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“How was it? Jade, I’m not a religious man, but I know a spiritual experience when I have one.”
Jade’s laughter vibrates through me, and when she climbs off my lap, I feel a little disappointed the whole experience is over. But one thing is for sure: Seth was dead wrong about sex not being special. What Jade and I just did was fucking magic. If that’s not special, someone needs to redefine the word for me.
Jade helps me get cleaned off, and we take the time to give the kitchen countertop a quick clean and then shower before crawling into bed. We lie facing each other. The moon is a little brighter tonight, offering me just enough light to make out Jade’s features.
“I know this is going to sound really silly, but thank you for trusting me with this,” Jade says. “Your first time can be a little nerve-racking, and I don’t take it lightly.”
“I’m glad it was you,” I say.
“I thought you wanted it to be special,” she says, teasing.
“It was,” I say, and I’m not joking. “Because it was with you.”
It’s cheesy, but I mean it. Two months ago, the idea of this would have been laughable, but I don’t have any regrets. Jade has been a safe person for me since the day we had that failedattempt at a hookup. I’m more myself with her than I am with anyone else.
But I wasn’t the only participant in this. I wanted her to enjoy everything we did tonight as much as I did.
“What about for you?” I ask. “Was it okay for you? I won’t be offended. Be honest.”
“It was.” Her voice is soft but serious. “It was different. It’s never been . . . like that.”
I make a noise of acknowledgment. I know what she means in a way. Even with the other things we did, I’ve never felt like that with anyone else. And now I know she felt it too, even if she didn’t say it outright. She said it in her own way. Connections like this aren’t one-sided. We’ve both been feeling this thing building for weeks. This was the only thing we could do with all the pent-up emotion.
Jade turns over, nestling her back against my chest. “I would say our chemistry is, like, a ten out of ten,” she says, her voice lighter now.
“Take that, Anastasia,” I say.
She’s joking to shift the tone away from the deep stuff, and I don’t push to change the subject back. She’s been more vulnerable with me in the past two days than she has in the past two months, and I know this isn’t her comfort zone.
She’s calling it chemistry, but I know what it is. The word I was looking for came to me in the shower. It still doesn’t feel like enough, but it’s the only container for the connection Jade and I shared tonight. It’s the only word big enough to hold all the thousand good and beautiful things I feel for Jade McKinney.
But I’m not brave enough to say it yet—not while I know she’s awake and listening. Not while there’s a chance she could still reject me for saying it. So I wait her out. I wait until her breathing starts to even and I’m confident she’s asleep, then Ituck her close to me, placing a soft kiss on the back of her shoulder.
“Good night, Jade,” I say. “I love you.”
20
JADE
“O, why rebuke you him that loves you so?”Act III, Scene II
Three words. Eight letters.
It takes so little to ruin something so good.
I hold completely still, eyes squeezed shut, until Ian’s soft snores hit my ears. His arm around me relaxes, and I peel it off me, lying on my back to stare at the same ceiling I stared at for hundreds of nights as a child and a teenager while falling asleep.
Did he want me to hear him? Was he hoping I’d say it back?
He knows I don’t do love. He knows I don’t do feelings. I’ve said that for as long as I can remember, and I have definitely said it to him. So why the hell would he go and say something like that to me?
In high school, the girl I dated for long enough to meet my mom, her name was Melanie. We were together for six months, which is practically forever in high school. We were each other’s firsts for a lot of things, and she knew I wasn’t big on the touchy-feely stuff. She said she was cool with keeping it casual. So whenshe took me on a picnic date one bright, gorgeous Saturday in the spring of our junior year, I found it a little weird. She’d set up this picnic, all my favorite snacks, and she’d snuck some champagne from her parents’ basement fridge. We usually just watched movies and hooked up in her basement or played video games or card games and ate pizza. We held hands at school, and I went to her softball games and she came to my theater rehearsals sometimes, but it wasn’t anything serious.
Until it was.
It was fun until she told me she loved me.
I literally ran.
