Reed, Early Spring, Junior Year of High School
This must be what real love feels like.
Nolan’s body feels warm against my skin, the heat somehow radiating through our layers of sweatshirts. I wonder if other people on this bus are looking at us. I’ve never actually sat by myself during one of our track team bus trips. There’s always been a girl, and I think most of the people in our school think I just need someone. Maybe I do. This, though…it’s different.
This isn’t needing someone. This is needing Nolan.
She’s doing the cutest thing with her hands. She keeps bunching the front of my sweatshirt in her palms and squeezing it, like it’s a teddy bear or something. I love the way her knuckles feel when they press against my stomach. I just like feeling her close—the connection.
Constant.
I thrum my fingers along her arm and she shifts her head, tilting her chin up to look me in the eyes. I brush away her hair, tucking it behind her ear, and I spend the next few miles staring at her. She’s all shadows and reflections now that the sun has gone down. The moon is out enough to highlight the curve of her lips, the lift of her cheeks and the softness of her hands. I could ride around on this bus forever under this light. We’re surrounded yet all alone.
Her forehead wrinkles, and I press my thumb along the small dent, trying to erase it. It makes her smile, but her lips flatten out again when I go back to stroking her hair.
“What’s on your mind?”
She bites at the inside of her cheek. This is how I can tell when she’s nervous.
“Nothing,” she says. That’s a lie.
She nuzzles into me more, hiding her face; I tickle her and make her giggle and move. When her lips are free, I bend down to kiss them. She tucks her chin, so I rest my head on hers and graze the tip of her nose with my mouth.
“That doesn’t look like nothing,” I tease, but gently. “Come on, you can tell me. Just say it; you think I’m cute, don’t you!”
I poke at her side again, but she doesn’t laugh as much this time.
“You’re all right, I guess,” she says, rolling her eyes to make fun of me.
“Hey, you’re no looker either, sister. We uglies have to stick together,” I shoot back, trying to maintain a serious face. I can’t keep my smile in check, though, and pretty soon it’s stretching across my face. When Nolan sticks her tongue out at me, I lift her enough to catch her in a kiss. It turns into more than just a short peck, the feel of her lips taking over my self-control. Every time I taste her, it’s like her mouth was meant for mine. There was never a moment of figuring out where we belonged. Our hands always knew where to go and how to hold, and our bodies have been the same. Nolan just fits in all of my empty spaces.
Our hands remain twined as our lips fall away, and I lean back in the seat while she rests in my lap, her legs curled up against the window—our own little paradise rolling down the road at sixty-five.
I fall into the trance of our hands together, taking in the way they look—her skin against mine. Where she’s freckles and pale, I’m tan and strong. Her delicate fingers are cool to my warm, and all I want is never to let them go.
“How many girls have you slept with?” Her question comes out of the blue, but in a way, I felt it burning in her. It’s been on her mind for a while, maybe since we met. At least since I dated Tatum.
“Oh my God, I didn’t mean to say that out loud.” She’s cupping her mouth with both hands and her eyes are wide. She wasn’t ready to ask me, but really…she deserves to know.
I sweep her into a hug against my chest, letting out a nervous laugh.
“You’re adorable, you know that?”
I kiss against her hair and take a deep breath in, not wanting to talk about any of this. It hurts to share. I’m not proud, but I can’t take any of these things back that I’ve done. I thought I was making the right choices when I made them. I was fifteen…sixteen…seventeen. I was a teenaged boy in a locker room full of other teenaged boys all obsessed with losing our virginity, with bragging about it, with feeling satisfied and grown-up like a man, even though we couldn’t be farther from mature.
“Four,” I say quickly. I feel a hammer hit my chest with the word.
It hits Nolan, too. Her once-loose body has grown rigid in my hold, and her breath has paused. She’s staring at our hands, no longer moving.
There’s no way she’ll be surprised by Tatum. She and I weren’t exactly quiet or discrete. She was my first, and she and I were about all of the wrong things. It wasn’t fair to her that I let our relationship go on that long. Even with the mistakes she made, she deserves better.
“I’m not proud of it,” I say, nervous about this conversation. I don’t want Nolan to think less of me, to doubt us. “I would take all of them back if I could. You know that, right?”
I lift her chin to look into her eyes. Her lips part to speak, but she closes them again quickly. I’ve surprised her—disappointed her. It feels terrible.
I graze her cheek with the back of my hand.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Noles, but I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Anything you need to know and deserve to know. But I’m not asking you to have sex with me, not unless you want to. I’ll never be that guy.”
Every bit of me wants her, to touch and feel her. But it’s different. It’s this need to be close to her that grips at me, and as hungry as I am for it, my love for her also keeps me from betraying her trust and pushing her. I would never. Not with any girl. But especially this one.
“You make me feel safe,” she says, sliding her arms around my body and hugging me tightly.
I relax into the seat, maybe a little surprised to hear her say that out loud. It’s all I want—her to feel safe. Even before we were a couple, I wanted that for her. I always wanted to protect her. I should have known it meant so much more.
“Okay, well, you know about Tatum. She was my first. And, well, that’s because I was an adolescent teenaged boy with hormones busting at the seams and…hell, you know the rest.” I stop there, not really wanting to hurt her with the rest. It will hurt her, too. Maybe that’s why I did it. I don’t deserve her, and the fucked-up way I dealt with my jealousy was just that—fucked up. I glare out the window, feeling the weight of her body against mine and praying this will end here.
