. It was a crush."

So I told her. The whole almost. The confession, the boba, the boyfriend I never got to keep.

She winced through the entire thing. "You were that close. If you hadn't transferred..." She sighed. "Well. It was a crush. Regret's pretty much the whole genre." Then she cracked a beer of her own and lit up like someone had flipped a switch. "Okay, but I'm fixing this. I'm setting you up. Ooh. The professor's son. Trust me, Chess. He is exactly your type."

Chapter 5

I shot her a look. "Why stop there? Set me up with the dean's son too. Every hot honor-roll guy on campus, line them right up."

Bri's eyes lit like I'd handed her a mission. She yanked me in and thumped her chest. "Done. Consider it done. I've got you."

I said "sure" in a tone that meant not a chance and went to brush my teeth, filing the whole thing under drunk nonsense.

I should not have filed it.

The next evening I went to the translation club meeting.

The upperclassmen greeted me with a wall of pity eyes.

After a round of gentle there-there, they pivoted, hard, into singing the praises of Grant.

That was how I learned Bri had gotten wasted again. And this time she hadn't just broadcast my breakup. She'd taken my drunk joke from the night before, filed it as my official dating criteria, and opened a boyfriend search on my behalf. In the club.

The committee had convened, deliberated, and unanimously decided Grant fit the brief. Motion to pair us: passed.

Grant was our club president. He was also the French professor's nephew. Top of every class, genuinely good-looking.

He was also so composed he gave off the energy of a man three decades older. Like one of my uncles. I respected him the way you respect an uncle, which is to say with exactly zero romantic voltage.

So I turned it down without thinking. "Okay, nobody get any ideas. The president and I are basically siblings."

I looked over at him to back me up.

Grant said nothing.

Grant went red.

I sat in the silence for a couple of seconds and then quietly came apart.

Oh no. Was he...

The crowd saw his face and lost their minds.

"The president didn't deny it, Chess. Give the man a real think. We'll wait."

"Yeah, yeah. We'll wait for you to become First Lady of the club."

My head throbbed. I had no idea how to save this, so I just glared at Bri, who was still visibly drunk.

Then came a knock. Professor Vance stood in the doorway, beaming.

"I've been listening a while. Quite the party in here."

The crowd, allergic to letting a good fire die, threw on gasoline.

"Professor, perfect timing. Chess got her heart broken, we're building her back up, and we think the president's the guy."

"He's your nephew, Professor. They get together, Chess is basically your daughter-in-law."

The professor laughed. "It's not a bad match. Chess is my favorite, you all know that. But you can't force these things. And the poor girl just had her heart broken, so go a little easy on the jokes."

The professor had heard everything.

I wanted to evaporate.

The heckling did not, in fact, ease up. This crowd had gone feral.

Something about keeping it in the family. Do-or-die. They would see me and Grant married if it killed them.

They were, frankly, unwell.

Bri especially. Loose-lipped sober, she was a broken faucet drunk.

She kept blurting. "Professor, she's not heartbroken, exactly. The guy she liked just went and got himself a girlfriend."

And then she laid out the whole history. My crush. The French. The part where I flirted in a language I was positive he couldn't speak and called him my boyfriend under completely false pretenses.

The room went up in laughter. Somebody gave me a thumbs-up.

Even the professor was fighting a smile. "Chess, you'd better hope that boy didn't actually understand French. Otherwise you did some real damage."

I curled my toes into the floor and briefly stopped wanting to exist.

Then I gave up entirely. "Lucky for me he couldn't understand a word. Otherwise I'd have thrown away a thing that went both ways over nothing but bad timing. And honestly? I'd have died of the regret."

Chapter 6

The professor patted my shoulder. "If it slipped away, it wasn't the right thread to begin with. A girl like you? You'll meet better. That boy just wasn't lucky enough."

The unlucky one was me. He'd been so good.

The crowd squeezed in a few more jokes before they remembered the professor had actual business with us.

She'd called us together for a job. A friend of hers had written a book that needed translating, and she wanted to know if we'd take it on.

It was a real opportunity, the good kind, the kind that sharpened your skills and paid you for the trouble. Everyone jumped at it.

Once the details were settled the professor left, and the room went straight back to planning a wedding for me and Grant before people finally drifted off.

I hated this unhinged world for handing me a room full of people with no concept of boundaries.

I took it out on Bri. She bought me dinner enough times, and swore off drinking on top of it, that I eventually let the fire die.

The club got busy.

But between deadlines, people kept shipping me and Grant. Somebody opened a betting pool on when he'd finally land me.

I was speechless. I shut it down. It did nothing.

To his credit, Grant never once stepped over a line. If he liked me, you couldn't tell. So I stopped worrying about it and let the vultures circle.

Before long we were halfway through the book.

The professor's friend invited us out for a weekend get-together, partly to settle how a few names should sound in English. Then the sky opened and it poured, so we moved it to the professor's house instead.

Bri, desperate for round two with the professor's gorgeous son, bolted for the house ahead of everyone.

A few of the upperclassmen and I stopped to buy the food, which made us late.

I'd barely stepped into the yard before I heard the noise.

Get closer and it resolved into the whole club interrogating Grant about whether he liked me, and roasting him for being a coward about it.

"Come on. Do you like Chess or not? You stand three feet away from her every single time."

"Just say it. What's a grown man scared of?"

The professor and her friend watched from the side, delighted, snacking on the drama.

Her friend was egging Grant on. "If you like her, say so. Worst case, she says no and you stay friends."

Grant turned his head and asked the guy beside him, "You've got a girlfriend. Give me something to work with."

The guy seemed to think it over. I couldn't see his face from behind, but something in the way he moved landed strange and familiar somewhere under my ribs.

Somebody spotted us and came to take the groceries off our hands.

Bri towed me into the crowd. She pointed at the guy next to Grant. "There he is. The professor's ridiculously hot son I told you about. See?"

I looked over to say hi.

He turned around.

The greeting died on my tongue.

Every drop of blood in my body forgot what it was doing.

My heart went off like something had kicked it, and my hands, hanging at my sides, had no idea what to do with themselves.

It was Adrian.

Older. Sharper. The clean line of that jaw, the careless fall of hair across his forehead, every unhurried angle of him pulling at me the way it always had.

He clearly hadn't expected me either. Something moved behind his eyes. Searching, then startled, then, for no reason I could name, going dark.

Neither of us said a word. We just stood there, staring, for far too long.

Bri broke it. She beamed and introduced me to him, cheerful and oblivious. "Oh, right, Adrian. This is the girl Grant's been working up the nerve to confess to. My friend. Her name's Chessa."

Adrian's face went darker