24. We Save Money. We Zoom. We Count the Days
WE SAVE MONEY. WE ZOOM. WE COUNT THE DAYS
PAST
The days leading up to Yellowstone Club seem to crawl by.
We continue to practice as a team, twice a week.
In our group chat, we send stupid memes and agree it’s past time to share location with one another, especially since we’ll be traveling from different places.
Lucas asks me for book recommendations, and Brody whines about my picks being too philosophical.
Somehow, in the weeks leading up to Yellowstone Club, we turn into a little mini book club, debating everything from whether author intentionality matters to why the monk in A Psalm for the Wild-Built goes by they/them pronouns.
I add even more hours to my work schedule, doubling up on Pizza Palace and tutoring because one is more lucrative, the other stable and secure.
It helps that Lucas also works too many hours.
We’re exhausted together, even though we’re apart.
Because meaningful phone conversations remain tricky, he texts me each morning with pictures of the city.
During his lunch break, he’ll share songs that made him think of me (Blake Shelton’s “Austin,” because apparently Lucas’s grandparents lived in Texas, a YouTube video of Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” being sung via 331 movies).
Because he has more of a social life than I do—no siblings in Chicago to take care of, appearances to keep up if he wants that return offer—he often goes out with coworkers.
He sends me pictures of a retro poster of someone talking about the necessity of caffeine (and a picture of the receipt because he cannot believe was forced to pay $8.
50 for a vanilla latte so he could sit at the same table as his coworkers).
Another day there’s a pretty contrail (cue debate about whether contrails can really be beautiful, which then devolves into a Plato vs.
Aristotle sidebar about aesthetics in general).
Only once do I send a picture: Here’s a sweatshirt you left at my dorm, and because possession is nine-tenths of the law . . . I guess it’s my Pasadena City College sweatshirt now.
We save money. We Zoom. We count down the days.
Lucas and I land within half an hour of each other. He looks so nauseous I can’t help but laugh.
“That bad?”
He wraps his long arms around me. He’s filled out a little, eating the free breakfasts and lunches Eluva provides.
He also looks more put together than usual.
He had to get a real haircut (though he’d kept it long) because I forgot to trim it before he left.
“Better than when we flew back from nationals.”
I laugh up at him as he smiles ruefully down at me. “Every single flight attendant and child left this plane with at least two origami creations. My fingers are numb.”
“I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to help distract you.”
“If I could have justified renting a car and driving here, I would have.” He kisses the top of my head. “But I didn’t want to miss a single minute with you.”
Because the words don’t come as easily to me, I squeeze his hand as I pull him toward the baggage claim. “No more calluses.”
“Will you think less of me if I admit I miss the outdoor stuff?”
“Are you… not enjoying the internship?”
Lucas looks around, as if worried that even here, hundreds of miles away, someone will hear him disparaging fintech.
“It’s intellectually more interesting, but—” He shrugs.
“Maybe because I’m just an intern, but all summer I’ve been given mini projects, micro tasks that slot into someone else’s big picture.
” One corner of his mouth tilts up. “Can’t complain about the difference in pay, though. ”
Brody’s waiting for us at the curb, leaning against what he tells us is the family’s Yellowstone Range Rover.
“Meaning it stays here, year-round?” Lucas doesn’t mean to sound judgmental, and luckily, Brody is hard to offend.
“We need a car when we’re here, guys.”
Brody’s other friends are out hiking when we arrive, meaning we get a private tour of the place.
Like with everything in Brody’s life, townhouse is a misnomer: the Huntington-Branca vacation home is a four-bed, six-bath, 2,600-square-foot single-family residence that happens to share one small wall with its neighbor.
It’s larger than Lucas’s and my family’s apartments . . . combined.
“I get the master because it’s my birthday week and I’m gonna have girls over. But . . .” He pauses, dramatically opening the door to a magnificent bedroom, with beautiful hardwood floors, lush Persian rugs, and a queen canopy bed.
One bed.
“I saved this for you guys.” He leads us to the attached bathroom, which has a large tub with a view overlooking the golf course.
Downstairs, the front door opens and someone shouts to Brody to get his ass back out there.
“Don’t say I never did anything for you,” Brody says as he closes the door.
Lucas looks at me and then the door, his body taut with tension.
“I did not ask Brody to plan this. I have no expectations of . . . anything.”
“I know.” I lean in and raise myself up to tiptoe so I can nip his ear. “I asked Brody to help me plan this.”
I laugh at how shocked Lucas looks.
We’ve been dancing around sex for months now, sneaking in as much as we can .
. . which is to say, not much. During the school year, my room was always occupied as my roommate worked her way through every available partner at Caltech, PCC, or any random party she visited.
She claimed that sex calmed her and that it helped her to focus better on tests.
Considering she’s a double-major at Caltech and maintained straight As? I’m loath to question her methodology.
Lucas’s home was obviously off-limits, considering Lucas shares a room with his brothers, and whenever Delilah isn’t working, she’s organizing bake sales or having neighbors over to talk about which things they want to petition the landlord to fix.
And though Lucas regularly came over to my place, we’ve done little more than sneak in a few kisses between CS lessons for Aurora, fixing the neighbor’s .
. . everything, and reading to the younger girls.
A few times, we got to the under-the-shirt phase.
