“I said such a terrible thing about you,” Bo added mournfully. “I said such an awful thing.”
Max nodded. “Yes, you did.”
“You know it’s not true, don’t you? I didn’t really feel like that . . . I said it once, without thinking, and I’ve hated that I said it ever since.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s in the past now.”
“Itdoesmatter,” Bo insisted. “You’re perfect to me, do you understand? Everything about you, from your looks to your voice to your messy hair and even your lurid purple shirt which looks like it lost a fight with a highlighter are perfect to me. That shirt is a hate crime against fashion, the colour of radioactive grapes, but I love it, because it came fromyou. I wouldn’t be without it now. Just like I wouldn’t be without you now.” She swallowed hard, blinking back tears as she spoke. “Do you see, Max? You could give me the ugliest thing in the world and it would still be perfect, because you gave it to me. Everything about you is perfect, and I don’t ever want you to change. Even your phone is perfect to me, and no one says that about Nokia 3310s.”
Briefly, Max looked embarrassed. “Actually . . .” he said, and from his pocket he pulled out a brand-new iPhone.
Bo stared at him, and he flushed a deeper shade of red.
“I didn’t even have a picture of you,” he admitted. “All those months we were apart, and I didn’t have a picture of you. The only photograph of us together was taken on your phone, and I cursed myself for not being with it enough to have owned a phone I could take a photo with. So, I bought one.”
Bo grinned. “Same number?”
“Surprisingly, yes.”
She reached into her pocket, pulling out her phone. “Here,” she said, and immediately airdropped him the photo of them from months before. The photo where they were both covered in yoghurt, Max smiling, Bo serious. “Now you have a picture of me. A picture of us.”
“I’ll make it my wallpaper,” he replied, tucking his phone away, and Bo grinned at him.
“Are we really going to do this? You and me?” she asked. She was still stunned. Still overwhelmed. She was also still in love, and so happy she could cry — well, she would if she hadn’talready emptied her tear ducts several times over that evening already.
“I don’t see why not,” Max mused. “We love each other. We get on well together. If we can just work out a way of sharing what’s on our minds, instead of keeping it to ourselves as we seem to have done, we stand a good chance of making a success of us.” He grinned at her suddenly. “Plus, the sex is amazing, right?”
She blushed red. “You know it is.”
He cupped her face in his hands. “That last night we had together . . . it was so intense. I remember looking at you and thinking, you’re in way too deep here, mate. This one’s getting under your skin far too much. I was so in love with you, and I didn’t know what to do about it. I even let you watch me rehearse, and Ineverlet anyone watch me rehearse.”
“We never even spent the night together though,” Bo told him. “We never even slept next to one another — well, other than that one time we grabbed a few hours together on the floor. We never even had sex in a bed that wasn’t in a converted shed.”
Something in Max’s face changed. “Well, we can do something about that right now, can’t we?”
Bo blushed again but uttered not a word of protest as Max led her upstairs.
* * *
After months apart, she thought she would have forgotten. After months apart, she thought it would be awkward, or even disappointing.
But it wasn’t, and she hadn’t forgotten. She remembered everything. Everything and more.
Max stripped her gently, rolling her onto his sheets and crawling over her. He was gentle with her, so very gentle, his touch reverent and feather-light. His kisses were soft, his handssweetly exploratory, and the only words in the air between them were ‘I love you’ and each other’s names. When Max finally rocked inside her, slipping in so that the breath caught in Bo’s throat, he stayed slow, his eyes locked on hers. It was sweet and gentle and everything Bo needed until suddenly she needed more, and so she locked her legs around Max’s waist, trying to let him know. He read her movements easily, as he always had, as he probably always would, and went faster, his hands moving to Bo’s hair, a new urgency to his movements. He was the warmest thing she’d ever felt, and as she looked into his eyes, she tried to trace every shade of blue that lived within them, as though she could catalogue them and keep the knowledge safe within her. But it was impossible, because his eyes weren’t just one colour. No, they were a whole sky, shifting and endless, layered with light and shadow and something else that she’d seen a hundred times in the past but never before been able to name.
She could name it now though. Love. It was love, clouding the stormy edges of Max’s eyes when he looked at her, and it made her heart skip a beat to finally realize it. He held her gaze, as if he reallysawher, as if she were something worth loving and worth staying for. Bo smiled at him, and he smiled back, and suddenly, just like that, she didn’t want to define anything about him or about them anymore. She just wanted to drown in the blue of his eyes and never find her way back out.
When she came, it was airy, like bubbles erupting under her skin, and her head fell back against the pillow, his name the only thing she could manage to think or say.
Later, when she lay cradled against his chest, Max running his hand through her hair, she whispered into his skin.
“I met Madelief.”
His hand paused, and he looked down into her eyes. “Did you?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
