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Her whole life, Allison had been a collector of words. Her freshman year in high school, she’d started a word wall, where she papered every spare inch of space in her bedroom with sticky notes displaying the new terms she discovered as she read. To this day, when she wrote papers, she’d craft every sentence, revising it one, two, three times before moving on, certain the perfect combination of words existed to manifest her ideas on the page.
But as Allison and Colin drank each other in, neither moving except for the rise and fall of their chests, the world gone silent around them, she realized some words had meanings that defied articulation. Ache, she knew now, was a sensation, one that mere letters or strings of phrases could never adequately encapsulate.
It swelled in her chest until it might crack her open. Until she couldn’t swallow back the small moan of relief as Colin mercifully closed the space between them, his mouth pressing to hers.
Allison bunched the sides of his cardigan in her hands and pulled him toward her, its buttons digging into her palm. His lips were soft and yielding, and they still held some of the sweetness from the donuts they’d polished off earlier. As her mouth opened to his, Colin’s smell filled her senses, smothering everything around them so there was only him, him, him.
When they pulled apart, it was with ragged breaths. Desire shook Allison’s frame like a shot of adrenaline, and the space between them, barely the length of her arms, felt cavernous.
“What are we doing?”
His question was a snowstorm in July, a shock to Allison’s system. She didn’t want to talk or have to make sense of this. She wasn’t sure she could. If she pushed too hard, asked too many questions, the night was likely to crumble to dust in her hands.
She climbed to her feet and strode to the couch the dogs had not yet commandeered, putting some distance between them.
“I don’t know. Why are you here?” she asked. “Why did you drive me home?”
If anything was to blame for what was happening, it was all that uninterrupted time in the car. All those windows into him that had been thrown open, forcing her to confront the new sides of Colin Benjamin she’d been trying hard to ignore all these weeks. If he was the same old Colin, it made sense to resist these…things…she was feeling. But if he’d changed… what if he’d changed?
Allison shook her head, dispersing those thoughts.
He blew out a breath. “I couldn’t let you go through this alone.”
“Why?”
“Because…” His long fingers clawed through his unkempt hair, and he began to pace in front of her.
Allison wanted nothing more than to be the one combing back those silky strands. Tugging them between her fingers. She wrung her hands in her lap. “Because no one else could? Because it was the right thing to do?”
He stopped and faced her. “Because it’s you.” Behind his maroon-framed glasses, his gaze was firm. Certain. He knew what he was doing. What he was saying. “Allison…” He lowered himself onto the other end of the couch. “I think about you constantly.”
Her heart lost its rhythm. She couldn’t seem to stop herself from confessing, “I think about you, too.”
Colin reached for her hand. “I don’t mean I think about how I’m going to trounce you in class or win this mentorship or prove I’m the most medieval of medievalists.” His thumb traced a line of heat up the inside of her wrist. “I think about how much I want to thread my fingers through your hair. And about every look you give me, unpacking it to see if there might be more than animosity in it. I think about the endless string of brilliant things you say, and about how it used to feel to hold you, to kiss you, to dothis”—he lifted their hands—“and how I fucked that all up. And more than anything else, I think about how much I lost when I broke up with you. How much more I would gain if we found a way back to each other now.”
The couch beneath Allison was worn, full of lumps and crevices from the weekend watch-a-thons and Thursday-night reality-TV binges Allison and her mom had shared for years. To sit on it was to immediately sink down to the springs. And yet, each of Colin’s words piled onto Allison until she felt herself dip lower. Until she wasn’t sure she’d find her way back out.
“What do you mean?”
Colin’s eyes drifted closed. “If you’d told me two years ago that you’d only be smarter and more articulate and more beautiful now, I wouldn’t have thought it possible. But every day, you manage to say something that…” He flicked his free hand beside his temple, mimicking his mind exploding.
Allison’s heart drilled against her chest. He really had been confessing his regrets on that Scrabble board. “And you want that?”
His eyes stole her gaze. “Yes.”
He’s not the same,she told herself.I’m not the same. That means the outcome won’t be, either.
She was probably fooling herself. She should have created twenty-five different sets of WCS lists before ever stepping into that car with Colin tonight. But Allison was exhausted, and she wanted this badly enough not to question it.
Sliding his glasses from his face, she set them on the end table and snaked her arms around his neck. He yielded to her gentle tug, kneeling over her as she lay back against the arm of the couch.
His lips seemed to search hers. Gone was his confidence, his ego, displaced by a timid sort of wanting that made Allison bolder. It washer mouth that opened to let in a soft sweep of his tongue. It was her hands that first crawled up the back of his cardigan and the T-shirt beneath to explore the smooth skin and sharp points of his back, the small patches of hair on his stomach and chest.
When her fingers started to tease at the waistband of his jeans, he jerked back with an urgency that sent her blood pumping. His chest heaved up and down, matching the thrum at Allison’s center, as he wrestled with the hem of his shirt.
He seemed to forget all about his baggy wool cardigan, trying to pull his T-shirt up by the waist, and ended up a tangled mess. With everything bunched around his head, he stumbled off the couch, knocked into the coffee table, and fell flat on his ass.
“Well, this is awkward,” came his muffled voice through the layers of fabric.
