“That I love you and… you’ve been my whole world since you entered it.”
Halle: 17 Years Old
Sebastian: 18 Years Old
“You can’t do this!” Saint says, while tears stream down her sweet face. Her hair was still falling out of the ponytail, and the purple on her neck brought out by my teeth and tongue was darkening by the second, which was doing nothing to help our case. I rub a hand over my eyes, disappointed that I’d gotten so carried away.
I’d half expected Saint to be yelling, but I think she’s still feeling the slight embarrassment over my mother having caught us,again, in my bedroom.She wasn’t supposed to be home for a few hours, and I thought we’d have more time.I’d blown off practice to be alone with Halle, and… somehow my mom figured it out and came home while we were nowhere near finished with each other. So now, we’re enduring our hundredth lecture about how “inappropriate” our relationship was, how things were out of hand, and that we needed to stop. Usually, I’d sit and endure it, letting it go in one ear and out the other, knowing that Saint and I will have to be sneakier next time.
But this time was different.
“Watch me,” my mother snaps. My mother rarely yelled, even in situations like these. She would typically explain her disappointmentsternly,but she seldom raised her voice. But this time, she’s practically been screaming since she opened thedoor to my bedroom. “I am tired of it! You guys lie to me all the time. You are constantly sneaking around and… not only is this relationship not healthy, but it’s also not safe! Abandoned parking lots late at night? Parking out in the woods somewhere? Forget someone seeing you… What if something happens to you?”
“We’re fine! This town is safe!” Halle argues. And while I do agree it’s a safe town, I think Halle has been lured into a false sense of security because she knows I’d never let anything happen to her.
“I’m not going to Aunt Emily’s.” I interrupt, as I look up at my mother from my spot on the couch. My Aunt Emily, my mom’s sister, lives over an hour from here, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to be that far away from Saint for three months.
“You don’t have a choice, so I suggest you start packing.” My mother lifts her glasses to pinch the bridge of her nose, and I can see the stress on her face. I know we didn’t make things easier for her, but I refused to be anywhere without Saint.
“I’m eighteen. You can’t make me go.”I’ll sleep outside in my car if I have to.
“Fine.” Sara shrugs. “Then Halle can go.”
Saint stiffens from where she’s seated next to me.I’m not going to let that happen, baby,I try to tell her. “You’re kidding. Saint barely knows her!”
“Which is why I suggested you in the first place. This is not to make anyone uncomfortable. It’s to create some distance between you two that you desperately need. This has gotten way out of hand, and I blame myself for letting it go on this long! I should have put a stop to all of this long ago. All you two care about is each other and…” My mom scrunches her nose in what seems like disgust and waves her hand back and forth between us. “This.”
“Sara, please don’t do this. I love him. And… I don’t want him to go. I need him,” Saint begs, and I can tell she’s crossing out of anger and into sadness over the situation.
“And therein lies the problem. You two are so codependent… and you need time apart. I’m trying to protect you two from yourselves. When you’re older, you’ll see. You both are just too close to the relationship. But this will never work in the real world.”
“You don’t know what we’ll feel when we’re older.” Halle scrunches her nose. “I’m sorry that the world has been so cruel to you that it’s not given you a chance to fully explore love, but don’t take that away from us because you’re bitter.”
“Saint…” I can hear the hurt in her voice and the pain that comes with referencing the passing of her father, but my mother lost someone in that scenario too.
My mother nods, but I see the hurt in her face. “You two think you’re just the first people in the world to ever fall in love. The first to ever think that the sun rises and sets with another person. You aresoyoung, and you haven’t seen anything yet. But it’s called afirstlove for a reason. It means that you will go on to have more loves. Ones that are real and will teach you so much about yourself and won’t be born out of convenience or trauma or forced proximity. I get that youthinkthat you love each other—”
“I know I love him.” Saint interrupts. “And you can send him away, but it’s not going to stop me from loving him. It’s not going to stop him from loving me.”
“I’m not going,” I say again. I hate that it seems like no one is listening to me and, worse, that it sounds like Saint is conceding.
“You’re right, I can’t control your thoughts or feelings, but I can control your proximity to each other. I can control the situation because you two can’t control your hormones. Wild, Aunt Emily is expecting you tomorrow.”
“I can’t believe you’re sending me away. I’m your son.”
“I know, and I promise it’s all for your own good. One day, you’ll see that I am doing this because I love you. Both of you.” I hear the words, but her demeanor doesn’t match. It doesn’t seem like she loves us. She looks cold, almost stoic as she says this, and I wonder if it’s just the stress of the situation making her come off like she doesn’t care that this is going to hurt us both… or maybe she actually doesn’t care.
Present Day
That was the summer when everything changed. I could sense Saint’s resentment for my mother growing with every conversation we had. The tension had been building for years, ever since Saint and I first figured out our feelings for each other, but that summer brought everything to a boiling point. Saint was angry with her for separating us, which led to constant arguing. And if they weren’t arguing, they weren’t speaking at all. By the time that summer was over, Saint and my mother really only spoke when they had to. Saint didn’t trust her with anything, and I remember it even went so far as to ask Mrs. Sharpe from next door, my mother’s best friend, for homecoming dress advice. Years later, my mother told me she wished she’d handled things differently and that her relationship with Halle wasn’t so strained, but she understood why Halle had created that distance.
We were much more careful after that. When I came home for the holidays, we never did anything in the house. We were still sneaking around, but we were much better at it. And we onlyhad to do this through Halle’s senior year, because once she was a freshman in college, she moved out of my mother’s house, got an off-campus apartment, and never went back. Halle received a sum of money from her father’s will, as well as money that my mother had saved for her when she turned eighteen, which provided her with more than enough to rent an apartment. She also worked, which allowed her to save quite a bit as well. But this gave us a place to be alone during breaks so we didn’t have to be as careful.
I assumed my mother thought we were still together, but what could she do? We were eighteen and no longer under her roof. Since Halle turned eighteen, my mother has never explicitly mentioned it again. She’s hinted at it a few times in more of a questioning way, but I never wanted to get into it, and she probably only talked to Halle a few times a year. Polite conversations on holidays and birthdays but never about anything substantial.
I put my phone down after going through emails and look at the woman sitting next to me, who is also scrolling on her phone, feeling my hunger for her grow by the second. I wanted her the second I opened my eyes this morning. I was as hard as fuck after she’d spent the night grinding against my dick in her sleep, and I could only swipe my finger against her swollen clit once before she stirred and shooed me away, murmuring something about it being too early. I’d kept her up late, so I let her sleep despite my cock screaming to get inside her.
She looked so fucking sexy despite not being up for long before we had to leave for the airport. Half of her hair was pulled back into a clip, pulling her hair off her face, while letting the rest of it barely dust her shoulders. It was still sporting some significant wave from the curls she put it in last night,even after I spent the night tangling my hands in her hair.She’d put on some makeup in the Uber because she was always running lateand had become a pro at getting ready while in motion. She even went so far as to use that thing that makes a woman’s eyelashes appear longer. I swear, it looks like she’s going to poke her eye out every time she uses it.
