“It looked finished to me,” Dare muttered. “You even got the dumb way I sit.”
“Which you only do when you’re anxious.”
“I’m not anxious.”
I gave him a pointed look.
Dare rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I just…” He flipped through the pad. “Just needed to know you’re still drawing me—still thinking of me—when you were gone.”
I pressed my forehead to his temple, breathing him in. Detergent and salt, the way he smelled when he came back from the rec center and didn’t bother to shower. Typical.
“I never stopped drawing you,” I murmured. “Even when I wanted to.”
Dare let out a laugh that barely made it to his lips. “Why would you want to stop?”
“Because it hurt sometimes,” I admitted. “Missing you that much.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time. Wind lifted the edges of the curtains. It was the kind of storm that belonged to us somehow—the kind that felt like it might knock the sky open and let something new through.
Dare flipped to another sketch. One I’d done from memory in New York of him lying on our old dorm mattress, mouth parted, lashes dark against his cheeks. Peaceful, but not quite asleep.
He stared at it for a long time. Then he set the pad on the coffee table and turned to me, eyes a little glassy.
“I wanted you to draw me like this,” he said, voice low. “Here. At home. With you.”
“Youarehome,” I said. Then I kissed him.
It started slow, but it never stayed that way. Not with us.
His greedy hands slid up under my towel. I straddled his lap without a second thought, soaked hair dripping down his chest, and Dare laughed into my mouth.
“We’re gonna have to move this couch aside to make room for my new desk,” I said between kisses. He watched me, waiting for more. I teased him with quick kisses that left him unsatisfied and chasing my mouth. “Now that I’ll be working from home.”
Dare stilled, his eyes snapping up to meet mine. He read my growing smile, and it was infectious. He was grinning back before he could stop himself.
“You got the job?”
“They hired me. Just part-time for now, until we graduate.”
He kissed me again, slower, deeper, sucking my tongue into his mouth. “Better be an extra-wide desk so there’s plenty of room for me to fuck you on it.”
I laughed into the kisses that didn’t stop coming. “Why can’t we just fuck on the couch? It’s much softer.”
“God,” he complained with mock seriousness. “You’re so vanilla.”
Outside, the first heavy drops of rain hit the windowpanes. Inside, I tried to convince Dare that I wasn’t so vanilla after all.
He still didn’t sayI love youeasily. But he said it in how he fixed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. In the way he folded my hoodie and left it on the back of the chair when I was cold. In the way he never let me fall asleep without kissing me goodnight.
And in the way he whispered over the thunder, “I’ll take you any way I can get you.”
CHAPTER 46
DARE
We’ve had a lot of firsts. First kiss. First fight. First apartment. But this one feels like the start of forever.
I satin the third row of graduates, sweating through my gown and straining to catch a glimpse of him two blocks back in the sea of caps and gowns. My stomach was a wreck. It wasn’t nerves; it was impatience. I’d never been good at waiting for anything, and right then I was counting down the minutes until I could wrap my arms around Tru and say,We did it.
