AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You know, you very rarely show one of your real smiles. I think it took more than two full weeks for me to see one. The day we made the ball pit—that was the first time.”
“You mean like this?” He bares his teeth at me in a growl.
“That’s the one!” And I lean forward and kiss him again.
Only occasionally does the possibility hit me that we may never leave this place. That we’ll live an entire life of Wednesdays. Would we age? Lose our memories? Get sick of each other but never be able to escape?
Every outcome scares me.
His fingers play against the back of my neck, winding around a strand of hair. Unearthing a rose petal. “If we ever get out,” he says, “I want to go on a proper date with you. A non–September twenty-first date. A winter date, or a summer date.”
“What would we do?”
“Something tragically normal. Like a baseball game. Or dinner and a movie.”
It’s absurd how lovely that sounds. “Dinner and a movie,” I repeat, the image tugging at my heart. “I can’t wait.”
I love you, I almost say a half-dozen times, but every time it hovers on the tip of my tongue, I swallow it back.
“I didn’t think I could like someone this much,” I say instead. “Or maybe it’s that I didn’t know someone could like me this much. If you—you know. Like me.”
He grins my favorite full-wattage grin. “Barrett. I am a thousand kilometers past like. Worlds. Galaxies.”
“I don’t know if affection can be measured in kilometers,” I say, and he valiantly attempts to show me how.
“I changed my mind,” I say later, when the sky outside is darkest black and Miles can barely keep his eyes open. “I want to wake up next to you. That’s what I want on Thursday.”
“Then let’s just not go to sleep.”
“It won’t work.” I don’t mean it to, but my voice breaks. It’s fucking unfair, that’s what it is. Unfair that I can have the things I want only within these specific parameters.
He brushes curls away from my face, settles his head beneath my chin. “Maybe not,” he says. “But it’s nice to dream.”
DAY TWENTY-EIGHT
Chapter 36
I CAN STILL SMELL THE ocean air, the rose petals, Miles’s Irish Spring soap, as though it’s been dragged along my skin. I can still hear his earnest whispers and taste his shy, sweet exhales. My name, bitten off at the edge. The heat of his body next to mine, and our promise of a real date.
I am utterly, perfectly gone for him, and it’s this realization that warms the cold hard truth of another September 21.
It shouldn’t break my heart when I wake up back in Olmsted Hall, and yet it does. I had all these jokes prepared for a potential Thursday. I was going to say that maybe I was onto something with orgasms trapping us in time, and we had to have them together in order to jump-start our timelines again. And Miles would groan but secretly love it.
It should be scary, letting someone have this much of a heart I thought was made of steel, but now the only thing about Miles that seems scary is not getting to experience a weekend with him. An October. A winter.
Lucie has come and gone, and I can barely remember when we messed with Cole, or when we bonded after she took me to Elsewhere. Five days ago or ten? Two or twenty? My brain is jumbled, a blurred calendar that begins and ends on a single page.
The only thing it seems capable of doing is playing last night over and over, and I don’t mind that one bit.
A knock on my door startles me into a sitting position, my head swimming.
“I’m indecent,” I yell out, assuming it’s Lucie or Paige. When it doesn’t open, I throw my knitted sweater over my UW T-shirt and open the door a crack.
It’s worth the light-headedness for the way Miles’s face lights up, eyes brightening, a touch of a blush spreading across his cheeks.
The way his face lights up for me.
“Good morning,” he says in this rough, sleepy voice that’s warm enough to melt me back into bed.
