Judging from the photo Alex sent, it seems like his mother made every item that could possibly be included in a traditional American Thanksgiving meal as well as a huge Mexican feast, just for the four of them. His father isn’t around this year. Remembering what Alex told me about him being in and out of their lives, I didn’t probe.
“Who are you texting?” Sierra’s voice pulls my attention back to the present.
“No one,” I say. Her eyes narrow.
“Oh my God, you’re seeing someone.” I start to protest, but she continues, “Please don’t tell me you’re throwing your future away over a boy.”
“Why would your mind even go there? Why not just accept that this is the life I want?” I will never tell her that the discussion that spurred me to switch majorswaswith a boy. She’d never let me live it down.
“Mom!”she screams at the top of her lungs.
“What? No. Stop. Why are you like this?”
She ignores me. “Joey has a boyfriend!”
Despite the fact that I spend the next couple of days answering my family’s questions about my boyfriend, it takes being back on campus with Alex for it to fully hit me.
I’m hisgirlfriend.
It’s almost embarrassing, how giddy that makes me. I’ve been a “girlfriend” only a handful of times before. In the age of dating apps and situationships and “Let’s not define things too quickly, just see how it goes,” I’ve had people I’ve regularly slept with, regularly went on dates with, and even spent a lot of time with outside the context of sex, but slapping on an actual label rarely happened.
Then there’s the fact that I was in love with my best friend and measured every person I dated against him. Sometimes it felt like the only reason I dated at all was to feel less pathetic, so when my dates shied away from commitment, I wasn’t too put out by it.
Being with Alex feels natural. Comfortable. It’s baffling that I lived an entire life without us ever figuring that out.
Only we did sort of figure it out, didn’t we? Our night together had been electric, but I convinced myself it was all in my head—our connection, how perfect things felt, how easy, howright. I’d wanted to run away from the reality of watching the man I loved marry someone else, and I walked outside to find Alex right there waiting for me. I’d been desperate for connection, and so I imagined I’d found it. That’s all it was. A self-fulfilling prophecy.
Except maybe it wasn’t just that.
Being in an actual, honest-to-God relationship with Alex is differentthan I would have imagined. Aspects of his personality I once hated quickly become some of my favorite things about him. Once, I thought him arrogant, but now his confidence astounds me. In many ways, it’s contagious. He makes me feel like anything is possible, like I should never doubt myself. It’s easy to see how a guy like this became so successful—he saw his own success as an inevitability. A grating trait when I didn’t like him, but a fascinating one now that I do.
I practically move into Alex’s dorm. There are two weeks of class left before finals, and Alex and I spend every moment we can with each other. When we’re together, he has this intoxicating way of making me feel like he and I are the only two people in the entire world.
One day, curled up in his dorm bed, we watchBefore Sunset.
“Let’s go to Paris for Christmas.”
I blink at him incredulously.
“You want to book a trip halfway across the world for”—I glance at the date in the corner of his laptop—“three weeks from now?”
He shrugs. “Why not? Imagine the two of us wandering down cobblestone streets together like Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy. Say yes.”
I have to force myself to hold back my laugh. So hisI can have anything I wantattitude isn’t something that came with the money; it was always there. Good to know.
“I can’t afford to fly to Paris,” I point out. “And neither can you. Maybe next year. We can save up. And I’ll need to get a passport.”
His eyes light up, and he nods like it’s a done deal. “Next year it is.”
Only then do I realize what I’ve said.Next year?We haven’t even been together a month. What’s that arbitrary rule of thumb—don’t make plans further out than the time you’ve been together? Something like that. I just passed that timeline and left it weeping in the dust.
Alex continues, unaware of my internal panic. “We should study abroad together.”
My first instinct is to protest—with my major, I don’t have room in my course load to study abroad, and besides, studying abroad costsmoney. Money I’m not sure my scholarship will cover. And then I remember: I don’t have a major.
That’s one problem solved, leaving just the other. Admittedly, it’s thebiggerof the two, because a lack of money is nearly always the most difficult problem to solve. But there’s time, and I don’t have enough information to know how big the problem is, so I let myself dream.
Ihavealways wanted to travel.