Once, he went as far as unbuttoning my jeans.
But there were always people around, always distractions and potential interruptions.
“We’re like a depressed married couple,” I tell him, pressing my hips into his, feeling the hard ridge of his erection along my stomach. “We’re worse than one of those silver anniversary couples, since even sexless marriages still bang it out around once a month.”
A pink hue spreads across Lucas’s face. “Did you really say bang it out?”
“Our options are limited. Unless we’re going to bring condoms to worlds, where we’ll both be distracted, when are we going to really be alone again? The Pizza Palace handicap restroom?”
Lucas makes a face, likely because he’s remembering that he did get carried away once in the hallway during one of my breaks, that rather than get caught, we’d stumbled into the bathroom and it had . . . not been good.
As unromantic of a heart as I claim to have, even I draw the line at unsanitary. And I wasn’t able to stay in the moment while pressing my back against a dirty bathroom wall.
“Unless I lock my roommate out next year or unless you’re prepared for our first time to be crazy stupid rushed, this is our best option.”
Maybe our only option.
Lucas nods slowly, his blush deepens, and he’s unable to meet my eyes. His breathing is shallow in a way that speaks more of anxiety than excitement. “Unless I’m making assumptions? I’m not trying to pressure you into sex.”
Lucas bends until he can rest his forehead against mine, his eyes squeezed shut, the edge of his glasses digging into my skin.
“I want to fuck you so bad. But I didn’t want to presume.
I thought about flying you out to Chicago, but that seemed like the definition of presumptuous.
Then I started worrying you’d worry having sex would change something about our team dynamics, and I’d rather not be having sex with you than potentially screw up—”
I kiss him, because it’s one of the few ways I can stop his overactive brain. Lucas’s response is immediate. Gratifyingly so. He leans into me, his hands already slipping under my loose tank when we both hear Brody shouting from downstairs.
“We’ll be meeting to head to dinner at seven o’clock. Everyone will be out until seven sharp. The house will be totally empty. No one else will even have a key.”
“Oh my God,” Lucas whispers against my forehead.
“I couldn’t plan this without Brody knowing.” I smile, even as there are hoots from below, meaning—
“Meaning everyone knows.” Lucas’s voice is a bit pained. “Do you mind?”
I close my eyes, hearing the entreaty in Lucas’s voice. He’s never pressured me. If anything, I’m the one who instigates. “Not as much as I should.”
Meaning I was this close to going further in Delilah’s car on half a dozen occasions. That I wondered how quiet we could be with the girls asleep in their bedroom and us on a couch.
But a private bedroom with a canopy bed in an empty house for the next five hours? Unquestionably better.
When I pull Lucas’s face down for a kiss again, he pauses.
“I should shower.”
I close my eyes against the gurgle of laughter that’s threatening to overtake me.
“You want to shower now?”
There’s the blush again, his face reddening at an alarming rate. “It’s our first time together, and you know it’s my first—” He swallows and I watch the long line of his throat, the stubble of growth along there that I can’t wait to feel against my skin. “And I want it to be perfect.”
“It doesn’t have to be perfect.” I reach a hand down to unbutton his jeans.
While I’ve tried to be flippant about it, I’m not much more experienced than he is.
In high school, it seemed to be a thing to check off, a tiny act of rebellion against my father: That I wouldn’t be the docile, virginal daughter he could mold as he wanted.
But completely unsurprisingly, there was little desire and almost no satisfaction to be found in the arms of high school boys who were as unpracticed as I was.
But with Lucas, when I wrap my hands around his length, which is somehow simultaneously soft and hard in a way I’ve only read about, that I’ve never bothered to notice in my other rushed encounters, I feel an answering pool of desire. “Aiming for perfect would be setting ourselves up for failure.”
Even as he hardens in my hand, I can see the internal battle warring inside. “You’re perfect, Lorelai, and I—”
This time, he’s the one who cuts himself off, his mouth meeting mine in an almost frantic kiss as my hand around him smooths a path down and then up.
There’s almost no finesse in the way he jerks my tank top above my head, the way he groans when it becomes apparent it’s not physically possible to maintain contact while he removes my clothes.
He fumbles with the clasp of my bra and accidentally—in a completely unsexy way—snaps the waistband of my panties.
There are so many mistakes along the way.
He’s too gentle in a way that allows me to get into my own head.
And somehow, stupidly, it takes Lucas Sebastian Murray three condoms before it’s not inside out and not broken, meaning he’s almost shaking with need, muttering that there’s no way he’s going to last while I reassure him.
He (of course) apologizes that I need to reassure him.
And then we’re both laughing because this isn’t how either of us really imagined it. With such sloppiness and so many apologies, with a little too much sweat and not nearly enough finesse.
But then I pull him to me, and yes, there is a moment of perfection when he enters me.
I hate that my mind labels it as such.
Because I ought to know better.
And yet, even as I rationalize that this is a college romance, that I shouldn’t romanticize, it is almost impossible as Lucas mutters to me that I’m perfect, and this is perfect. A small part of me whispers that yes, being this close to Lucas is frighteningly, almost world-redefiningly good.
For a moment, I feel safe and content. I am protected and cherished.
Then Lucas whispers, “I love you.”
And I burst into tears.