Chapter 22
Matteo
“I DON’T WANT you to go,” I said.
Izzy plopped down on her bed next to me. “It’s only for the summer.”
I looked around the room. “It doesn’t feel that way. You’re packing everything you own.”
“I told you. My dad doesn’t want to pay rent when we’ll be gone for a few months. So we’re putting our stuff in storage.”
“Where will you live when you get back?”
She shrugged. “We’ll find a place.”
“What if it’s not near me anymore?”
She smiled. “Then you’ll find a new girl to watch like a creeper.”
“Dat’s not funny.”
Izzy laced her fingers with mine. “Think of it this way, when I get back, we’ll only have a month until I turn seventeen.”
I frowned. “Yeah, and then your father will probably say you have to be eighteen to date.” I’d waited four long months for Izzy to be my girlfriend last year, only for her to tell me on her birthday that her dad had changed his mind, and she had to wait another year to start dating.
“If you don’t want to wait, it’s fine.” She shrugged. “I understand.”
“You say dat like you don’t care if I go out with someone else.”
“Of course I do. But I’m not going to be here the whole summer, and if you find some other girl, I’ll understand.”
My jaw tightened. I wasn’t going to be so understanding if she found some other guy.
Izzy noticed my face and moved from next to me to sit on my lap. “You’re cute when you pout.”
“I’m not pouting.”
She ran her fingers through my hair. “I’ll write to you.”
“You mean email?”
“No. I’ll write you letters. I’ve been making rubber stamps, the kind you use with an ink pad to make a design on paper. I’ll finish the one I’m carving for myself and stamp my own stationery. I’ll only use it to write to you.”
“Who makes a rubber stamp?”
“I do. It’s easy. The first one I made out of a potato. But that rotted pretty quick. So the new one I’m working on is made from a big eraser. I carved my initials, and I’m working on the flowers now.”
I shook my head but couldn’t help but smile. “You’re a weirdo.”
She rubbed her nose to mine. “Well, that makes you a weirdo lover, then, doesn’t it?”
Izzy was teasing, but she wasn’t wrong. I’d fallen in love with her the first time I’d laid eyes on her under the bleachers, though I hadn’t said the words out loud yet. “I guess it does.”
***
A few days later, it was time to say goodbye.
Izzy and her mom were going on a month-long mission trip to Cambodia with the church her mom belonged to, and then they were heading to Soave, a small village in northeast Italy where her dad had bought a run-down castle with big plans to restore it and make a million euro renting it.
As far as I knew, he’d never worked in construction, and he definitely had no experience with two-hundred-year-old castles. But whatever. I just hated that she’d be gone all summer.
Luciana and I had gone over to help them load the last of the boxes into the moving truck, and my sister was downstairs with Izzy’s mom, quizzing her on words she was trying to learn in Khmer, the native language of Cambodia. It was the first time Izzy and I had been alone all day.
She shut the door and rested her hands on my chest. “I wanted to give you something before I go.”
I tried to smile, but my face had been perpetually sour lately. “What’s dat?”
She licked her lips, then leaned in and pressed them to mine. “This.”
Izzy might’ve started the kiss, but my body took over.
More than a year’s worth of wanting her pushed past my hesitation.
My hands found her waist, her hair, her back.
They moved all over, touching the places I’d been dying to feel.
I kissed her like I’d been waiting for permission, and now that I had it, I wasn’t going to waste a second.
She made a tiny sound—half sigh, half surprise—that lit me from the inside, and the world went blurry.
There was only my body against hers and her lips parting against mine.
It was soft and hungry all at once. I deepened the kiss, and she didn’t pull away.
If anything, she pushed closer, like she wanted me as badly as I wanted her. It was next to impossible to stop.
When we finally did, we were both breathing hard. She leaned her forehead against mine, her eyes closed and her voice barely above a whisper. “Wow.”
“Yeah.” I smiled. “That was…wow.”
She pulled back enough to look at me. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a while.”
“I’ve been wanting to do dat since the first time I met you.”
Her smile widened and lit her whole face. Seeing it knocked the air out of my lungs even more than the kiss had.
Izzy brushed another soft kiss to my lips before stepping away. “I’ll be back before you know it.”
I knew I’d be counting the days until I saw her again. I just didn’t know there would be so many to count.