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“Figuratively. You get that, right?”
“Yes. I know that people don’t live in the clouds.”
Maybe that’s a joke. I don’t know. I turn to look at him.
We are toward the back of the bus. The seats are tall. No one can really see us. Aislin’s dozing.
“What the hell am I going to do with you?” I ask Adam.
“Do you have to do something with me? It’s my decision what I do with myself. Right?” He genuinely isn’t sure.
I avoid answering directly. “I don’t even know what I’m doing with myself. What if they actually arrest my mother? What, I live with my grandmother?”
“Do you have to live with her?”
“I don’t know if I’m exactly ready for my own house,” I say.
“Freedom,” he says, and he gives the word surprising urgency.
“Responsibility,” I counter.
“Do they go together?”
“So I’ve heard,” I admit.
His beautiful eyes—eyes that I try not to remember as floating loose and unattached—look into my eyes. Eyes that he has never seen loose and unattached. Fortunately.
I have the advantage on him. I can remember everything about him. He can only seem to look into my soul. I can pretty much actually look into his.
“Does this mean you are responsible for me?” Adam asks.
“Do you want me to be?”
He frowns. There’s an instant of panic in his eyes. It surprises me. How has he moved so quickly from childlike naïveté to existential panic?
“I don’t know what I am,” he says.
“You’re Adam Allbright,” I say, and I try to flash a smile.
“I find you beautiful, but…” He stops himself.
“I like the part about ‘beautiful’ more than whatever was going to come after ‘but,’” I say lightly. Because what else am I going to do when the most beautiful boy in the world is seated beside me and several inches of him are pressed against me and I swear the taste of his breath is sweet in my mouth?
Joke.
“Do you want me to say you’re beautiful?” he asks. He seems concerned.
“Who doesn’t like flattery?” I ask.
“But it’s not flattery. It’s what I feel. I feel that you are the most beautiful—”
And that’s when the bus lurches as it heads onto the Golden Gate Bridge and oh I’m even closer now and he doesn’t pull away and I start to but I don’t. It’s not possible to pull away.
I kiss him.
He does not kiss me.
His lips are the lips I gave him.
