A stream of air staggered into her lungs and stayed there.
“I love you so much,” he continued, words gushing free now, “that I just want to be near you, all the time. Because even when we’re not talking, you hear me more clearly than anyone else has. You might actually be the only person who’s ever listened. And not only that, you shine. Your passion, your drive... you’re the brightest star in the whole damn sky. The one I steer by, now.”
She was quiet. He bit his lip, hesitant, but when he reached for her, he found her cheeks wet.
He scooted close and tucked her against the length of his body. “Was that the wrong thing to say?”
“No.” She sniffled. “That’s the thing. You never say anything wrong. You only ever say everything right.”
“Do I? I worry it’s too much, sometimes. ThatI’mtoo much.”
“You’re not. I don’t ever want you to stop being so. . .”
“Dramatic?” he guessed.
“Real. Don’t ever stop being so real. So intense.”
He slid a hand down her body, skimming past the plane of her stomach to settle on her hip. “I couldn’t if I tried. You do something to me.”
She tugged him down, and he kissed her with all the tenderness her confession had unlocked. No one had ever said they’d loved him, at least not that he could remember. Probably his mom had, at some point. But that was lost to the haze of time. Now, hearing it from Aubrey’s lips—the same lips he nibbled and worshiped and kissed away tears from—redefined all his inner boundaries, as if she’d torn down some wall within him and allowed him to glimpse a faraway horizon he hadn’t realized existed.
“I fucking love you,” he said into her mouth.
“I fucking loveyou.”
He stayed there, breathing her breath, letting his heartbeat align with hers.
“There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask,” she said. “Seems like this might be the time.”
“Okay.”
A long moment passed. She swallowed. “Would you... come with me, maybe? In August? When I go to New York?”
His fingers dug into her hip. “Come with you? Like... move there?”
“Yeah.”
His thoughts tumbled over one another. “I... don’t know that I could. I have nothing. No money to get to New York. No way to live there, even if I did.”
“But you could get a job, couldn’t you? After graduation? You could go talk to the union. I bet they’d get you a place at the mill.”
He pondered that. They would graduate in just two weeks, and in his descent into this delirious rapture, he hadn’t planned for whatever came next. He hadn’t wanted to. Yet he hadn’t dared dream that the end of high school might mark the beginning of something else.
“You’d have the entire summer to save up,” she said. “I could get a job, too. We could pool our money, get an apartment together in the fall.”
“You mean live together? Would you really want that?”
“Are you kidding? More than anything.”
He choked back a wild rush of emotion. “But... what would your parents say about you skipping the dorms? Wouldn’t they mind you living with your boyfriend?”
She tensed. He still hadn’t met her parents, despite sleeping in their house nightly and raiding their kitchen every day after school. He’d signed away his soul to their daughter, yet never seen their faces.
But he knew what they would think when they saw his, so he’d deflected Aubrey’s many requests for a proper dinner. Maybe once he’d filled out more, since having access to her kitchen had already added six pounds to his frame. Or maybe once he’d gotten that job at the mill and earned enough to be taken seriously. To be treated like an adult.
“Let me worry about that,” she said. “Though meeting them would help.”
“I will,” he murmured. “Soon. And I’ll go down to the local tomorrow.”
