I wrap my arms around his neck and tug until his lips are on mine. The kiss surprises him, and we’re both knocked offbalance, stumbling sideways. I grab his shoulders and pull him again, harder this time, until we’re lying flush against each other on the bottom bunk, his body pressing into mine. He shifts until his weight is half-balanced on the mattress, one leg thrown over mine, pinning me with his hips. He bends his head and kisses me with brain-melting, aching slowness, but after several hazy, lazy minutes, I am unmoored with want. His unhurried, careful, exploratory kisses aren’t nearly enough. I need all of him, right now.
“I’m ready,” I whisper against his lips.
He pulls back in surprise. “What?”
“I’m ready,” I say again as I reach for his belt buckle.
“Now?” He looks slightly horrified.
“Now,” I confirm as I slide his belt out of his pants. I drop it to the floor and reach for his button.
His eyes rove over the walls of the dingy room, halting on the bunk bed only a foot above his head. “Here?” he asks weakly. “I wanted something less…dreary than this for you. For us.” If I weren’t horizontal, the rasp in his voice would have buckled my knees.
“West,” I say, drawing his attention back to me. “Are you really going to make me say it again?”
His pupils grow, black swallowing amber, and his careful restraint snaps. He presses his thigh up between my legs and rocks into me,overwhelming me with the exquisite gift of friction. My eyelids flutter shut as he parts my lips with an insistent tongue and presses his body into mine, bracketing my head with his forearms. “One day,” he says, peppering me with frenzied kisses between each word, “I’ll find the right words.”
I take his face in my hands and pull his mouth reluctantly from my collarbone. “Sometimes words aren’t enough,” I say,hoping he comprehends what I mean. I don’t need him to say the perfect thing, because I already know. As he presses his forehead to mine, I think he understands. I lift my arms as he pulls my shirt over my head, and we spend the rest of the night trying to tell each other how we feel without ever saying anything at all.
On our secondfull day in New York, West uses my phone to take my photo under the elm trees at the Central Park Literary Walk. As I scroll through the hundreds of nearly identical pictures, I try to imagine my face on the inside of a book jacket. I’m smiling so hard I look like I’ve got a secret that I’m bursting to tell, and with the golden-hour sun on my face, you’d never know that I was shivering the whole time.
“How’d I do?” West asks, blowing into his hands to warm them up while I survey his work.
I delete a handful of pictures that really emphasize the vein in my forehead and keep scrolling. “If this writing thing doesn’t work out, you can become my full-time Instagram boyfriend.” I maximize a photo where the breeze has picked my hair up just right and save it in my favorites.
“How long do we have until we meet your agent?” he asks in a tight voice. He’s stuffed his hands in his pockets, and his nose is turning red. We need something warmer if we’re going to survive the rest of the trip.
We have a couple of hours before drinks with Danielle, so we kill two birds with one stone by walking to Times Square and finding a gift shop with cheap hoodies. West clasps my hand in his as we walk, and while I chatter about the cute shops and my favorite neighborhoods and how if I moved here, I’dhave to buy a whole new wardrobe, West is quieter than usual. He doesn’t say more than a few words until we pass a piercing and tattoo shop advertising a flash tattoo event. “Remember when you got your nose pierced on our first date?” he asks as he draws us to a stop in front of the window.
I touch the ring in my nose as I smile up at him. “You consider that night our first date?”
“Obviously.” West’s eyes darken with the twilight sky. “Do you remember what we did in the library?”
I press my cold hands to my warm cheeks. “I still don’t think you can call that our first date.”
“Why not?”
“Because it took you two and a half years to ask me out again.”
He rolls his eyes. “And whose fault was that?”
“Beth-any’s,” I declare with a grin, unable to stop myself.
West laughs, but then his smile fades as his eyes rove over my face like he’s trying to memorize the pink tint dusting my cheeks.
“Any particular reason you’re thinking about that night?” I prod.
He runs his fingers through his hair with a sigh. “School’s almost over, and, I dunno, I’m upset about all the time that we missed.”
“What are you talking about? We have nothingbuttime,” I insist, although the future is looming in front of us, wild and heavy, hard to ignore and even harder to see. We don’t talk about the specifics of it.
He drums his fingers on his thigh, looking more nervous than I’ve ever seen him. “Maybe.”
I wonder if he knows that I’m in love with him. We haven’tsaid it yet, and this moment doesn’t seem like the right time. But I want him to know that I’m all in. I don’t know how to picture a future without West.
“Let’s get tattoos!” I point to the flash designs in the window, my finger landing on a small orange surrounded by flower blossoms. “It’s kismet.” All of campus smelled like orange blossoms on the night of our first kiss, and now I can’t think of anything else when I smell them.
West narrows his eyes. “Aren’t matching tattoos bad luck? What if you break up with me?”
