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Miles purses his lips, lost in thought. “I want to make a movie, even if it’s the lowest budget, most derivative piece of garbage and only the friends I force to watch it ever see it. I just want to have accomplished it.” Then a new expression comes over his face, something I’m not sure I’ve seen on him yet. A little shyness, a little curiosity. “And… I guess I’d like to make love to someone, at some point.”
The air in the truck turns so humid, I’m shocked the remaining ice cream doesn’t immediately liquefy.
I’m going to try my best not to comment on the fact that he said make love to instead of have sex with or sleep with. It’s hardly a clinical or scientific term, and there’s something about it that feels so anti-Miles. I’d expect him to say “copulate” or “engage in coitus” before “make love.”
“You haven’t?” I ask, and I hope it doesn’t sound judgmental, because I’m not. Not when my own history with it is so fraught, or when I literally came face-to-face with that history ten minutes ago.
He shakes his head. “I haven’t really dated, unless you count the girlfriend I had for a week in kindergarten, which meant we sat together during snack time and shared our applesauce. Or the lab partner I went out with for two weeks sophomore year, during which neither of us spoke to each other at school because we were too awkward.”
Now that sounds more like Miles.
“You don’t have to date someone to make love to them.” What Cole and I did definitely wasn’t making love. It was two bodies clumsily writhing against each other until one of them let out a long groan and the other was left feeling unsatisfied in more ways than one. “All the times you’ve repeated this day, you’ve never had the urge to just bang it out with someone?”
One day I will learn not to utter every thought that enters my brain. That day is not today.
“That would require. Um. Someone wanting to bang it out with me,” Miles says, beginning to turn the color of strawberries and cream.
I squint at him. “You’re not bad-looking.”
“Line up, ladies,” he says, cupping his hands around his mouth and pretending to shout toward the quad. “Completely average-looking guy here, ripe for the taking!”
“Fine, above average, if you’re fishing for a compliment.”
The deepening blush on his cheeks indicates that maybe he wasn’t, and it surprises him just as much as it surprised me. “I’m pretty sure every person who teased me about my ears as a kid would beg to differ,” he says. “They called me Dumbo. Zero points for creativity.”
“Are you serious? That’s shitty and lazy. I love your ears. I mean—” I backtrack, regretting my choice of words. “I have a completely normal amount of affection for your ears.”
He reaches up to touch one of them, as though making sure those are the ears I’m talking about. “You don’t have to say that. But thank you.”
“Maybe we should take this opportunity to get back at all the assholes who made fun of you.” I punctuate my words with a few air-swipes of the ice-cream scoop. “What do you think about a Barrett-and-Miles revenge tour?” I get another flash of Cole. Until now, revenge has never really crossed my mind, and yet—if I wanted to mess with him, this could be the perfect, consequencefree opportunity.
“No. No revenge,” he says. “Besides, I figure bullies are usually overcompensating for their own insecurities.”
“There you go with your logic. You can’t just let it fester into an ugly, long-held grudge like everyone else.”
“Oh, trust me, there’s plenty of festering. It took a while to get here,” he says. “Your turn. Things you want to do before you die.”
“See the pyramids, witness a flash mob, maybe win a Pulitzer, if I have time.” I rattle them off as quickly as I can.
“Witness a flash mob? Why not be part of a flash mob?”
“I’m not a good enough dancer,” I say matter-of-factly, because this is something I feel strongly about. “And I don’t want to have to commit to all the rehearsals. I want to be going about my day and then be completely awed when a flash mob happens right in front of me. Something about it just seems… I don’t know, magical.” I’ve gone down more than a few YouTube rabbit holes, getting emotional almost every time. I don’t know what it is about them—the surprise and synchronization just go straight to my heart. “Okay. Now back to the more interesting topic of getting you laid.”
Even as I say it, the words are as thick as rocky road. Why I decide to linger on this is one of the universe’s many mysteries.
He gives me this long-suffering look. “You’re incorrigible. What would I do, just go up to someone and say, ‘Hi, I’m a time traveler, want to sleep with me?’?”
“As far as pickup lines go, it’s not the worst. Probably one notch above”—I put on my cheesiest voice and lean closer—“?‘hey, baby, did it hurt when you fell from heaven?’?”
It’s just a joke, but I am too close to Miles, close enough to see the rise and fall of his chest, the tips of his eyelashes. I clear my throat and back up. Still, this minor discomfort is a thousand times better than thinking about Cole and the campus we now have to share.
I whip off my apron and open the back door of the truck. “Hold, please.”
I glance around the quad, buoyed by adrenaline, and zero in on my target: there. A guy in a corduroy blazer with a serene half smile on his face.
“Hi!” I chirp, putting myself in his path. “I have a proposition for you.” He pauses, gesturing to the earbuds I didn’t see when I selected him. “Hi,” I say when he takes them out, a little less chirpy this time. “I’m a time traveler. Do you want to sleep with me?”
He slips his earbuds back in. “I have to get to my sociology class.”
