Page 110
Of us.
A hand slaps over the page, nails clean and short, skin peachy and half-covered with the chewed-up sleeve of my old hockey sweatshirt.
“We said we’d look at the same time,” she says, shaking her head in disapproval. But her eyes are full of mischief.
I shut the binder and cross my arms, leaning back against the wall where I’m seated on her dorm room bed. “What if I don’t want to wait anymore?”
“Too bad,” she says, but the words are full of heat instead of censure. It makes me want to press her to the mattress and take her again, but we’ve already done it twice today. And she just showered.
The showering part is hard for me. Paloma’s warm, pink skin . . . her hair in my hands as I wash and care for it—even if we’ve just had sex, it only serves to get me going again.
I kiss her instead, barely satiating the beast of my desire that has yet to leave me since the night at the beach house.
We’ve spent nearly every day together since. We studied for finals together in her dorm room, slept together nearly every night. And it never feels like enough, my thoughts circling her, her, her when I’m away from her.
“When do you leave for the break?” she asks.
My brow furrows again. She’s asked this a lot lately, and Paloma remembers most everything.
“I’ve got a practice Tuesday, so not ’til after that.” It’s Saturday; half of campus left the second finals ended. “I’ll be with my dad through Christmas. And then I do New Year’s Eve dinner with my mom and stepdad.”
“Is that how you always split it?”
“It wasn’t. But . . . yeah, now we do. My mom is—” I shake my head. “She struggles with holidays, and I think I make her a bit sadder. So, this just works best for us. And I like Christmases with my dad.”
“At the house in Beacon Hill?”
I nod, half distracted by the slipping of my old crewneck off her shoulder.
“Christmas is my favorite holiday.” She says the words like she’s admitting a little secret. I hold her vulnerable confessions close to my heart, just as protective of them as she seems to be. “It all just seems so warm and cozy—a fire in the fireplace, the multicolored glowing lights.”
I nod again, but my mind snags on the words. On the fact that despite Paloma’s usual affinity for dressing up her room for the season, there’s no Christmas anything in here. Something heavy sits in my gut, gnawing at me slightly. A niggle of worry lodging deep.
You’re obsessing over her and reading too much into it. Relax. Don’t do this to her.
“I love it, too,” I say. I kiss her forehead and tuck some loose hairs back. Her hair is getting blonder, whatever she uses to dye it washing out. Probably from the amount of times a week I insist on washing it myself, addicted to her hair in an obscene, relentless way. “Are you going home for Christmas?”
“Oh, um. Yeah.” She nods, biting on her lip. Her eyes wander back to the binder at my side and she grabs for it. “Okay, are you ready to swap?”
I smile and nod, excited and a little nervous for her to read the romantic notions I’ve been putting toward her since the first day by the hockey lockers. I’ve been half in love with her since she told me her favorite Robert Frost poem. I hadn’t let that go. It bled directly into my choice.
She scoops up my paper for herself, holding it close to her chest as she steps over to her desk chair.
After we turned in our project a week before finals, Dr. Britton gave us a “final” final—to choose a poem for our project partner.
“You’ve been spending an entire semester with them, getting to know them intimately—” The entire class had snickered, but he only raised his eyebrow and defended his words. “Poetry and the way we view it—positively or negatively, the things we see in it, how we talk about it—I think it all represents the innermost workings of our brains. So yes, intimately.”
It made sense. Poetry was always intimate to me, especially with Paloma.
I wait until she’s across the room and settled before I finally look down at the paper in my possession, still within the binder. My eyes widen at the title.
No fucking way.
Stomach tight, chest beating—like my heart is screaming her, her, her. I gaze up, seeing the same realization settling across her beautiful too-perfect features.
“Bennett—”
“I know.”
