Page 8 of Big Man on Campus

“You don’t trust it.” He tightens his arm around me. “I’ll prove it to you. We have time. We have the whole year at SPU together.”

“Maybe we should talk.” I yawn.

“Maybe we should sleep. Talk in the morning,” he says, picking up my yawn.

“You sure it’s okay for me to stay over?”

“We’re not kids anymore. I’m here alone for the weekend.” He kisses me. My lips are swollen from all our kissing. I’d forgotten that feeling, of being saturated and satisfied and content.

“Goodnight, Glory.”

“Goodnight John Boy.”

His chest reverberates with a silent chuckle and I close my eyes, feeling the comfort of his thudding heart and the sound of his breathing.

* * *

“How are you, sunshine?”

I assume it’s a rhetorical question since he has his morning wood pressed into my ass crack and there’s not a more comforting feeling on god’s green earth. Wriggling into him, my mind speeds around corners in a race to say something flip, screeching to a halt on the most improbable sentence. It pops from my mouth like an overdue baby.

“They have me seeing a shrink.” I try laughing at myself, but my guts wrench and I squeeze my eyes shut, biting my lip as if I have a prayer of him unhearing my words.

“What?” he says on a half-laugh. I sigh

“Either they’re earning their money, because you’re here with me, a whole woman, or you never needed them in the first place.”

“They’re earning their money,” I say. “Slowly, but surely.”

“Good. Sky is—”

“Gone forever. Nothing will ever bring Sky back. That’s what I can’t get past. The finality of it. It’s like nothing I ever do or say from now on counts against that un-erasable black mark.”

“Don’t say that.”

“What about us, Kace?” I don’t know what I’m asking or maybe I just need reassurance.

“I know she would want us to be together. I fell in love with you, Glory, and I don’t think I ever stopped. Not in all this time. We’ll start fresh. We’ll jump—”

“Jump in the deep end of the pool?” I half laugh. It was a thing we used to do. We first met in the summer at the pool when we were in seventh grade. I was mature for my age and had a lot of boys interested, but they were all so young and awkward and too much like my kid brother. Except not Kace. He was laid back and sure of himself but not in an arrogant, obnoxious way. He didn’t whistle or make comments or splash me like the other boys. He challenged me. He said, let’s jump in the deep end of the pool. And we did. We jumped together.

“Let’s do it, Glory. Like old times.”

I laugh. “God you make us sound like geezers.” But some days that’s exactly what I feel like. Old. Like my life before the crash that killed Sky was a hundred years ago.

I touch his face, the face that I loved, and I can feel all those feelings seeping back, the longing that I used to feel when he first left. Before I learned to numb myself against it. Before I stopped drinking at social events, not that there’ve been many. I never worried about drinking when we were together, before Sky’s death.

Maybe if we get back together, I won’t worry so much about drinking or not drinking.

As long as I don’t drive with a passenger it doesn’t matter, does it? Then I can’t hurt anyone. But myself.

“I better go now. My parents will be expecting me home.”

He smiles. “This reminds me exactly of high school. I feel like I’ve been thrown back in time. Worried about my parents finding us.”

“Not far enough back. Sky’s death happened.” I get out of bed. Picking up my panties off the floor, I start pulling them on. He sits up.

“I’m not giving up on us again before we give it another chance. I learned my lesson last time. Things are different now.”