“My bedtime idea book?” I ask, throat nearly closing up.
“What are you not getting about this, Luc?”
Is he fucking serious right now? “What areyounot getting about this?” I flip through the first few pages, confirming my suspicions. I can’t make out any words, but at least half of this book is filled with nonsensical scribbles and half-ass ideas. “You really still have this? This is at least ten years old.”
The awe in my voice is unmistakable even to my own ears. Austin squeezes his eyes shut for a second, his face contorting in concentration. “Fourteen years old, actually. I got it for you when we were twelve. And Itold youI still had it.”
I throw the blankets off myself and rush across the room, flipping on the light.
“Wow, holy shit,” Austin complains, covering his eyes with his hand.
“Sorry.” I dive back into bed, laying the notebook down on my pillow and opening it up to the first page.
There’s a treehouse and two best friends. The treehouse has a magic door that only opens if they both say the combination.
A laugh bursts from my chest as I stretch out on my stomach and flip to the next page.
Remember that ice cream place mama took us to last week? Yeah something with that. Maybe the ice cream keeps filling up even after you eat it all.
That one makes me smile, but it also makes my stomach hurt. God, I miss my mom.
Austin lies down beside me, pressing close as he leans his head against mine. “The next page is your idea about superhero rabbits that fight crime.”
I turn my head to look at him. “How do you know that?”
A small smile stretches Austin’s lips, then he leans in to kiss me. It’s just a soft peck, but I find myself smiling into it anyway. When he breaks away, his grin grows. “I must have read through this notebook a hundred times over the years.”
“Why?”
Austin sighs, rolling to his back and staring up at the ceiling. “You always had this spark about you, Luc. This brightness that nothing and no one could dim.” I study his face, watching as a sweet grin lights up his eyes. “You’d wake up in the middle of the night rambling about some new story idea, and well—I don’t know. When you left, I found this under my bed. Half the time I don’t think you even remembered me handing it to you.”
“That’s why you handed it to me tonight?” I ask, heart thrummingin my chest.
Austin glances at me with a sheepish expression. “Yeah. Heard you mumbling over there, and muscle memory kicked in.”
“When you say ‘muscle memory,’ you mean tossing my notebook of ideas at me?”
“You got it.”
I flip to the next page, not at all surprised to find that Austin was right. Then the next and the next. There have to be ideas from when I was twelve all the way to fourteen or fifteen in here.
“Oh, look at this one,” Austin says, rolling back to his side and flipping quickly through the pages before landing on one of the later entries.
Two boys falling in love? Big brown eyes, dirty blond hair. Sunburned skin that peels and tans after. They kiss.
A few lines down, I scribbled,
Mom says that Dad’s kisses taste like sunshine. I wonder if that’s true.
I read over it twice, my heart in my throat. “This is the last one,” Austin says. “Always wondered if you were talking about me.”
Iwastalking about him, actually. And it wasn’t even two weeks after this that we had our first, dry-lipped, fumbling kiss sitting on his bed in his mom and dad’s house. I had woken up from a dream about it. Kissing him, that is. Almost made for an embarrassing morning, but thankfully it didn’t go that far. And then I looked at his sleeping face—the pink on his cheeks from his sunburn, the lighter pieces of blond in his hair, bleached from the sun, and his parted lips—and thought maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to see if kisses tasted like sunshine the way Mom claimed they did.
“I was,” I say simply. “It wasn’t even two weeks after this that I asked you to kiss me.”
“It was the falling in love part that always got me. This is right around the time your story ideas switched from magical musings to romance and love.”
That makes me smile. My throat is tight again, this time with something I’m not quite sure I can name. “Yeah,” I breathe.
