Ugly Love

Chapter ten


MILES


Six years earlier


Ian knows.

I had to tell him. After the first week of school, he knew

everything became Rachel.

Rachel knows Ian knows. Rachel knows he won’t say

anything.

I give Rachel my room when she moves in, and I take the

spare bedroom. My room is the only spare bedroom with its

own bathroom. I want Rachel to have the better room.

“Do you want this box in here?” Ian asks Rachel. Rachel asks

what it is, and he tells her it’s all her bras and underwear. “I

thought maybe I should just go ahead and put it in Miles’s

room.”

Rachel rolls her eyes at Ian. “Hush,” she tells him. He laughs.

He likes that he’s in on such a private thing. That’s why he

would never tell. He knows the power of secrets.

Ian leaves after all the boxes are unloaded. My father passes

me in the hallway and pauses. His pause means I should

pause, too.

“Thank you, Miles.”

He thinks I’m okay with this. With the fact that he’s allowing

another woman to push out the last reminders of my mother.

I’m not okay with it.

I’m just pretending to be okay with it, because none of it

matters. Rachel matters.

Not him.

“No problem,” I say.

He begins walking, then pauses again. He tells me he

appreciates that I’m being nice to Rachel. He says he wishes he

and Mom could have given me a sibling when I was younger.

He says I make a good brother.

Words are awful when they come out of his mouth.

I walk back to Rachel’s room. I close the door.

It’s just the two of us.

We smile.

I walk to her and wrap my arms around her, then I kiss her

neck. It’s been three weeks since the first night I kissed her.

I can count the times I’ve kissed her since then. We can’t

interact like this at school. We can’t interact like this in public.

We can’t interact like this in front of our parents. I can only

touch her when we’re alone, and we haven’t been able to be

alone much in the last three weeks.

Now?

Now I kiss her.

“We need a few guidelines so we don’t get ourselves in

trouble,” she says. She separates herself from me. She sits at my

desk, and I sit on my bed.

Well . . . she sits at her desk, and I sit on her bed.

“First,” she says, “no making out when they’re home. It’s too

risky.”

I don’t want to agree to that rule, but I’m nodding my head.

“Second, no sex.”

I’m not nodding anymore.

“Ever?” I ask her.

She’s nodding. Oh, I really hate that nod.

“Why?”

She sighs heavily. “Sex will make it that much harder when our

time is up. You know that.”

She’s right. She’s also completely wrong, but I have a feeling

she’ll figure that out later.

“Can I ask what rule number three is before I agree to rule

number two?”

She grins. “There is no rule number three.”

I grin. “So sex is the only thing off limits? And we’re talking

penetration, right? Not oral?”

She covers her face with her hands. “Oh, my God, do you have

to get so specific?”

She’s cute when she’s embarrassed. “Just clarifying. I have a

lifetime of things I want to do to you and only six months left

to do them all.”

“Let’s leave the specifics up to the situation,” she says.

“Fair enough,” I say, admiring the blush in her cheeks.

“Rachel? Are you a virgin?”

Her cheeks grow even redder. She shakes her head and tells

me no. She asks if that bothers me.

“Not at all,” I say, being honest.

She asks if I’m a virgin, but her voice is timid when she asks it.

“No,” I say. “But now that I’ve met you, I kind of wish I was.”

She likes that I said this to her.

I stand up and prepare to head to my new bedroom to begin

rearranging. Before I walk out, I lock her bedroom door from

the inside, and then I turn around and smile at her.

I slowly walk to her.

I take her by the hands and pull her up. I wrap my arm around

her lower back and pull her against me.

I kiss her.