It was late afternoon and the choir was killing one hour and 18 minutes waiting in an empty ballroom after lunch because Ms. Mason didn't trust them to wander through the various vendors and exhibits and be back in time for their performance. Kate had spent the previous afternoon walking around with Aaron's circle of friends looking at Dorothy's slippers and Jackie Kennedy dresses in the Smithsonian, and she still felt mildly exhilarated to have miraculously gained eight friends from the upper echelons of the choir caste system. They were talking about whether fruit had any business on a pizza regardless of its good references from highly rated pork products, and Kate was sitting on one of those circular plaza couches next to a few girls she didn't know very well. The rest of the conversationalists were sitting on the floor around them. Aaron got up to grab his water bottle from across the room and when he came back he shimmied himself between Kate and a girl named Alli on the couch throwing his arm around Kate and giving her shoulder a squeeze.
And then he kept it there, draped across her shoulder in his usual self-confident nonchalant way. Initially Kate just sat normally like his arm wasn't there but was feeling horrible self-aware and awkward. Eventually the VBS side of her personality gave way and Kate relaxed and settled into the squishy boniness of the extraordinarily tall Aaron. Since she had also spent the previous evening not falling asleep in new crush giddiness, she was also feeling pretty stellar about the current arrangement.
Sadly it meant essentially nothing to Aaron, other than a natural shift from stranger to somewhere on the extremely broad romantic radar of an 18 year old guy. Aaron is one of those benevolent cuddle cassanovas (BCC) that every woman knows but doesn't have a word for. The kind of guy whose unsavory counterpart is the guy that played those stupid "give me an excuse to touch you" games like Are You Nervous? in middle school and by sophomore year of high school is a full blown lecher. However, unlike that guy who is usually placed somewhere on the spectrum between overpowering body odor and holding a bag of still warm but quickly cooling vomit-- the BCC is almost universally welcomed into a girl's affection as the guy that gives you a really good hug just when you need it. The BCC often suffers from being hardcore friend-zoned but that's the price he pays for ready access to the socially acceptable physical affection he craves. A woman just doesn't really know what to do with being one of twenty girls that a guy treats more or less the same, so she puts him in the only mental filing cabinet that's got a slot for him--"brother." But while Kate knew in some vague way that this was just the type of thing Aaron did, she was still fostering grand hopes that it was indicative of a reciprocal attraction.
From her snuggled in position she looked down and saw a series of freckles on the back of Aaron's right hand. She made one of those exhale sniff-laughs for being a dork before she could stop herself. When Aaron asked what she thought was funny she couldn't think of a feasible lie fast enough so she had no choice but tell him.
"You're freckles look like Auriga."
"Like what?"
"Auriga... It's a constellation of a guy holding a goat."
Aaron didn't have a response to that.
"I'm weird. I know, don't worry."
To which Aaron squeezed her shoulder again, and pressed on her head so that it was resting on her shoulder. Kate hoped fervently that he couldn't tell that her breathing had gone all funny and her face had grown hot.
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