Nora grips my shirt in her hand, pulling me closer, and I kiss her back as fiercely as she’s kissing me.
I’m so relieved to be with her. Relieved, also, that she’s not insisting we post bail for her asshole ex-boyfriend.
She tugs away slightly so she can look at me, her eyes sparkling in the dim glow from a far-off streetlight. “You’re a little naughty.”
“And you like it.”
“I do.”
I glance outside, suddenly realizing where we are. I thought she’d pulled over in the middle of nowhere, but we’renotin the middle of nowhere. We’re parked at the back of Mountain High.
“Nora, why are we at the high school?”
“We’re going to do the Mountain High Marathon,” she says with a smile. “I want to do it with you.”
It’s as if she stole the thought from a couple of months ago straight out of my head.
“What if we get caught?”
“Thereisa risk of that.”
“If I have to share a jail cell with Jonah, I might actually kill him.”
She smiles as she opens her car door and climbs out, taking the growler she brought with her. I leave the car, too, and come around to her.
She takes my hand with her free one. “Do you want to take things too far tonight, Cormac?”
“With you? Always.”
We sneak onto campus together, and Nora leads me to the side of the building that still has the rickety old fire escape, climbed by thousands of death-defying youngsters over the years.
“I think I might actually be too old for this,” I say with a groan. I tug myself up and then reach down for her hand to give her a boost. The fire escape creaks ominously.
She laughs as she stands up, then she shimmies past me, running her hand across the front of my pants.
Turns out I’m not too old for it after all.
I follow her up to the roof, which is surrounded by a safety bar, probably because all the administrators and teachers who work here are perfectly well aware of the challenge.
It’s too dark for us to see much, but bright stars speckle the sky, defying even the city’s light pollution, and the glow of the moon bathes the curve of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance.
I take Nora’s hand as I soak in the moment, reveling that I’m here with her, after everything.
She tugs away to open the growler, then hands the bottle to me. Even before I catch the scent, I know that this is it. This is ours.
“Let me know if it’s a subpar pear,” she says, smiling at me.She sounds almost nervous about it, as if there’s a single chance it’ll be anything less than exceptional.
I take a sip, and the flavor floods my senses. Ginger and pear, chased by a floral note that softens them.
“It’s delicious,” I say, holding her gaze in the night sky.
“I was going to call it the Muse, because you inspired it.”
If I grinned any harder, I might cause an injury to my face. Definitely to my jacked-up eye.
“But I’ve decided it’s the Story of Us.”
“Kind of a long name.”
