“Right.” Sadie cranes her neck, distracted, as if searching for someone—forhim, Julius realizes, with a rush of warmth.
He is all too glad to be walking up to her, to slide his hand around her waist, pull her closer to his side, well aware that Pineapple Guy is tracking every movement.
“This is my boyfriend, Julius,” Sadie introduces him loudly.
“Hey, man,” Pineapple Guy says.
Julius offers him the most perfunctory of nods. “Hey.”
But Pineapple Guy doesn’t seem entirely discouraged by his presence. He seems more like he’s making an assessment, sniffing out any openings like a dog behind a closed door. “You guys are cute together. Did you meet here, or—”
“High school,” Sadie says.
“Over ten years ago, actually,” Julius adds.
“Ten years?”Pineapple Guy blinks. “That’s like—damn, that’s a really long time.”
“A very long time to be obsessed with someone,” Sadie says, with a private smile just for him, and Pineapple Guy seems to reach the conclusion, at last, that the door is firmly locked.
“Happy for you two,” Pineapple Guy says. “Listen, I need to run off to the gym. But see you at the meeting, yeah?”
“Sounds good,” Sadie tells him. “See you there.”
Pineapple Guy steps back from them, but Julius can still feel him watching, and there’s still an unpleasant tension banding around his ribs when he imagines Sadie and the guy laughing together over free pizza. Without another word, he cups Sadie’s face and kisses her, longer and deeper than he normally would somewhere so public. He can taste the sweetness of cherries on her lips, feel her sharp inhale of surprise, then her smile, as if she knows what he’s thinking—which, to be fair, isn’t much at all right now. Only her. Impossible to think clearly when she’s touching the nape of his neck, kissing him back just as hard. Her teeth nip his bottom lip and for a second his mind goes perfectly blank.
“If you’re going to kiss me like that whenever you’re jealous, I’ll have to make you jealous more often,” Sadie says when she pulls away to look at him.
“I’m not jealous,” Julius says automatically.
She makes a small sound, like a suppressed hum of laughter. “Okay, sure.”
He draws her toward him again, keeps her there. “I mean, he should be jealous of me,” Julius murmurs against the curve of her neck. “But if he bothers you—ifanyonebothers you when classes begin, call me, okay? Actually, that goes for everything. If you’re overwhelmed or lonely or sad, or you’re stressed about a group project, or if there’s a spider on your wall, or the window in your dorm room won’t shut properly, or you’re working late and craving ramen, or you simply want someone to come and hold you. Anytime. Doesn’t matter if it’s three in the morning. Just call me.”
“What are you going to do? Drive all the way up here?”
“Yes,” he says without hesitation. “I would. As long as you want me here.”
“And what if I want you here constantly?”
“Well, I’m already planning on seeing you as often as I can,” he says, and takes out his phone to show her his calendar. He’s marked every public holiday, every weekend, every spare afternoon he might have for the entire academic year. “We can meet in the city on weekdays, and I’ll drive up to visit you on the weekends.”
“But that’s, like, a one-hour drive,” Sadie points out. “Are you sure—”
“Sadie, I’d hop on a sixteen-hour plane ride to see you,” he tells her, and he hopes she knows how much he means it. “An hour is nothing.”
She stares up at him, stunned, visibly moved.
“What?” he asks, teasing. “Too mesmerized by how good I look?”
Her features twist into a half-hearted scowl.
Laughing, he picks her purse up from the grass and slings it over his shoulder, then reaches for her with his other hand. “Come on. Want to go check out the library next?”
You promised Abigail.
I repeat this to myself like I might be able to magically channel my best friend’s spirit if only I say it enough times. At the very least, it’s what’s keeping me from chickening out as I zip up my miniskirt. It might well be the shortest skirt I’ve worn since I was two years old, and I have to practice walking around in the bathroom and stretching my arms as if I’m actually two again, checking the extent to which I can move without flashing anybody. My immediate findings: not very much at all.
But if I’m really going to do this, I’m going to do it right. Or do it the way Abigail envisioned when she assembled the look on our last shopping trip. So the skirt stays, just like the black lace top I’m wearing, the leather boots fitted snugly around my knees, and the gel eyeliner I’ve managed to draw around my eyes after three attempts.
