Chapter 4 Bohdan
Bohdan
Then - College
I try to wait to kiss her.
To show her that it’s not some fleeting, dumb college thing.
That I don’t think a single girl has ever really existed to me before I saw her—certainly not since—and never again.
But I don’t make it that long.
Three days after I took her skating and all I could see when I closed my eyes was her smile and all I could feel were her fingers slotting into mine, I realized I needed her more than I needed most things—so I made Talon and Jay fake a stupid reason to throw a party to have an excuse to invite her over.
They didn’t need much convincing. They were more than happy to oblige, saying I hadn’t shut up about her since the date, and they’d do anything to go back to the relative silence of the house.
The only thing I said to them was that the date was great, and that Sloan was entirely inconceivable—because she was absolutely none of their business—but they claimed that was a ringing endorsement and the fact that I was more glued to my phone than I’d ever been, hoping she’d text me or call, was reason enough for celebration.
She comes to the party, hand in hand with Tia Valdez—who watches me like a hawk—but she doesn’t need to.
I’ve never been more interested in anything than making Sloan Joseph comfortable enough to smile.
She does smile. I even make her laugh.
I’m pretty high on myself over that one.
She sits with me in the corner of the living room, away from Talon and Jay and all the noise of the party, talking softly about things she likes and things she doesn’t—ancient civilizations rank pretty high, olives rank pretty low—and she listens more than anyone I’ve ever met when I tell her about hockey, but she’s more interested in asking me about geology.
She stays all night, until I notice her press her eyes closed, rubbing her palm across her chest, and when I come back from the kitchen, she’s not in the living room anymore.
She’s outside in the backyard.
“What are you doing out here?” The door clicks shut behind me, and Sloan whirls around when I walk down the worn wooden steps into the yard.
“Oh.” Sloan’s fingers tighten on her red cup, and a faint blush paints her cheeks.
“It’s just . . . quieter out here. And the snow—” She gestures to the giant flakes, drifting lazily down from the sky, illuminated by the light hanging above the back deck.
“It’s my favourite when it snows at night like this. ”
“It’s nice.” I reach forward, taking her cup, crouching down to set it on the frozen ground.
She blinks up at me when I stand again, closer to her than before, eyes brighter than all the stars in the sky, snowflakes catching in her hair and melting on her cheeks. “Are you going to kiss me now?”
I nod, eyes tracing the pout of her lips. “Yeah, Zlatí?ko. I think I will.”
She looks almost puzzled—a fleeting crease between her eyebrows and a wrinkle across her nose—but I cup her cheek, thumb sweeping under her left eye over a snowflake obscuring these three freckles that I think I’ll count to go to sleep.
She takes a tiny inhale, then my lips are on hers, and I think my life as I know it is over.
Now, she comes to my place at least twice a week.
I hate going longer than that without seeing her.
But we don’t share a single class. I have practice at least once a day, usually more, so my evenings are rarely free. Our schedule has us away for games more than we’re home.
I don’t mind going to her dorm. Tia has more sense than her brother and usually leaves to study so we can be alone—but practice runs late more often than not, and by the time I’m out of the shower, sometimes she’s just here.
Sitting cross-legged on my bed, usually in an oversized sweater, jeans or leggings, and a pair of my socks, with her textbooks spread around her and music playing softly on her phone.
Talon and Jay cut her a key the day after the party, when I couldn’t stop swiping my thumb across my bottom lip—right where hers had been.
Tonight, she’s got stacks of brochures and pamphlets spread out around her.
“What are these?” I point my chin towards the mess she’s got going before toweling off my still-damp hair.
“I went to that anthropology program open house tonight. They had a bunch of different booths with field study and internship opportunities,” she says, and I catch her shrugging when I toss the towel onto my desk chair.
“Oh yeah? Anything you’re interested in?” I drop down on the bed beside her, picking one up at random.
“Oh! That’s for the field study in Northern BC!” Sloan lights up, reaching forward to grab it from me. I circle her wrist, but she switches hands, holding it up.
Tugging her towards me instead—I’ve been thinking about her in my bed for the entire day—she holds up another pamphlet, eyes and smile bright. “Last year at this field school, someone found an entire pot!”
“A pot?” I grin, thumb stroking across the inside of her wrist. “What’s so special about a pot?”
Sloan purses her lips. “What’s so special about an igneous rock?”
“Well, they are formed when magma or lava solidify, so some might say that’s significantly more interesting than a plain old pot.”
She lifts her chin. “Who says it’s a plain old pot? It could have been used for any number of things.”
“Was it?”
Her eyes narrow. “They haven’t been able to determine its exact function yet.”
“Fascinating.” I raise a brow and tug on her wrist again.
Sloan glances at the pamphlet before dropping it onto my bed beside all the other scattered pieces of paper. “I’ve been talking a lot,” she says softly, a wrinkle cutting across her nose I’d like to smooth away with my mouth. “I’m sorry.”
“I’m not,” I tell her.
“Are you sure?” she asks with a sniff, eyes getting bright in the way they only do when she’s going to cry. “It seems like you’re trying to get me to lay down so maybe I’ll shut up and stop talking about these stupid digs.”
“I have been trying to get you to lay down. But it’s not because I want you to stop talking, Sloan.” I press my thumb down, and I can feel the faint beat of her heart in her pulse. “And I’m certainly not interested in making you shut up. I’d actually like you to make quite a bit of noise.”
She blinks, full lips parting while a pink blush rises on her cheeks. But she tips her chin up again, that funny streak of stubbornness shining through. “How lewd.”
I grin, bringing her wrist to my mouth, pressing a kiss there. “I’m twenty and you’re the most beautiful person I’ll probably ever see in real life. I can get lewder.”
