It wasn’t like I was head over heels for the guy. I got butterflies whenever I heard his voice on the phone, and could focus on nothing else whenever his leg touched mine at the movie theater, but my heart and my mind argued a lot on the subject. I think I liked it that way. It was complicated, but it was simple. Being friends meant we didn’t expect anything special of each other. But the mutual understanding of how much we cared about each other presented the vague but constant possibility that we could be something more.

The first time he held my hand was at the ice skating rink last year. He took off his glove so I could feel the warmth of his fingers as they laced through mine. When I fell, he caught me. When I was cold, he put his arms around me. And I was unusually clumsy and perpetually freezing. He still said things like, “I thought soccer players were supposed to be graceful,” and “Maybe you should think about someone but yourself for once.” But he could never say it with a straight face. The one thing he could say was this: “I don’t think you understand how much you mean to me.” And I think I liked it that way.