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"Ready to go," I agreed. And, as he led me out into the cool early evening air, I realized it - I was starting to fall in love with him.
Really in love.
Before, I had known that there was something there, and I had tried my best to pretend that it wasn’t. But now I could see it was blossoming into something powerful, profound, something that I wanted to let bloom in its entirety. The world around me was just starting to sink into Autumn, everything cooling and changing. But for me, things were just starting to heat up. Life was coming into my world for the first time in what felt like forever. It was hard to imagine that I had ever, for a moment, thought that being with him had been a bad idea; it was so obvious to me now that it was how it was meant to be. That I was meant to love him.
"What are you thinking about?" He asked, as he started up the car. I shook my head and smiled. I would tell him, one day, but I wasn’t ready for it quite yet.
"Nothing," I replied. "Come on, let’s get home. I want to see what bad stuff is on TV that we can laugh at together."
"Sounds perfect," he agreed, and he leaned over and stole a quick kiss before we pulled off into the night together.
I knew then that I was falling in love with him. I still knew, of course, that I shouldn’t have been – that this was destined to end badly one way or another, given that he used to be a student at this school and that this town was hardly known for its open and accepting view towards anything, really. But I was falling in love with him, and I hadn’t allowed myself to be in love for so long that it felt like there was nothing to do but let it happen.
And even when I had loved before – it had never been love like this. Not really. Not the kind that I felt deep in my guts, the kind that rolled up and out of me, unstoppable. Before, I could have walked away from the men I was involved with if something had really called for it, and yes, it would have sucked, but I would have survived it. With Joseph, I knew that it wasn’t going to happen that way. If someone had told me that I needed to cut him out of my life for good, I would have pushed back, found some way to fight it. Because I was sure that he would have done the same for me in an instant. He might not have been the man I thought I would fall for, but he was the man I had, and now, I just had to find some way to make that work with the rest of my life. I didn’t know what that was going to look like, but I would find a way.
"What are you thinking about?" Joseph asked, as we pulled up outside my building. I looked at him for a moment, and wondered if I should have come out and said it. It would have been out of the blue, for sure, but I was certain that he felt it too. If I’d said it to him now, said those three little words, I was sure that he would have returned it.
"Nothing," I replied.
No. Not yet. Not so soon.
There was more that I had to do before I let myself go that far, more that I had to share with him, more that we had to work out between us. But I knew, then, at the end of that day, that I loved him. And that there was nothing I could do to unwind that truth.
No matter how hard I wanted to try.
Chapter twelve
Tick tick boom
Allofithadbeen going too well.
Looking back, I could see that now. It was obvious, when I thought about it, that there was no way the universe was going to let me off with things this easily. We had been together, properly, for about two and a half months, and everything was so perfect and so smooth and so delightful that I should have seen that we were ploughing straight towards a wall, doomed to the impact whether we liked it or not.
It was funny, when I cast my eyes back over that time that we had spent together, it was almost like I could see a clock ticking above my head. Yes, all that time slowly slipping away, counting down to zero, counting down to the moment that we were going to be exposed to the rest of the world.
He had come around to visit me at the school, taking me by surprise; I had been hanging out in Mallory’s room, gathering some stuff for the next day and using it as an excuse to catch up on some gossip, when Nina, the secretary, had ducked her head into the classroom to catch my attention.
"Abigail?" She asked. I glanced over.
"Yes?"
"There’s someone here to see you," she replied. "Looks like a parent?"
"Oh, right," I replied, and Mallory waved her hand at me to let me know that I was dismissed. I headed out and back to my classroom, expecting to come face-to-face with someone worried about how their little one was doing in my class – but instead, when I opened the door, I found Joseph waiting on the other side of it for me.
"What are you doing here?" I squealed with delight, and I closed the door behind me, glancing over my shoulder to make sure that nobody had seen my overjoyed reaction to him coming in. Nina had only worked here a couple of years so she would have had no idea who he was, and that was just fine by me.
"I got back a few hours early," Joseph explained. "The weather was turning so we got shipped off sooner than we expected. I know that I was meant to be coming around to yours to have dinner tonight, but I just wanted to see you..."
"You know you’re being silly coming down here," I play-scolded him, and he grinned and put his arms around me. When he touched me, any attempts that I might have been able to hold on to in telling him off just fell away. I didn’t have it in me. I never would. I was just pleased to see him.
Little did I know, of course, that the timer above my head was about to tick down to zero.
He leaned down to kiss me and I snuggled myself against him happily, delighted to have a chance to get a few more hours with him. Every second that we spent together was something that I treasured with every inch of my being. I knew that he felt the same way. He had never said it out loud but he had never had to; he showed it in the way he held me, touched me, pulled me close.
And I suppose I got a little lost in the way it felt to kiss him again. I knew that it was dangerous to let myself get this close to him on school grounds, but how in the name of hell was I meant to tell him to stop when he just felt so damngood?He kissed me deeply and I sank my fingers into his shoulders and cursed the world that kept me so far away from him most of the time. But, I supposed, absence made the heart grow fonder and-
"What thefuck?”