“And…numbers two, three, and four?” She asks so quietly, afraid to know. God, Nolan—you don’t want to. I know what it’s like, though, to need to know. Even when it hurts.
“I said I wasn’t proud.” I pause with my eyes on her, but I can’t tell her this and see how it hits her. I look to the side, to nothing.
“Morgan was my second…you know? The lifeguard that worked with us this summer?”
I can see her throat move as she swallows. I hate this. So much. I glance at her, and her eyes are still on me, waiting for the next two names—girls that deserve more respect than a high-school boy knows how to give them.
Fuck.
I look back down toward the floor of the bus. It’s too dark to see my feet, but I mush the toe of my shoe into a small space where the seat in front of us is bolted to the metal.
“Well, Morgan had a friend named Mandy. We were at a party one night and I sort of found myself with her.” I scrunch my face because I sound like such a dick. I was a dick.
“That’s sort of when Morgan told me to kiss her ass,” I admit.
“Good for Morgan,” Nolan says quickly. She means it, too. She slaps her hand over her mouth again and flashes her eyes. “Sorry,” she squeaks out, smiling bashfully. I squeeze her because she’s not the one who should be embarrassed here. What’s terrible is I think Morgan and Nolan would have been really good friends. They like a lot of the same things. If I saw them together now, though, I think I’d start to run. There’s no way Morgan would be telling Nolan anything nice. I’d deserve it all for cheating on her with her friend, too.
My gaze shifts back to the darkness outside, little glimpses of the mountains and brush lit up by the side lights of the bus. I wish I could lie to this girl. This last name is one I don’t ever want her to know, and it’s going to break her. I suck in my top lip and try to breathe, even though the air immediately around Nolan and me is suffocating. There’s a shortage of it. It’s strangling me—my punishment.
“I have to know,” she says, her fingers wrapping around my arm. They feel so small and timid. I can feel the vibrations—the worry.
“Calley,” I say, ripping the bandage off quickly and instantly wanting to put it back on and hide the truth away forever. Calley is Sarah’s sister. A friend. A close friend.
Calley was a huge betrayal. It was on both of our parts. It was careless of me—heartless. It was desperate and foolish, and I know if Calley could erase it from history, she would. I’d let her.
I feel her start to tuck into me, hiding, so I flatten my palm against her cheek, my touch gentle. Her head pushes against me and her eyes slant with the pain. Her eyes are starting to water, and goddamn do I hate seeing it. I force myself to look, though. I need to know intimately what hurting her looks like so I can keep myself from doing it again.
She lifts her arm, wiping her eyes along the long sleeve of her sweatshirt, the cuff tucked around her knuckles.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to cry, that one just…surprised me. I just thought Calley knew how I felt about you.” Her voice quivers at the end. The knife in my chest grows hot.
She shrugs, trying to pretend that the hurt was temporary—that it isn’t real. Before she can look away, though, I lift her chin with my fingers.
“Don’t do that. Don’t run away from me. And don’t blame Calley. She was at the desert party the night you picked me up. She was drunk. I was…drunk.”
That’s the night I told her I loved her. The words fell out of me in a dream, only I said them out loud. Mostly, I knew she was hearing them. I was a coward, though, and I needed that mask to get through it—to tell her the truth.
“I was running my mouth to her in the back of her car, telling her how you were with this dickhead and I fucked everything up and she was consoling me and then we both did a bunch of shots of what-the-fuck-I-don’t-know.” I stop suddenly, my mouth watering a little from the wave of nausea. That night was both the worst and the best of my life—the best because she was there. When I needed someone, Nolan was there.
“It sort of happened somewhere after that. And that’s when I started texting you because I just wanted to erase it, knew I was fucking everything up…even more than I had already, if that was even possible.”
Her eyes sag, maybe with pity for me. She’s feeling sorry for me, though she has this all backward.
“Calley started crying, telling me never to tell anyone and to pretend it didn’t happen. Noles, she never wanted to hurt you either. You have to know; she was so drunk. She got sick after that, passed out in her backseat and shit.”
I stare at her, needing some sort of absolution. Say it’s okay, Nolan. Please…say it’s okay. The quiet drags, and after nearly a minute of staring at her and willing her to forgive me, I realize that she isn’t going to. She probably doesn’t think she needs to. I’m not really asking for it, but I’m sorry all the same.
She sinks back into me, and my palms tentatively cup her shoulders, then run along her arms.
“I’m never going to be what they were,” she says, and my eyes close hearing her hard truth. That’s what this is about for her. It’s about the experience, and all of that bullshit that we think we need to impress someone. She doesn’t need any of it. All she needs to do is be this, to be her.
I lean forward and press my lips to the top of her ear. So small and innocent. So unspoiled and precious.
“Baby, you’re so much more.” I stop and take a sharp breath, the truth of what I’m saying hitting me hard. “You have no idea. You’re so beautiful, and I love you, and if you ever want to be with me, I’ll be the luckiest dude on earth…but not unless you want to share that with me.”
I kiss her neck and bury my face in it, breathing her scent in until I’ll smell it in my dreams. I memorize it. Not that there is any way in hell there is anything about Nolan Lennox that I could ever—ever—forget.