“Yeah, I’m good with it. It’ll be a nice break for her, and . . . um. Maybe for you and me, too. If you’d want to—”
I stop her mouth with mine, kiss her long and hard.
“I want to,” I say, when I finally stop. She’s flushed along her neck, her hands fisted in the fabric of my shirt. “I’d love to. I have to show you these sheets.”
I don’t even think she knows what I mean about the sheets, which is fair enough. I guess I’ll have to explain when I get her in there. Which I hope is soon.
“Adam,” she says, loosening her hold, smoothing the fabric she had crushed in her hands even as her brow creases with worry.
“Yeah?”
“We have a lot of questions to ask each other. Real ones. What happens when the Baltimore story comes out. What we’ll do, living in two different places. How it’ll be, when I’m being difficult and distant, or when I maybe start to disappear a little. What you’ll think of me, when—”
“Jess,” I say, taking her hands in both of mine. I bring them to my mouth, press my lips against the bumps of her knuckles before lowering them, holding them against my heart. “We’ll have to answer stuff about me, too. What we’ll do when I push too hard, or when I can’t help but try to be the biggest thing in your life. How it’ll be when we finally figure out the two different places thing, and I can’t compromise about which side of the bed I want to sleep on or what time we get up on the weekends.”
“You’ve got strong feelings about those things?” Jess says, eyebrows raised.
“Oh yeah. I’m a real nightmare, I’m sure.”
She smiles again, different this time—a closemouthed, slightly embarrassed smile. “It’s not the same as the stuff with me. It’s so much more stuff, with me. Everything I went through with Mom, and with Tegan.”
I press her hands closer against my heart. “The point is, these questions—we’re going to answer them together. Tell our own story, okay? We’re going to know this one only for ourselves.”
She looks up at me then, her eyes filled up with happy tears, relieved tears. Any of her tears, I’ll take.
“Only for ourselves,” she repeats, and then, as if she’s sealing a bond, she leans forward and sets her lips against my hands, where they still hold hers against my heart.
We stand that way for a while, soaking it in—the relief and the promise of it, the privacy of it.
But eventually, I get restless.
Eventually, I need more.
Jess’s bare skin and her panting breath and yeah—the look of her on the bed I know she belongs in.
So I bend my creaking knees and I put my strength into my right shoulder. I push it against her stomach, as soft as I can, and then I have her up and off the ground, her laughing yelp a sound I’ll have to settle for never having recorded. Her body folds over mine, one of her hands swatting my backside.
“You can’t do this!” she says, as I start walking toward my room.
“I can. I’m currently doing it, in fact.”
“No, I mean—you have to save your strength! For—um.” She pauses, then taps insistently at my back with one of her fingers. “Listen, I didn’t get to ask you one of my questions!”
I pause, set her down in the hallway outside my bedroom.Soclose.
I look down at her, her face all red from being upside-down, her hair a huge, spun-gold cloud around her face.
God, I love her.
“What’s the question?”
She lifts her hands, tries to tame that mass of gorgeous hair I can’t wait to feel against my skin. She shifts on her feet and clears her throat.
“I was wondering how you’d feel about helping me move my little sister into college?”
I smile down at her, but I doubt she has time to see it. In seconds I’ve got her over my shoulder again, and I don’t bother saying a word.
This answer, I’ll give to her with my body. With the beat of my heart.
