“Not bad, no,” he says. His voice is hushed and even, like he’s trying very hard to control something struggling to escape.
The ground shifts under me. I don’t fight the feeling. I’m ready to fall.
“I agree,” I say.
When he says nothing, I recline onto the pillows and reach for the remote. “Should we see if they have movies here?”
His eyes find mine, and they hold on for a few moments before he replies. “No, I don’t think we should.”
The words wake up every cell in my body, and not a second too soon, because then he’s leaning down, his lips rushing to mine. My thoughts a whirlwind, I hear only one distinctly. I have never been kissed this way before.
There’s urgency to the way he deepens the kiss. I understand why. Our time is limited. He’s racing the days, hours, minutes we have together with every brush of his lips on mine.
It won’t be enough. Feeling something I don’t have the words to name come over me, I reach up with clumsy, hurried hands and pull his shirt over his chest. He has a nice chest. Limber, lithe. It’s like good poetry, perfectly crafted to hold everything it needs and nothing else. I run my hands down the contours, to the ridges where his skin meets his waistline. Freckles cover his neck and shoulders, uncountable. I could study them endlessly. For now, I settle for kissing one I choose randomly on his shoulder, then one on his neck, then one on his jawline. My thoughts fall away, and it’s only me and him, here and now.
I remove my own shirt. I don’t feel bare, because his gaze covers every inch of me. Pulchritudinous, I hear in my head, and it’s in his voice.
He kisses me gently. Then he pulls back.
“I really like you, Juniper,” he says breathlessly.
“I like you too,” I say.
“It scares me sometimes, how much I like you,” he continues. “How much you can change my world. How much you already have.” There’s a tremor in his tone, one I know is not entirely from us being nearly naked. Because it’s the same tremor running through me.
“It scares me too,” I say.
He looks up. “Yeah?” He shifts so we’re lying opposite each other on our sides, our forearms gently touching.
I nod. “It scares me how much I want this, despite everything with Matt. I don’t want to repeat heartache like that. I don’t want to be looking back on what you and I had, unable to move forward.” If this were to continue, how could I not factor this boy into my college decisions? I don’t want him to influence my wide-open future, even unconsciously, but I can’t ignore what lying next to him is doing to me. I’m trapped between a really exciting rock and a really, really attractive hard place. “But this feels special,” I go on. “I don’t want to miss it.”
“Me neither,” he says.
“Why couldn’t we have met earlier? Or later?” I ask. “Why did it have to be now, when we’re on the brink of everything?” The question comes out choked. We both know the end date of this new itinerary we’ve built together. In two days, we’re going to turn around and start driving home. It’s unavoidable. We can’t just wander the country, traipsing from hotel to hotel with our lives on hold forever.
“How about this?” His hand finds the curve of my forearm. I glance up. The beautiful blue of his eyes catches mine and holds on, unwavering. “We only have a few days together,” he says. “Let’s live in the present.”
His words relax the tension in my chest, calming the tremors. He knows exactly what to say even when he’s not using his elaborate vocabulary. “Fitzgerald Holton wanting to live in the present?” I chide gently. “I really am changing you.”
He smiles. “You really are.”
Fitz
WE DIDN’T HAVE sex. I wanted to, and I’m pretty sure Juniper did too. It would have been my first time, which I understand objectively is a big deal, yet with Juniper somehow it feels natural, fated—and completely awesome, of course. Part of me is still hoping for my first time to be with her. But last night, we wordlessly decided we didn’t want sleeping together to complicate the upcoming couple of days.
We did literally sleep together, though. We talked for hours before nodding off, facing each other under the pillowed comforter of her hotel bed. I never imagined it could be this easy connecting with someone—never imagined I could feel this comfortable and confident, could know the right way to reply to everything Juniper says. I wonder if this is what people mean when they talk about reinventing yourself. It doesn’t feel like I’ve reinvented anything, though. It just feels like me.
It’s morning now. The early sunlight peeks through the crack in the heavy hotel curtains. While she sleeps, I grab my dictionary from the nightstand. I had an idea in the middle of the night. After finding the word I want, I scribble a message in the margin. I rip the page cleanly from the dictionary, though it occurs to me the behavior borders on sacrilegious to the book I’ve brought with me everywhere for years.
I tuck the folded page into the box of Juniper’s cherished items, which I find next to her suitcase, and close the lid over the unfinished scarf.
We’re on the road by seven for the long drive to Washington, D.C., four hours of Juniper’s favorite podcast. Every episode centers on the one of the weirdest buildings in the country, and I find myself engrossed in the one about the Winchester Mystery House. We reach the city just in time for our Georgetown information session. I enjoy the tour, but undeniably my favorite part is watching Juniper’s eyes rove over the intricate Gothic details of the buildings. After, we meet up with Lewis at the National Mall.
We walk from the Lincoln Memorial to the Washington Monument, up the frozen expanse of the Reflecting Pool, where a few intrepid couples have walked onto the ice. In front of the obelisk, Lewis tells us he’s getting lunch with former teammates from the entrepreneurship competition I didn’t know he did his sophomore year. Juniper and I grab burgers nearby and bring them to a bench in the Constitution Gardens.
It’s one of those winter days with an unusually blue sky, warm but not warm enough to melt the snow into brown slush piles along the sidewalk. With the sun on my face, I sip from the double-chocolate milkshake Juniper insisted we get to share. The order didn’t surprise me. Juniper has a serious thing for chocolate in any form. It’s odd, how quickly a person can begin to predict the patterns and preferences of another. A couple of days together, and I know Juniper likes to eat dinner no later than seven, never blow-dries her hair—not even if she’s showered in the morning and her hair will literally freeze when she leaves the hotel—and will always opt to eat outside if given the choice.
Sometimes, in moments like these, when we’re not touring a school or planning an itinerary, it’s deceptively easy to convince myself we’re already freshmen in college together. That I’ve known her for years, and this is only one day of many. It’s a beguiling fiction.