“Hey,” he said, both of us coming up for air after a moment, Alex gasping a bit against my mouth. “Hey hey hey, hi, talk to me.”
I looked at him for a moment, searching. I didn’t know exactly what to say. I wanted to tell him that spending the weekend at home had terrified me more than anything, that I didn’t see how he and I would ever last if I got sent back. That until I’d made the trip to Orlando I’d never realized how little I had. I wanted to tell him that I could physically feel my life changing and that he was the reason, that I was scared I was falling in love with him and was pretty sure it was all going to end in heartbreak and disaster, but when I opened my mouth to explain all that, the only thing that came out was “I missed you.” I huffed out a laugh at how lame it sounded, how completely I was failing to explain. “Shit, Alex. I missed you really bad.”
“I missed you, too,” Alex said, cupping my face with both hands and kissing me again, desperate. My shoulder blades scraped against the rough outside wall. “Trevor’s got a date with the frozen yogurt girl,” he murmured breathlessly, his fingertips skating along the hem of my tank top. “There’s nobody upstairs.”
“Seriously?” I said, pulling back and looking at him, the possibilities zinging through my brain and my body. “Why are you just telling me this now?”
“I don’t know,” Alex said, laughing a little, nervous or hopeful or both. “I got distracted.”
“Yeah, no kidding.” I smiled at him, knocked our foreheads together one more time. “Do you want to go upstairs?”
“I—yeah,” Alex said. “Of course. Yeah, I do.”
“Okay,” I said, looking at him and making a decision. “So let’s go upstairs.”
Trevor and Alex’s apartment had the same layout as ours did, though you could definitely tell two boys were living there with no actual adult to be found. Half-empty bags of chips gaped open on the counter in the kitchen; a pile of jumbled, unlaced sneakers sprawled near the door. Something had spilled on the coffee table and been wiped up only hastily, a film of something sticky-looking still coating the fake-wood surface.
Alex’s room was neat-ish, though—neater than mine, at least, which was perpetually strewn with clothes and magazines and hair supplies—but a little stale smelling, too, air conditioner and boy. The bedsheets were rumpled, and Alex reached forward and smoothed them out. We looked at each other in the half dark, neither one of us saying anything. All the noise and uncertainty of the outside world had evaporated into the air, but at the same time it felt like everything was changing at once, like at any second the earth might start moving underneath our feet. It was as if we were in a vacuum somehow, the only two people for miles or years.
“Have you ever?” I asked him, one knee up on the mattress. I didn’t think he had, but for everything else we’d told each other, we’d somehow never talked about it before now.
“No.” Alex shook his head. “Have you?”
“No,” I said, and Alex looked so openly relieved that I cracked up. “You thought I was going to say yes!” I accused, shoving him in the arm, everything feeling lighter all of a sudden, less serious, the tension breaking like an egg. “You jerk. You thought I was going to be like, oh, yeah, with like fifty guys.”
“That’s not what I thought!” Alex protested, the tips of his ears turning pink like they always did when I’d caught him at something.
“Uh-huh.” I reached out and shoved him down onto the mattress, swung one knee across his lap. “You totally did.”
“I didn’t,” Alex said breathlessly, tilting his face up to kiss me. “I just—feel like you know stuff. It’s a compliment,” he said when I raised my eyebrows. “I mean it as a compliment. I mean you’re smarter than me, I mean you’re not afraid of anything.”
“That what you think?” I asked him in between kisses, working his T-shirt up over his head. “I’m afraid of stuff.” I took a breath. “I’m afraid of having to leave you.”
“Hey.” Alex pushed my hair out of my face, looking at me seriously. “It’s not gonna happen,” he promised. “No matter what, it’s not gonna happen.”
He sounded so sure in that moment that it was impossible even for me not to believe him. It felt like all I had to do was hold on.
We kissed for a long time on top of the covers, Alex’s soft tongue and his pulse thudding away beneath the vellum skin at his throat. He smelled like soap and a little bit like sweat. “Do you have . . . ?” I started, then trailed off.
“In the dresser,” he told me, his voice a little ragged, and we didn’t talk a whole lot more after that. My bra hit the floor, then Alex’s boxers; after that he stopped, though, his breathing gone heavy and his expression concerned. I could feel him trying not to push himself against my hip.
“I’m scared I’m going to hurt you,” he said, tucking my hair behind my ear.
“You’re not going to hurt me,” I promised, panting a little myself. Every single part of me felt almost unbearably tightly coiled, like I was a gun about to go off. “It’s okay, I promise. You won’t.”
That wasn’t entirely true—when it happened it did hurt, a little, a fast sharp pain and then something closer to an ache. Alex propped himself up on his elbows as he moved. “Dana,” he said quietly, his voice a desperate gasp in my ear.
It was over pretty fast: “Oh my God,” Alex said again, his sweaty forehead buried in the crook of my neck. “Oh my God, Dana, please.” I tangled my fingers in his hair and hung on. When he was finished, Alex reached down between us and rubbed until I felt like I was bursting into a thousand pieces, as if I were an exploding star.
“Hi,” I said when I came back to myself, turning my face against his warm, soft shoulder. There were a handful of freckles scattered there, like somebody had thrown a fistful of glitter.
“Hi.” Alex smiled, looking at me with a mixture of love and shell shock. “You okay?”
“Mm-hmm.” I peered up at him from underneath my eyelashes. “Are you?”
That made him laugh. “Yeah, Dana, I’m good.”
I felt wrung out and sleepy; all I wanted to do was pass out with the sound of Alex’s heart in my ear. I was dangerously close to doing just that when I heard it: the sound of a key in the front door lock.
“Shit,” Alex said, eyes widening as my heart swooped unpleasantly inside my chest. “Trevor.”
We scrambled back into our clothes, both of us laughing a little. We smoothed the bed out as best we could manage; I ran a hand through my messy hair. He walked me to the door, and I waved a sheepish good night to Trevor, who’d made a beeline for the refrigerator and didn’t seem to notice anything one way or the other.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” Alex told me out on the catwalk. I didn’t want to let go of his hand. But I nodded, kissed him good night, and headed home to our apartment. I looked back at him and grinned one more time before I went.
THIRTY