A smile attempted to break onto Chastity’s features, but she contained all of it but a lip twitch. “Almost makes you wonder what we should do about that.” She came to a stop at the end of her sentence and turned to face him.
Jack slowed and stopped a pace or two away from her. His expression, Chastity noted, was maddeningly bland. “What’s there to do about it?” he asked, causing Chastity to (momentarily) wonder if Jack was as dull and dimwitted as the stereotypes of boys in general suggested. But, he surprised her by continuing. “The way I figure it there are only three options we have open to us. We either stay this way, go backward, or… we go forward.” He paused and looked at her in silence, and she could feel him evaluating her demeanor. She tried to play it cool, but Jack saw right through it. “What, don’t give me that look. You’ve been thinking about this probably as much as I have.”
“Thinking about what?” she asked, attempting to be innocent.
Jack shuffled his feet and looked around for a moment. “About going forward,” he said. “That… um…” he closed his mouth and stood absolutely still for another moment. “That rather than waiting and seeing what happens, we do something about it,” he said at last, avoiding her gaze while speaking and not daring to look at her until after he’d dropped the bomb, as it were, but after it had cleared the bomb bay he glanced up to see if and how it had hit; Chastity could read his emotions pretty clearly and knew that he was trying hard to keep himself level while daring to cross this sort of ground. But, now wasn’t the time for games. Not here. Not with him.
“Yeah,” she whispered, “I have been thinking about it.” She stopped talking but Jack didn’t prompt her; the hesitation was obvious in her body language. Chastity looked at Jack, saw the earnestness in his features and the tension in his posture. The genie was out of the bottle, and there wasn’t a snowball’s chance it was going back in. Someone was going to have to make a wish first, as it were, and Chastity knew that she was locked into it. Suddenly, she didn’t want to answer, only run away and hide, maybe think about it or… just simply do something else, anything else, be anywhere else… instead of facing this particular situation at this particular moment. She had wanted time to think about getting into a relationship with Jack, but now she was boxed into a decision point. It was a conscious effort on her part to stifle such thinking and keep her mind focused on the task at hand. There were words that needed to be spoken, and she had to speak them. Her silent hesitation was dragging on—in truth it hadn’t been much more than a couple of seconds—but Jack waited silently, maddeningly still and quiet, his eyes locked onto her, boring into her own.
“Okay.”
It was a feminine voice that delivered that one little word in a voice not much above a whisper. In the intervening instances of time leading up to, during, and after their delivery all other sound decided to die away, two hearts stopped beating (or at least seemed to) and it was as though the world paused so the moment could have its time in the sun. But, immediately following their utterance, the world resumed, and it seemed to have retained the shape it was in prior to this particular instant of time. Except for the minor, more or less unimportant fact that Jack Adamson and Chastity Bennett were, for all intents and purposes, a couple, life went on, and the singularity of that fact was lost on it and almost one hundred percent of the beings on its surface. In a sense, it was ironic… usually, such moments were the subject of extreme camera zooms that would give them importance to people who would watch them secondhand at a later date, but in this case, the moment arrived, was experienced, and then passed into the annals of time gone leaving nothing behind but the sudden relief of tension from two teenagers.