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“Always,” I echo. “Whatever we face, we face together.”
“Promise?” she asks, whispering.
I take my hand from hers, graze my fingers along her chin, tilt her face up toward mine, hold her eyes with mine.
“I promise,” I tell her.
I touch my lips to hers slowly, softly, so gently I almost don’t feel it because I want this kiss to last forever. I pull back, push forward, run my thumb along her cheekbone. She steps forward, into me, suddenly on her toes, her arm slung around me and I kiss her deeper, harder.
I can’t help myself. I never could, not with her, and now I want to fall into this girl, drown in her and never come up for air.
At last, I make myself pull away. I want to pull her onto the couch, brace her against the back of it, wrap her legs around me. I want to give her that promise, skin to skin as we intertwine, but I don’t.
We’re in Seth’s apartment, and it’s Seth’s couch, and I have a better idea than I’d like of what that couch has been through.
So instead I drop kisses on her fingertips and say, “Thank you for finding me,” and she laughs.
“I’m the one who stormed out, so it only seemed right,” she says. “You did enough.”
She tilts her head, looks at me.
“Also, I was afraid you were on some incredibly long hike and I’d never find you,” she says.
“That was only if you didn’t take me back,” I admit.
“You know what we should do?” she says, leaning into me.
Before I can say anything, there’s the sound of keys in the front door, and then it opens.
“Is anyone naked or crying?” Seth calls out.
“Yes. Both,” Thalia says instantly. “It’s really cathartic. Come try!”
There’s a very, very long pause. We’re both laughing silently when, at last, Seth peeks one eye around a corner, quickly followed by the rest of his body.
“I was being polite,” he says, quickly walking through the living room, toward his stairs. “Sorry, I forgot something. One second and you can go back to your orgy of tears.”
“An orgy requires more than two people,” Thalia points out as Seth disappears.
“Oh, he knows,” I tell her.
“Is he the slutty one?” she whispers.
I almost say yes instantly, but then I stop.
“He was,” I say. “It’s… I don’t know.”
I doubt that Seth would appreciate me taking it upon myself to lay out his entire love life and recent lack thereof to Thalia, so I don’t.
“All right,” he says, coming back down, though he doesn’t seem to be carrying anything else. “Sorry about that, please go back to groping each other or whatever you were doing.”
“We were exchanging haikus,” Thalia volunteers.
“Is that what they call it?”
“Bye!” I say, and Seth just laughs as the door shuts behind him.
I look back at Thalia.
“We can’t stay here,” I tell her. “We’ll get lulled into thinking we have privacy, but we’ll only get caught in a compromising position.”
She raises one eyebrow.
“Which one?”
Several possibilities present themselves, and I push them all away.
“Don’t,” I say, bending toward her, my voice dipping lower.
It’s been two weeks. I’m pretty sure that if Thalia said eggs Benedict in the right way it would set me off.
“All I said was —”
I put my thumb over her lips, silencing her. She smirks, her eyes wicked.
“No,” I tell her. “We’re going on a date. In public. Dinner and a movie. We’re gonna hold hands and everything.”
“What’s every —”
“No,” I say again, pressing my thumb to her lips again. Now she’s laughing but my pulse is racing and I’m quickly flipping through a mental catalog of available beds in Sprucevale.
Scratch that. Available private spaces. I don’t care if there’s a bed, but I’m coming up blank: not here, not my mom’s house or Levi’s, not Daniel’s spare bedroom or Eli’s couch.
Okay, I think. What if we just took a tent into the woods —
Then, I think of the obvious answer, and I start grinning.
“What?” she asks, suspicious, the word still slightly blurred by my thumb.
“A date,” I tell her. “We’re going on a date, that’s all. Let me go change.”
She starts to say something else but I lean forward, kiss her, then practically run upstairs to Seth’s study where the pull-out sofa is currently functioning as my bed. I put on clothes that aren’t covered in sawdust, run a hand through my hair, make sure there’s nothing weird on my face.
Then I pull out my phone. I do a quick search. I find what I’m looking for.
And I place a quick phone call.Chapter Fifty-TwoCalebI take her to the only Thai restaurant in Spucevale, which is uncreatively named Taste of Thailand, but it’s slightly better than the Thai place closest to campus in Marysburg, so I can’t complain.
It’s still odd to be with her in public, and it’s even odder to know that it doesn’t matter if we’re seen. We hold hands over the table like we’re in a cheesy movie. I lean over and kiss her more than once.
