Chapter 45
TRU
We were still learning how to love each other right. But for once, I wasn’t scared of what came next.
There were boxes everywhere, packing tape stuck to my sock, and a half-eaten sandwich sitting on a speaker Dare had sworn we didn’t need to bring.
We’d officially moved in.
Well, somewhere in the sweaty, paint-splattered middle of it. We were twenty-one now—somehow adults, allegedly—but it still felt like we were playing house.
The place was small. The furniture had come in boxes with instructions written in a foreign language. The air conditioner hummed louder than our TV. But it was ours. And I wouldn’t have traded it for anything.
The entire soccer team was crammed into our new apartment, loud as ever, arguing about whether or not we’d fit a king-sized bed through the stairwell.
“Y’all better not scratch the paint,” I called from where I was kneeling by the wall, sketching the outline of a mural.
Dare leaned over my shoulder, peeking. “You’re doing the skyline?”
“I’m doing our skyline,” I said. “Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Manhattan… even that janky little rest stop where we hooked up the first time on our drive back from New York.”
He snorted and kissed the top of my head. “You’re such a sap.”
“Your sap.”
He disappeared into the bedroom again, where I heard him opening a box labeled Do Not Open Without Me. Seriously. That was our version of romance, emotional landmines with permanent marker warnings.
Hours passed. Friends cycled in and out. Someone brought beer. Someone else knocked over the thrifted lamp. We’d hit six furniture stores in one afternoon looking for the perfect bed, and all we’d gotten was heat exhaustion and a fight about firm versus soft mattresses.
By evening, the place was quiet. We were curled up on the living room floor, surrounded by empty takeout containers and sleeping bags since the bed wasn’t arriving until tomorrow. Dare had his soccer medals spread out on the coffee table, trying to figure out which ones were worth hanging up.
He surprised me by picking the two state championship medals—the ones he never bragged about. “Coach said I earned ’em,” he said, brushing his thumb over one. “Might as well own that shit.”
I nodded, proud, and leaned into him, my fingers still paint-streaked from the mural.
He set them aside, plopped down cross-legged on the floor, and grabbed the instruction booklet from our IKEA cabinet, which meant I got to watch my sexy-ass boyfriend assemble furniture shirtless.
Later, while unpacking a final box labeled Tru’s Ancient Stuff, I found something that knocked the breath out of me—a folded sheet of lined paper, the edges worn soft.
Inside was a sketch of two boys on a soccer field, facing each other with flushed cheeks and messy hair.
One had a scratch on his knee. The other bent over to kiss it better.
I’d drawn it shortly after we met as kids, and I’d never thrown it away. It was our beginning, the one he’d almost convinced me I’d dreamed up. While Dare was swearing at the tiny bag of hardware and the Allen wrench, I popped online and ordered a frame for the sketch.
I’d hang it near the front door, and on the mat I’d write, We Made It.
When I came out of the shower, the apartment windows were open. A storm was rolling in, slow and low, thunder muttering somewhere behind the skyline. The smell of rain drifted in with the breeze.
Dare was on the couch in gym shorts, flipping through a sketchbook he’d stolen from my bag. I slid down beside him and wound my arm around his back, running my fingertips over his smooth, warm skin.
“Stop snooping.” I pressed a kiss behind his ear. “That one’s not finished.”
“It looked finished to me,” Dare muttered. “You even got the dumb way I sit.”
“Which you only do when you’re anxious.”
“I’m not anxious.”
I gave him a pointed look.
Dare rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I just…” He flipped through the pad. “Just needed to know you’re still drawing me—still thinking of me—when you were gone.”
I pressed my forehead to his temple, breathing him in. Detergent and salt, the way he smelled when he came back from the rec center and didn’t bother to shower. Typical.
“I never stopped drawing you,” I murmured. “Even when I wanted to.”
Dare let out a laugh that barely made it to his lips. “Why would you want to stop?”
“Because it hurt sometimes,” I admitted. “Missing you that much.”
The thunder rolled again, closer this time. Wind lifted the edges of the curtains. It was the kind of storm that belonged to us somehow—the kind that felt like it might knock the sky open and let something new through.
Dare flipped to another sketch. One I’d done from memory in New York of him lying on our old dorm mattress, mouth parted, lashes dark against his cheeks. Peaceful, but not quite asleep.
He stared at it for a long time. Then he set the pad on the coffee table and turned to me, eyes a little glassy.
“I wanted you to draw me like this,” he said, voice low. “Here. At home. With you.”
“You are home,” I said. Then I kissed him.
It started slow, but it never stayed that way. Not with us.
His greedy hands slid up under my towel. I straddled his lap without a second thought, soaked hair dripping down his chest, and Dare laughed into my mouth.
“We’re gonna have to move this couch aside to make room for my new desk,” I said between kisses. He watched me, waiting for more. I teased him with quick kisses that left him unsatisfied and chasing my mouth. “Now that I’ll be working from home.”
Dare stilled, his eyes snapping up to meet mine. He read my growing smile, and it was infectious. He was grinning back before he could stop himself.
“You got the job?”
“They hired me. Just part-time for now, until we graduate.”
He kissed me again, slower, deeper, sucking my tongue into his mouth. “Better be an extra-wide desk so there’s plenty of room for me to fuck you on it.”
I laughed into the kisses that didn’t stop coming. “Why can’t we just fuck on the couch? It’s much softer.”
“God,” he complained with mock seriousness. “You’re so vanilla.”
Outside, the first heavy drops of rain hit the windowpanes. Inside, I tried to convince Dare that I wasn’t so vanilla after all.
He still didn’t say I love you easily. But he said it in how he fixed my coffee exactly the way I liked it. In the way he folded my hoodie and left it on the back of the chair when I was cold. In the way he never let me fall asleep without kissing me goodnight.
And in the way he whispered over the thunder, “I’ll take you any way I can get you.”