“I’m not loud.”
“No,” I say with a small smile, “you’re not.”
We skate for three hours.
Maybe it’s more accurate to say Bohdan skates for three hours, backward the entire time, hands journeying from my wrists to my palms, until his fingers laced with mine.
I’d say it was to keep me from falling, but after a few minutes my legs weren’t wobbling as much, my movements steadier.
I just don’t think he wanted to let go.
And he didn’t.
Even when he skated as fast as he could, the entire arena a quiet, wonderful blur.
But never as beautiful and wonderful as the boy pulling me along—face alight, grin wide and somehow the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.
He doesn’t even let go of my hand the entire way back to my dorm. Not until we walk up the steps, the entire campus somehow still, just a shadow of what it was earlier.
We pause in front of the door, a cracked light flickering above us, sharpening the lines of his jaw.
His hand moves from mine, finding the side of my face, rough palm cupping it gently. He stares at me before he drops his voice to a low whisper. “Good night, Sloan.”
I inhale, and I think the sound of him saying my name fills up my lungs the way oxygen does. “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”
“No,” he says with a shake of his head, followed by rough, quiet words that make my breath hitch. “Not tonight.”
His thumb grazes my bottom lip, pausing in the centre before he scores a line down to my chin, across my jawbone, to the skin where it meets my ear—skin I’ve never really thought of as being terribly important or sensitive before, but it is, it’s on fire.
I’m on fire.
Burning up here while the snow falls and Bohdan’s fingers trace my cheek, moving to tuck errant hair behind my ear.
His mouth curves into a grin, and he murmurs something I don’t understand. It sounds like it starts with a Z.
“What does that mean?” I whisper, so quiet because I’m afraid someone might hear us and whatever bubble we’re existing in might burst.
His palm cups my cheek again, grey eyes rove over my face, categorizing or memorizing or something that seems beyond the capacity of most twenty-year-old boys, and he takes a measured step back, hand finding its way to his pocket.
The absence of him touching me feels a bit jarring, and I blink too much, watching him walk backward down the dorm steps, like he doesn’t have a care in the world.
He grins when he gets to the bottom, calling up to me, “I’ll tell you what it means if you go out with me again.”
I do go out with him again.
And again.
And again.
Bohdan
Then - College
I try to wait to kiss her.
To show her that it’s not some fleeting, dumb college thing.
That I don’t think a single girl has ever really existed to me before I saw her—certainly not since—and never again.
