“You can’t do that either.”
It was distracting and I’d end up looking stupid.
“I make no promises about how I look at you when you’re cute.” He leaned over and gave me a quick peck. “But I’ll try.”
He was cute right up until he winced. “The nickname, though.”
I was going to call him Daddy and he was going to call me Chipmunk.
“I’ll survive if you call me that.” I might’ve sounded a bit dramatic but it got me another kiss. “I just might die of embarrassment if they start teasing me about it.”
And the smirk was back.
“You really talked about it?” He chuckled as I groaned and sank lower in my seat, finally giving in to the urge to hide as I put my hands over my face. “That much, huh?”
“Yeah.” I hadn’t exactly been a subtle kid. “Um, you were this older guy and I was finally starting to understand why I was different.”
“You’re so cute.” Peeling my hands away from my face, he gave another soft laugh when he saw my eyes scrunched closed, but he didn’t let that stop him from kissing me again. “You were cute back then too. Just a bit too young.”
“We were in elementary school. Duh.” He’d been cute back then too, though. “You were really nice to me.”
We’d ended up at the same camp, and most of it was a blur because of how long ago it’d been, but I remembered him telling me I looked like a chipmunk and calling me that for the entire three weeks we were at camp.
To say I’d been obsessed with him after that would’ve been an understatement, but the age difference at that point had been too big to overcome. He was nice when he saw me but it wasn’t the same. I’d been crushed…for about five minutes and then I’d gone back to watching him.
“Alright, I will do my best but if it comes up, I will firmly tell your mother that no one is teasing my sub about things like that.” He managed to sound serious for about three seconds until I groaned and then he cracked up. “No, seriously. I’ll try not to use the nickname and you’re not going to panic if they tease you.”
They were definitely going to tease me but it would be theaww isn’t our little boy so cutekind of torture.
“I’ll…I’ll ignore it and you’ll change the subject?” I wasn’t sure if I could do it but it was at least a plan. “And if I die of embarrassment just know that the past two weeks have been amazing.”
“You’ve grown up to be just as dramatic as you were when we were kids.” His delight as he said that made me wonder if I could strangle him and claim justifiable homicide. “But I clearly think it’s just as cute as I did back then.”
He’d thought I was cute?
Finally opening my eyes, the first thing I saw was his grin. “You thought I was cute?”
“Yeah.” Kissing my cheek, his smile got wider. “You were so cute and short with those chubby cheeks and you had so many stories about your family and you had no idea they were so weird. It was awesome.”
No, the awesome part was how he hadn’t told anyone else.
I’d just wanted to impress the older boy who was so cool and I hadn’t realized telling everything I’d heard around the house wasn’t a good idea.
“I’ll try to keep how cute you were back then to myself, though.” His wince made me laugh. “We really don’t need that coming up every holiday going forward.”
Eventually he was going to realize that he had to explain he was keeping me, right?
“No, that would be…frustrating.” We could be boring, though. We could do it. “We just need to be a regular boring college couple for a couple of days.”
Then we could go back home and be ourselves.
For whatever reason, that had Levi rolling his eyes before he gave me a look like he thought I was a few crayons short of a box. “Your family is nuts. Nothing we do will seem normal to them.”
Oh, I forgot.
Levi hadn’t.
“Your mother thought us possibly wanting to sleep in separate rooms over Christmas was weird.” He sighed when I shrugged. “We haven’t even been dating a month, Chipmunk. She shouldn’t be thinking about us living together or that kind of stuff yet. She should be wondering if we’ll last through the month because holidays are hard on new couples.”
