Page 62 of Double Dared
He smiled, though maybe a little sadly. “I don’t like endings.”
“Neither do I,” I said. “So I tell myself we’ll come back.”
“We will,” he assured me. “As soon as you say so.”
If it were up to me, we would just stay forever. We would stay here, like this, forever. Never growing older and wiser, never growing ashamed of ourselves, never having another worry in our lives. Never having to remember how to tie a tie or have a loose shoelace or think about making the rent.
But the real world waited for us back in the city, and we had to go back to it. We wanted to, as well, even if that was not the ideal life I could imagine for myself.
I’d never been particularly bothered by having to know where I was going and what it was all for. My studies were intentionally broad, options postponed, relationships kept at a distance, and friends treated as family that would forever be around.
But now, as we sat in Harrison’s car, driving away from heaven back to Earth, I had to wonder where it was all headed. And as soon as my mind found her, I shut her out of it. I didn’t know if Emma was a factor; Harrison had told me that she was not. Not really. But Harrison was like the sun, burning bright and beautiful, and I couldn’t stand here and bask in his lightwithout knowing that I could never be the only one who would be blessed with his warmth.
When we arrived on campus, I kissed him softly on the lips and promised to see him tomorrow.
“I’ll make plans for us,” Harrison said. “Something with people and madness. Something new.”
I wanted to tell him that I didn’t need people. Didn’t need madness or fun or anything new at all. But I feared that saying those words was too revealing, too soon. And as I stepped out of his car, I realized that there still was some fear in me. There still was some degree of self-awareness and worry.
Only, this was the kind I didn’t dare share with him so soon.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
harrison
Our first week together—trulytogether, not fake dating—flew by too fast, yet looking back on it, I saw a lifetime worth of memories.
That moment when Taylor had been standing in my living room, shirtless, waiting for me to hand him the T-shirt, knowing that I wouldn’t, felt like it had marked the shift in the fabric of reality, not just the life I’d been leading to that point.
Taylor had stormed into every corner of my soul and body. He’d crashed into my life with the fury of a shooting star and its beauty, too.
Waking up next to him, here on the morning after or in my cottage, only brought a smile to my face. And waking up without him didn’t fail to fill me with anticipation of seeing him later that day.
A week, yet an entire life, too.
The culmination of our first week was on Saturday evening, when I took Taylor to an abandonedpower plant that had been converted into an underground cabaret scene.
Drowned in the sea of strangers, we were absolutely anonymous, and pinning Taylor against a brick wall to kiss him senseless gave neither of us a pause.
The roaring twenties party followed the week after, though we spent plenty of quiet evenings together in my apartment, too.
It was chaos, pure and filled with lust and wonder. It was a perfect storm of glimmering moments neither of us wanted to give up or let pass. So we came together, came back to one another, time after time, never quite looking into each other’s eyes to discuss what it was that we were doing.
Why use words when actions spoke so loudly? I didn’t want words to muddle the beautiful thing that we had found for ourselves. Out of thin air, out of impossibility and chance, we had carved a little piece of heaven for ourselves, and we lived in it every day, every night.
Taylor never freaked out, though I’d been holding a breath while waiting for it in the early hours and days. I had been expecting some moment of clarity to sweep over him and remind him that he was not and never had been into men. Yet he simply was now. He was into me, whatever the hell that meant in the grand scheme of things.
And I was into him, though there was little surprise in that. I had been into him since the moment he’d strolled over to my table and pretended to know aboutLord Tennyson. I’d been into him since he’d sat down and admitted to wanting to take me to a date because of a dare.
There was something like jazz between us, something that was solely based on a common rhythm, built purely on our understanding of one another without too much thinking and planning.
When I wanted to drive us out of the city, Taylor had his backpack ready to go, no questions asked. He didn’t want to know where or why, and I didn’t want to tell him. So we found ourselves spending a night in a houseboat on a lake, all alone, rocking it like a storm until our hearts were beating so loudly I could hardly hear anything else.
And when the third week came to a close, I asked Taylor what he wanted to do, and he wrapped his hands around my upper arm, sank into my sofa, and pulled me close to himself. “This,” he said. “Just this.” His hand moved over the back of my head, and he held me close.
His fingers traced the shape of my ear until they moved over the two silver earrings, and he smiled.
My eyebrows asked the question that my drowsy voice couldn’t.
