I felt a tear start to slide from my eye and I blinked to shed it. I stared into his perfect green eyes and reached up to brush his bruised lip with my thumb. He grabbed my hand and stopped it there, to hold it against his kiss, closing his eyes and opening them to mine as I stared at wounds and then back to his perfect eyes. My chest squeezed and I took a slow, deep breath. “I love you, too,” my voice cracked.

I said it. And when the words left my mouth, Reed pulled me in closer and stopped with our lips barely touching. Looking at one another so closely, he shook his head a little, the sides of his mouth turning up into a tiny grin, and whispered against me, “I knew you did.”

And then his mouth was on mine, soft but full. I reached around his back to hold myself to him closely and he cradled me with his strong arms, still wearing his black sweater. I reached to pull it up over his back to feel more of his skin and he slid it over his head, tossing it to the floor and came right back to me, kissing me harder now, hungrier.

I ran my hands up his undershirt to feel the warm skin of his back and he held his hands to my face, helping me reach his height. He was walking us backwards until we reached the back of the door where he leaned me against it and continued to taste my lips, pulling on them with his own, stopping only to run kisses down my neck and back again.

We stayed in the bathroom for almost an hour, never taking it further, but desperate for one another’s touch. When we went downstairs, Becky and Sean had fallen asleep together watching television on the sofa. Reed pulled a few of the pillows onto the floor and pulled me down to the floor with him where he wrapped his arms around me tightly and didn’t let go until morning.

21. Us

I still woke up every morning feeling as though I had to convince myself I wasn’t just remembering a dream. Reed and I were an actual couple. It helped that when I held his hand as we walked to our literature class, people turned their heads to gossip.

A few of the guys from the football team would heckle Reed. “About time you got off your ass, Reed,” they would yell, whistling and telling us to get a room. Not that we were overly affectionate at school, but we were always connected. At lunch, Reed would pull me onto his lap and wrap strands of my hair around his finger. He would wait for me outside the gym when his practice wrapped before mine just to follow me home, or drive me home on the days that he was able to show up at my house before I left for school. And when we rode in the car, his hand was always interlocked with mine. It was like we were both afraid that if we let go, the other one would disappear.

Tyler tried to call me a few times and he sent a few apologetic texts, too, which I ignored. The calls finally stopped when he called me once while Reed was at my house. I couldn’t hear Tyler’s end of the conversation, but Reed was pretty clear about him staying away from me. And I was a bit mushy over his protective aggression in my honor.

It was closing in on Reed’s birthday, and I had a grand plan, but not much time to pull it off. I had been collecting clippings from the paper and photos from here and there since our freshman year. But I missed a few weeks this season; the weeks when I was so seething angry at Reed that I almost threw my entire box filled with his accomplishments away.

I had always planned on building him a scrapbook, but in the back of my mind it was sort of just a fantasy. Like when people say they’d like to run a marathon one day. But I knew if I did it right, and asked for a little help from my crafty friend Sienna, it would be something he would cherish.

Tugging the box from my closet, I started to lay out the items when I heard Sienna come through the front door.

“Hey, I’m in here,” I yelled.

She came bouncing in, her hair in a buoyant ponytail and a guilty grin on her face.

“Sienna? What did you do,” I teased her. She just smiled and bit her lip a little, finally giving in.

“Nolan, don’t get mad, but I sort of slept with Micah,” she spilled so quickly that I had to blink a few times to process what it all meant. Before thinking, I spoke.

“You mean… you had sex?!” I sounded shocked and a bit admonishing, because I was.

“See, this is why I didn’t want to tell you,” she started to pick up her things, and I grabbed her hand and forced her back down.

“No, no. I’m sorry for that bad reaction. You just surprised me. I… I didn’t realize you and Micah were that serious,” I was slowly trying to acclimate myself with this new information about my best friend. “So…what was it like?”

Deep down, I really wanted to know. I had thought about it with Reed briefly, sure, but only in the abstract. But now that we were dating, the worry about it plagued me a little more. It wasn’t something I was ready for, and I was surely shocked that Sienna was.