“I think we should figure out what’s going on here.” She adjusted herself on the bench and moved closer to me, draping her legs over my lap. I took it as a good sign and pulled her closer to me, my hand on her lower back, mimicking the circles she had just been doing on my thigh. She still wanted to be close to me and I was going to take every chance I could to put my hands on her. She took a deep breath and continued, but kept her eyes closed this time. “How do you want to do this? Do you want to date? Just be casual? I’ve never done this before, so I’m not really sure what to ask or what to do and now I feel like I’m rambling on here.”
She took another deep breath and then finally looked up at me. Her eyes showed just how worried she was about my answer to her questions and I wanted to make it go away immediately.
“I want to more than date, Erica.” I moved my hand from her back and placed it on her cheek. She leaned into me and closed her eyes again. “I never want to be casual with you again. I want us to have everything. Every kiss I can give you. Every touch I can sneak in throughout the day. I want tobewith you, Erica. I want to start our life together, peaches.”
I leaned down to kiss her lips and pulled away to see her staring up at me with watery eyes.
“I’ve never done this before either, but I think together, we can make this everything our nine-year-old hearts ever wanted.”
“Chase.” My name was a soft whisper on her lips, but she waited till a family walked by us to continue. “I don’t want our friends to know.”
Now this wasn’t something I had thought about. I had been so consumed about us, and what Erica was wanting and what I was wanting, that I hadn’t thought about our friends finding out. I knew deep down that Max would probably know the second he saw me, but everyone else, I had no idea what they would think. I had no care about what they did, but damn it, they were the closest thing I had to me besides Erica and my family.
“So, keep it a secret?” I asked, my response clipped.
“Something like that.” Erica leaned back, but I didn’t let her move far. I might have sounded agitated, but I was just trying to get a bearing of what she wanted.
“For how long?” The question came out a little more harsh than I intended. I was trying to play it cool, but it just wasn’t working. As much as I wanted to keep Erica all to myself, this wasn’t something I was wanting for long. I knew at some point I would want to show her off as mine, not just to our friends, but to the whole world.
“Just for now.” She assured me, bringing a hand up to my cheek, and we sat there intertwined in each other’s arms. “I just want to revel in this. In us, for as long as I can without our friends trying to but in and ask all the questions that I don’t even thinkwehave the answers to.”
I sat there for a moment, letting the wilderness fill the silence between us. She had a point. We still had so much to figure out about who we were as a couple together and apart, that if Max came barreling into our relationship at any time, I wouldn’t be able to answer all the questions I knew Erica was anticipating from them. I took a deep breath and closed my eyes, then opened them again. Erica still had her eyes on me, waiting for a response.
“I can work with that.” I leaned down to kiss her lips. “For now.”
She smiled against me and moved her legs, pulling me with her back up the mountain.
“How was high school after I left?” I asked a few minutes after we started walking with her hand in mine.
“So the interrogation starts.” Erica laughed at me. “I should have known you would be the one to start it off. Always so damn curious.”
She shot me a playful look.
“When it comes to you, I want to know everything.” I squeezed her hand that I was still holding, urging her to continue. I did want to know everything. Every single detail of every single moment we hadn’t spent together. I needed it in my life and in my heart.
“It wasn’t so bad. I kind of just hung out with myself.”
“Didn’t you have that friend?”
“Madison.” She scoffed her name and rolled her eyes. “I didn’t want to hang out with some of the popular girls one weekend. They were throwing a party. She called me a baby and went without me. I stayed home and watched movies all night.”
“That actually sounds like most of my nights.” I laughed, thinking back to all the weekends I spent sleeping in and binging on snack cakes while watching as much television as I could.
“Well, when Monday came, she started eating lunch with them and she never talked to me again. I have no idea what they had told her that night or what decisions she had made. I know her mother grounded her for weeks afterward, and my own mother told me I wasn’t allowed to hang out with Madison anymore. I hadn’t fought her on the idea, so I became my own friend.”
“Sounds like it was for the best.”
“It was.” She beamed up to me. “I started working on my photography and it’s what got me into college. I got a full ride scholarship for my grades, but I had a backup one too for a photo contest I won.”
“That’s pretty fucking amazing.”
“It was. I do have to say that I am so happy to be working on the photos for The Ink Well. It was this crazy dream once upon a time that my work would be something I loved, and when I kept thinking about it, I never wanted anything to tarnish what I did with photography. I just never knew that it could be something like this. That it could be doing something I loved. So, thank you for making it possible.”
“Pretty sure it was Max who offered you the job.”
“But you fought for me. I know you did.”
“Maybe.” My voice was small and I could feel my cheeks burning. I had fought for her. Every step of the way. Through every year we were together or apart.