She gives me a flat look this time. “Talon and Jay could come home.”
“Talon and Jay fucked off to the movies,” I say against her skin.
She blinks again with a tiny swallow.
She looks a bit nervous. Not because of me. We’ve got a rule about boundaries. She’s clear about them—best day of my life when she took her clothes off in front of me for the first time and we didn’t do anything but lie there.
She’s beautiful, radiant, probably made from the sun and the stars, but it wasn’t because of that.
It was the way her eyelashes fluttered softly, her lips curved into this little shy smile and her shoulders relaxed.
How she blinked slowly. How her hands painted these patterns across my chest, arms, and back when we lay there, alone in the dark except for the moon peeking through the window, whispering quietly, doing nothing more than laughing and kissing.
It was the way she was entirely, utterly relaxed. Comfortable. Quiet and at ease.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt more worthy of anything—more like a man—than I did that night and I probably never will again.
I always ask Sloan permission to do anything, and when she says stop, I stop and take ten steps back. But I know her enough now to be able to read these different subtleties in her, the way the font of her changes in the shifts of her body language.
She’s nervous about something her brain just told her.
I hold my hands up in submission and jerk my chin towards the brochure again. “How long are these field schools?”
“Uhm. It depends. This one was two weeks. But some of the European ones are a month.” She chews on her bottom lip, glancing towards the stacks strewn across my bed.
“A month?” I echo. “What’s so interesting you’re digging through the dirt for that long?”
She folds her arms, sitting up straighter. “Says the guy who goes to school to study rocks.”
“I’d miss you,” I tell her, voice low.
“It’s been like, two months.” She rolls her eyes, but she glances back up at me, and there’s this tiny bloom of hopefulness there, like when the sky turns blue first thing in the morning and you’ve got no idea what’s coming for you—a day that could be anything at all.
“I can’t miss you after two months?” I ask, leaning forward with a grin and plucking the brochure from her hand.
Sloan purses her lips, straightening the rest of the pamphlets on my bed before stacking them together. “Well, you can, I guess. Just—why would you?”
“Zlatí?ko, come on.”
She pauses, the stack of pamphlets still between her fingers. “What does it mean?”
“It’s killing you, isn’t it?” I laugh.
“No.” She shakes her head, hair tumbling around her shoulders, trying to look resolute.
My brow lifts. “You could just Google it, you know.”
“No,” she repeats, stubborn. “I’d rather you tell me.”
I groan, scrubbing my face, like it’s this old, tired thing, when really, it’s one of my favourite games to play with her.
I say something in Czech. She pretends not to care what it means, looks befuddled for a minute before she moves right on in conversation, and she spends too much time trying to trick me into telling her instead of just using the computer she carries around in her pocket.
I hope I spend my whole life playing games with Sloan Joseph.
But this one needs to end—because I think she needs to know how precious she is.
“Sweetheart,” I say, before I tell her what it really means to me. What she really means to me. “Or ‘little gold.’”
“Oh.” She breathes softly, looking down when a crease of apprehension sketches between her eyebrows.
I reach forward, tilting her chin up. “You looked—golden. Under those arena lights.”
She shakes her head. “Nothing about me is gold. I have brown hair.”
“Let me compliment you.” I press my thumb to the pout of her bottom lip. She blinks a bit too much, and I see a solitary tear slip over and slide down her cheek. Wiping it away, I ask quietly, “What’s going on in there?”
“Nothing good,” she says, shaking her head again with a sad, wet laugh.
“Can I kiss it better?”
She nods, softly this time, her fingers fluttering around my wrist.
I do kiss her. I hope I make it better.
She doesn’t seem to mind that I lose track of time, sitting up on my bed, surrounded by all these brochures, thumb still gripping her chin, her hand around my wrist, lips on mine.
The outside world could implode. Stars could die and the sun could burn out and maybe the rest of civilization is just dust.
All I know is that I’ve got her, that I’ve never wanted to kiss someone like this, that I don’t think I ever will again, that it’s stupid and makes no sense because she’s eighteen and I’m twenty but I think she’s it for me because she’s quiet and shy and soft and stubborn all at the same time and no one’s ever taken my breath away quite like she has.
That I would stay here kissing her, because even if the world did end, it wouldn’t, not really, not as long as she was still living and breathing, but Sloan pulls away, tucking her hair behind her ears, lips parted and swollen when she asks softly, “Can we lay down?”
“Yeah, Zlatí?ko, we can do whatever you want.”
Whatever she wants turns out to be the lights off, music she likes but seems sort of sad to me, all of our clothes gone, and her hair fanning out across the pillow, big blue eyes fluttering up at me suspended over her with one hand gripping the sheets and the other holding up a condom, asking her if she’s sure.
She says yes.
But it’s not all she says.
“Yes. It’s not my first time and I know it’s not yours but . . . it feels a bit . . . like maybe it is?” She bites down on her bottom lip, eyes wide like she’s worried I won’t understand. “Do you know what I mean?”
“I do.” I brush a thumb across her cheek.
It does feel like the first time.
I try to be careful with her, and the funny thing is—she tries to be careful with me. Her teeth graze my bottom lip, my shoulders, my arms, but she never bites down. She stops herself before her nails dig too deep into my back.
But I’d let her break me apart, if she wanted.
I’m gone the second she is, and something in me does shatter when she comes, my name on her lips—but not in a bad way.
In this way that tells me my heart was only ever supposed to be pieces she could hold in those tiny hands, anyway.
Not the first time, but she kisses me afterwards, tentative, like it’s new, and I think every single kiss with her is. Later, her laughter echoes into the dark room, her fingers trace portraits on my skin, and I think I’d be more than happy for my last everything to belong to her.