My stomach hops slightly.
“There’s an open day at St. Andrews after half-term. You could come and look around. Maeve is one of the student guides, doing tours of the uni and answering questions.”
“Then I could meet her too,” I say, and Henry looks so happy.
“Tori and Sinclair are coming,” he says.
I laugh. “Why don’t any of you want to go to Oxford?”
Henry shrugs his shoulders. “No idea. Maybe we’re all weird.”
“Then I must be too.”
“I knew from the start you’d fit in.”
I find myself smiling. “It feels nice having friends who are always there. I think I like this whole boarding-school thing in general.”
“That’s nice.”
I lean forward slightly. My lips brush Henry’s. I can feel that he’s smiling.
“We’re kissing, Emma,” he says, as if he can’t quite believe it.
“We’re kissing, Henry,” I repeat, and I don’t want us ever to stop. These are different kisses from back then in the drizzle, up against that wall. Slower kisses. Still very perfect kisses.
Henry’s eyes are tired when he eventually lets go of me and looks at me.
“You ought to go back, oughtn’t you?”
“Maybe,” he murmurs. “Should I go back?”
“You should sleep here,” I whisper, and the crazy thing is that it doesn’t feel weak to ask him not to leave me on my own. It feels right. “Little spoon?”
Henry smiles, first in surprise and then in real happiness. My belly feels warm as he kisses me again, then rolls cautiously onto his other side. He reaches for my hand as I slide up behind him and interlace his fingers with mine.
“You have to tell me everything,” he says as he runs his thumb over my wrist.
“I will,” I whisper, because I sense he’s about to fall asleep anyway. It’s unfair, I wish I could do that too, but it’s also kind of nice to lie next to Henry as his breathing evens and my thoughts slow.
We kissed for the first time; it was a really intense moment. I don’t know what it means. I only know that I’ve arrived at Dunbridge Academy.
23
Henry
It’s a mystery to me how I made it back to my wing on time. Emma and I woke up early, just before the sun came up, but we still had a lot of kissing to do before I made it out of bed.
My lips feel sore. They’re throbbing as I see Emma again in the dining room after the morning run. I’d like to be the cup she’s sipping from. She glances at me over the rim, and I feel warm again. She looks tired, but it seems to me that she’s kind of radiant too. Maybe only I can see that. No idea. Either way, I love it.
Sitting in English, spending the whole lesson looking at the back of her neck, is torture. I didn’t know that a body and skin could take up such a vast amount of space in my thoughts, but everything’s a bit different with Emma. During biology, I’m thinking about where I could kiss her later. I don’t mean where we’d go; I mean where on her body. There are so many places left for me to kiss. It’s overwhelming. I can’t think about it all without my trousers getting too tight, so I force my attention back to meiosis and mitosis. I’m not in very good shape for Ms.Barnett’s test, which is coming up, but there we are.
Sinclair shakes his head as he sits down beside me in Latin.
“What?” I ask.
“Congrats” is all he says.
“What?” I repeat.
