We’re back in Melly’s bed by eight thirty.
We don’t have sex. We make out for a while, lazy and slow, until it tips toward going further and she pulls back with her hand flat against my chest, her mouth swollen, her cheeks pink, and she tells me that she’s sore. So, we just lie there instead.
She’s on my chest. Her hand is on my stomach. Her thumb is grazing my lower stomach. I’m trying to think about anything else because I don’t want to wake my body up after she just said she was sore.
“Do you really want two kids, or did you just say that because I did?” she asks quietly.
I huff out a tiny laugh. “I do. Yeah.”
“Do you ever want to get married?”
“Of course,” I say, imagining that day.
“Do you think it’ll be to me?” She leans to look up at me. “The statistics of high school sweethearts lasting are not on our side.”
I brush my fingers on her face. “It’s a good thing we’re in college.”
She laughs at that and puts her head back down on my chest. “I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
She whispers, “I want you always, Blue Golding.”
I pull her hair to one side and let her words soothe my racing pulse. I kiss the top of her head. “I’ll love you always, Melly Sorcha.”
Chapter 21
Melly
IamdatingBlueGolding.
I have been dating Blue Golding for fifteen days, and I’ve been saying the word boyfriend out loud to other people for nine of them, and the word has not, in nine days, lost the small private thrill that lives at the back of my throat when it comes out of my mouth. I said it to Penelope. I said it to Mila. I said it to my mother, on a Tuesday phone call last week, in the middle of a sentence that started with, so I have to tell you something and ended with my mother screaming so loud Joel had to take the phone away from her for two minutes. I said it to my supervisor at the field placement, by accident, when she asked me why I was smiling at my email at three in the afternoon. I said it to a stranger at the grocery store last Friday, when she complimented the hoodie I was wearing and I said thanks, it’smy boyfriend’s, and the stranger gave me the small soft good for you nod that strangers give a random girl talking nonsense in public.
The boyfriend in question is Blue Golding.
And I’m walking out of my Tuesday three o’clock seminar with my phone is buzzing in my pocket because I have a boyfriend.
Blue: Done with practice. I’m coming over.
Me: Perfect. I’m just leaving class.
Blue: I’ll meet you.
Me: Okay.
I smile at my phone in the entryway of the academic building with a backpack on one shoulder and my coat half-zipped. I have been smiling at my phone like this for two weeks, and the butterflies haven’t faded.
I walk home, cutting across the quad. The grass is dead. The trees are bare.
Lucy and Gianna are outside the dining hall.
They see me. Lucy waves. She is bundled into one of Benson’s coats, and her hair is in a long side braid. Gianna is in her own coat. They wave me over. I cross to them.
“Melly.”
“Hi.”
“Where are you going?”
