“I’m trying. I’m figuring out how to put it into words so you’d understand.”
She pats my thigh, gesturing for me to make room, and I pull the lever to the seat, making a loud cranking noise as it moves all the way back. She climbs onto my lap and grips my face in her hands. “Try.”
I exhale a deep breath as my palms rest on the outside of her thighs. I feel her eyes searching mine while my fingers trail nervous circles over the skirt of her dress inching dangerously higher as she situates herself on top of me. “I guess…I feel like I don’t know what’s going to happen. With this house, my parents. Even with college. Like, I know I’ll be back up north in the fall, but you know…what about us? And all of this makes me feel like I have to be on my toes. Like I need to be prepared, and I don’t even know for what.”
She stays silent, and my hand moves to her lower back, pressing her closer to me as I try to figure out my words.
“And sometimes I don’t even feel like I’m inside my body. It’s like I’m hovering over it and watching everything happen, and my body’s frozen in time, and I can’t do anything. I watch my parents fight, and I just sit there, not doing a single thing. I feel like such a coward when that happens. I know I should do something, but I can’t.”
My body starts to shake, and my skin feels like it’s crawling with a thousand tiny bugs under the surface. She takes my hand, wrapping it around her wrist where I feel her pulse. It’s steady, unlike mine. I match my breathing to the easy moving thumps, and my body sags in her arms.
“You don’t need to worry about us,” she tells me, the softness in her voice making her words ring so true, I can’t even try to argue it. “I’m going to miss you, but we’ll figure it out.”
A calmness washes over me, and it feels like a placid lake. The small ripples that disrupt the surface don’t feel chaotic as they pop and plunk inside me. Instead, they magnify how all the scary things in my life aren’t actually scary at all. As long as I have Teeny by my side. We really are going to figure it out. And, at the end of it all, we’re going to be just fine.
“Yeah,” I respond. “I know.” After a long pause, one that makes me feel like it’s there to let us absorb this understanding between us, I whisper, “You.”
“Me?”
“You ground me.”
Her lips press into a soft line, and her eyes round, waiting for me to explain.
“When I feel like I’m hovering and I’m frozen, you bring me back to earth. And sometimes, just the sound of your voice makes me feel like everything’s going to be okay.”
She smiles, and it glitters. Like a thousand diamonds glinting in the sunlight, making everything luminous. It’s the only way to describe her smile. The way her eyes warm and twinkle, or how I can see every emotion through the small wrinkles that bridge her nose and the corners of her eyes. She’s so beautiful, and a dull throb starts to pulse in my chest. It looms over me like a dark cloud before I push it away, focusing on how her chest rises and falls with the soft sighs that filter through her pretty lips.
“I love you. And I know we’re, like, super young, and people are going to say we’re just kids and shit, but I really do. I’ve literally never felt this way about anyone?—”
“I love you too,” she interrupts me. “And who cares about what people say.”
That twinge behind the barricade of my ribcage fades into bursts of fireworks. They go off in my chest, and I feel like I’m going to grow rocket thrusters on my heels and shoot up into the sky. I love her. With my entire heart, I love this girl. And she loves me.
“You love me?”
“Yes.”
“You love me?” I ask again. My brows bounce in a menacing manner, and it shifts everything around us. This is us, in our purest form. Our hearts have been stripped bare for each other, and it doesn’t feel scary or unsure. It feels right.
She shoves a hand into my chest with an adorable chuckle, playing into my taunt. “You’re so silly,” she teases, and I see a redness creep up her neck even in the dark.
I laugh too, leaning forward to kiss her. “But you do.”
“I do what?” she asks, her voice breathy and soft as our kiss deepens.
“You love me.”
She nods into my lips. “I do.”
She starts rocking, back and forth, creating this ache inside me I’ve been trying to douse with the urge to never push her. My fingers find the bottom hem of her dress, finding that it’d ridden so far up her thigh, I’ve officially reached underwear territory. My thumb strokes her soft skin, matching the rhythm of her shifting on my lap. Back and forth, back and forth.
“Teeny, I think we should stop,” I tell her with a strain in my voice that makes me sound wounded and anguished.
But she doesn’t show any signs of stopping. In fact, she starts to move more frantically. Tugging the hair at my scalp, letting her teeth scrape against my lower lip, moaning a hopeless and urgent sigh into my mouth.
“Can we go inside?” she asks, her chest heaving against mine.
“Inside my house?”
