Chapter Twelve
That’s how Jackson put it, when he asked me to move in with him: Would you stay?
We were at his apartment—the one he shared with several roommates, all of whom were pursuing degrees in the sciences. There
was Ethan, who was in chemistry; and Rika and Yasmin, who had already been together for several years, and who I was quickly
becoming friends with. I was the lone humanities person, constantly drowning in source material and citations while the others
were preoccupied with theories and experiments.
Jackson and I were lying on the floor, next to each other, on our backs, because the couch in his apartment was an ancient
thing from IKEA that Ethan had bought off Craigslist, and it was horribly uncomfortable.
“Stay for what?” I asked, studying the shadows on the popcorn ceiling. Honestly, I’d only been half listening. I’d just come
from a meeting with Professor MacAndrew, who was going to advise my thesis, and was apparently the whole reason I was in the
program. She had believed in me, she said, right before she told me she didn’t think my proposed thesis topic was any good.
I was going back to the drawing board.
“Forever,” Jackson said.
I laughed in surprise, and then turned my head to find him staring intensely back at me. “Wait. What do you mean?”
He rolled onto his side, propping his head up with one hand, a smile playing around his lips. “You want to move in together?”
My heart stuttered. But it didn’t feel like an excited stutter. It felt more like I missed the bottom stair and hit the floor
when I wasn’t expecting to. “You mean . . . live together? In the same place?”
His forehead wrinkled, that half-amused, half-puzzled look he gave me when I was slow on the uptake. Which I often seemed
to be around him. “Yes, Harlowe. That’s generally what moving in together means.”
I still couldn’t quite seem to catch up. “You want me to move in here? It kind of seems crowded already.”
“No, no, I mean . . . let’s get our own place. Just you and me. We could get a couch that’s actually comfortable.”
That made me laugh. “You don’t want to feel springs in your ass every time you sit down?”
He grimaced. “Shockingly, no.” The grimace disappeared and he raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Come on, what do you think?”
I smiled, but it felt strange, like my face was stretching in all the wrong ways. “It’s . . . a big step.”
A very faint frown crossed his face. “Yeah. I know.”
“Well, it’s just . . . we’ve only been dating a year.”
He leaned ever so slightly away from me. “A year is a long time, Har. And we’re adults. I think we can know what we want.”
Can we? I thought desperately. Am I supposed to know?
He was so confident—just like he always was. Jackson wasn’t someone who waffled. He always seemed to be moving forward, in
a straight line, while I felt like I was zigzagging all over the place. He never changed his mind about anything.
And he’d chosen me.
I stared into his dark eyes, and I decided maybe his confidence was strong enough for both of us. Maybe this was just always how I was going to feel—like I was missing that bottom step. Never quite sure. Never quite ready.
Maybe this was just what happened when your dad walked out and it turned out your whole childhood was basically a lie. Maybe
it wrecked you for ever feeling sure.
So I decided I could let him lead. I could follow, because he was sure. That was enough.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s move in together.”
“And buy a decent couch?” he asked with a smile that made it impossible to look anywhere else.
I laughed. “And buy a decent couch.”
He rolled onto his back again, looking satisfied. And in that moment, a tiny voice in my head wondered why he hadn’t kissed
me. And then another wondered if it was fair to expect him to.
But I pushed both voices aside and squeezed his hand. We were going to find an apartment, and buy a couch, and I would figure
out my thesis topic, and we’d build lives together. And eventually, I told myself, I would be sure.