Chapter 17
Seventeen years ago
For the first time in his life, Nick had everything he wanted.
Three months in, it still didn’t feel real, even though Aubrey kissed him everywhere—in the hallway, the school parking lot,
the brick alley where he’d fought Gallant.
She also kissed him on the big blue sofa in her living room, where they canoodled every afternoon. At least until one of her
parents pulled into the cul-de-sac, at which point Nick disappeared through the back door. Then he’d wander Henderson with
his hands in his pockets and, when the upstairs at Aubrey’s house went dark, steal around back to her ground-floor window.
She’d raise the sash, pop out the screen, and welcome him in so they could kiss some more, this time in her bed, where Nick
would ravel his hands in her silken hair and press himself as close as he dared.
He hardly went home anymore. Mostly just to shower and change. His dad had asked why exactly once. Noah Thacker had lowered
his beer, narrowed his eyes, and muted the TV long enough to string a whole sentence together.
“Where the hell’re you off to this time?”
Nick had instinctively planted his feet, defensive. “My girlfriend’s house.”
But Noah hadn’t cared, of course, and had immediately gone back to his show. “Girlfriend? Huh. Just don’t knock her up.”
Seething, Nick had loped out into the night. He couldn’t have said what angered him so much, except maybe the suggestion that
Aubrey was nothing but a thing to impregnate, when in actuality, she was the sun around which his world orbited.
Ire aside, though, his dad had no cause to worry. Nick had turned eighteen in April, a mere three weeks before Aubrey had,
but even though they’d both officially entered adulthood, she wanted to wait.
So Nick would wait. Happily. Not that he didn’t want to have sex with her. He did. All the time. Every time he got near her,
and nine-tenths of the time he didn’t, some driving force pulsated within him, a scorching command for more, more, more. Claim her, possess her, make her yours. But he wouldn’t have dreamed of pushing. He’d barely even processed the fact that something about him had apparently earned
him the right to hold her hand, to slip a new letter into her locker each morning. To explore her mouth with his at night
until they both reached a state of blissful exhaustion and fell asleep with their limbs woven tight.
Asking for more would have been like winning the lottery and daring to complain that it wasn’t enough.
It was enough. More than that, Nick was in love.
Which he knew would prove agonizing when Aubrey left for NYU. But try as he might, he’d gone careening off that cliff, all
the while knowing that nothing waited at the bottom but a bone-shattering impact. Yet he only seemed to have two settings—full throttle and fuck no, and he couldn’t seem to remember the latter’s existence when all he felt was the former.
So he would take what he could get, and suffer for it later. That part, at least, would feel familiar.
That simple fact circled in Nick’s mind as he stretched on his side in Aubrey’s bed and tongued her earlobe. She writhed,
her breath a hot tide against his bare shoulder. She’d flung his shirt away somewhere, into her darkened bedroom, while he’d
worked her down to a bra and pajama shorts. Their combined weight made the bed dip, and he felt submerged in her, shipwrecked
on the headiness of her sunshine scent, on the warmth of the leg she’d draped over his hip.
“Nick,” she whimpered as he suckled at her throat. Her fingers bit into his shoulders.
His mouth trailed downward, his tongue skimming the blade of her collarbone. Fuck, she tasted sweet and salty at once, like
a delicacy he’d always coveted but had never tried until right now.
She said his name again, this time with enough force that he paused. He’d made it to the valley between her breasts, and he
pulled back with a muttered curse.
“Sorry,” he said. “Sorry, shit. I got carried away. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, don’t apologize.” In the darkness, she curled close. Her whisper ghosted against his lips. “I want more, trust me. I
want you. So, so badly. I just . . .”
He waited, but she didn’t finish. “What?”
“I don’t know. I’m scared.”
“Of what? It . . . hurting?”
She laughed, a thick sound that coiled him tight inside. “No. Of disappointing you, I think. Of . . . not being any good.
Not satisfying you.”
He exhaled through his nose, short and sharp. “That would be impossible. And I’m the one who’s supposed to be doing the satisfying, anyway. You’re just supposed to lie there and enjoy it. Hopefully.”
This time, he felt her laughter more than heard it. “I’m pretty sure there’s more to it than that.”
“If there is,” he said, “I don’t care. If you ever decide you want to do that with me, it’ll be all about you. What you want.
You’ll have to show me what you like, but whatever it is, I’ll do it.”
Her breath caught. “God, see? This is what I love about you.”
He stilled. That incomparable word soaked in to the silence, saturating the inches between them.
Nick told himself to relax, that it was just a phrase. Aubrey hadn’t said she loved him. Just something about him.
“Sorry.” She wriggled away.
He let her go, at a loss to do anything else.
“I even promised myself I wouldn’t do that,” she said. In the faint starlit glow from the window, he could just make her out,
lying on her back, a hand pressed to her chest as she stared at the ceiling.
“Do what?”
The shadows hid her expression. “Say it before you did.”
His pulse stalled. “Say what?”
“Oh, come on, Nick. That I love you. Everyone knows the girl isn’t supposed to say it first.”
He dragged in a breath laced with fire. A few dozen rockets launched off inside his skull and detonated somewhere in the vicinity
of his breastbone. “Do you? Love me?”
She turned his way, her face pale in the darkness, a beckoning light. “Of course I do. But it’s fine. You don’t have to say
it ba—”
“I love you.” The declaration barged out, so ferocious he felt like he’d thrown it at her. “I love you so fucking much.”
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. That I’m too 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 love you.”
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.”
She twined her arms around his neck and kissed him again, sweetly, in that dreamy way that meant sleep was calling to her.
“Thank you. The truth is, I never want to be away from you. And I know it can work. We’ll make it work.”
He grazed his fingertips up and down her back as she descended into slumber. He really would talk to the union tomorrow. Hell,
he’d take a job cleaning toilets, if they offered one.
But try as he might, Aubrey’s casual optimism felt faintly dangerous when placed in his hands. She made it sound as if a future
together was something they only had to reach for, something they had every right to expect.
Meanwhile, he’d considered this whole thing more of a fever dream. One divine happenstance after another, a series of statistical
anomalies that kept piling up and would have to come toppling down at some point.
But fuck it. If she wanted him to try, he would.
Really, he’d give her anything she asked for.