After hovering in front of the Graeme house for a bit, I’m speed-walking home （very irresponsible while texting, I know, but needs must）。 Then I hear my literal worst nightmare behind me: it’s Brad. Calling my name. Right after we just kissed.
And, God, the way we kissed. It was completely mortifying. Like, I saw fireworks and forgot my own name and momentarily considered putting his hand on my boob, all of which is very dangerous indeed because—because no one is supposed to feel like that. Like everything.
Brad can’t be everything.
“Celine!”
I very slowly turn and, yep: my ears do not deceive me. He is sprinting down the path, a coat thrown over his clothes. Oh my God. I stand frozen like a statue and panic.
As soon as he reaches me, breathless, he asks, “You learned to cook?”
The tip of his nose is red with cold. His eyes are as dark as midnight—not the cold winter kind, but the warm summer sort where you can’t sleep because the sheets stick to your skin and anyway, there are adventures out there to be had.
And his mouth is…soft. I know this firsthand because—
Midconversation, Celine.
“No,” I reply, hoping he didn’t notice my very minor dazed pause. “Why?”
He arches an eyebrow. “Because you just said you had to cook dinner.”
Shit. “You shouldn’t be allowed to look at people like that when you’re interrogating them.”
He arches another eyebrow and continues being unnervingly handsome. “Like what?”
I falter. “Never mind.”
He grins like he knows exactly what my problem is. （Considering the enthusiasm with which I put my tongue down his throat—considering I admitted I liked him—he understands completely.） “Well, I’m glad I caught you out here. I was going to follow you home and sneak into your room. I had an elaborate plan that involved trellis-climbing.” He pauses. “Except I probably wouldn’t have done that because I just remembered how much I weigh.”
“Also,” I say, images of Brad in my room dancing in my head, “we don’t have a trellis.”
“That too,” he allows cheerfully. “My mind is a dramatic and often inaccurate place. Point is—you said we should talk.” His amusement fades, and he watches me closely. My stomach lurches under his attention, half giddy and half terrified.
Because, without his mouth distracting me, I’ve woken up to the facts of our situation: it’s December. Final year. In roughly ten months, Brad and I will be separated. Once we leave Rosewood, we’ll be geographically farther apart than ever before. We won’t see each other every day. We’ll meet new people and develop new social bubbles that have no chance of overlapping. We will write new chapters in our lives and I’ll be a side character in his, and that will be fine and natural and understandable.
But I’ve experienced that before and I’m not doing it again. It hurt so much when we fell out years ago because we’d been so close. Close enough to feel like one person, and then we were ripped in two and I had to keep it together with blood gushing from my side and half of myself missing.
Well, I’m fine now, because I’m just me. I’ve felt the pull of him, but I’ve resisted.
If we get any closer—if he kisses me some more, and tells me how much he likes me, and smiles as if me just liking him back has set the world to rights…
We’ll be one person again. And I can’t have that. I can’t.
“Celine,” he says softly. “Talk.”
So I do. “Listen. Brad. Earlier was, you know, fine…” God, I’m such a liar. “But we can’t do it again.”
His tentative smile falls like a sudden and catastrophic loss of the sun. After an agonizingly long pause, he says, so softly it’s a struggle to hear: “Why not?”
I swallow hard. “Because…because what then?”
“Well, Celine,” he says, “if you let me kiss you some more, and I kept doing it and you kept liking it, I think the next thing is…we’d be dating.”
My throat seizes with terror or joy. Who can tell the difference, really? “But we can’t be dating,” I squeak.
His amusement is a puff of white in the air. “I mean, we definitely could be.”
He makes it sound so easy. Everything is easy for him. “But, what about uni?”
“Ugh,” he mutters. “Swear to God, uni is already ruining my life, and it hasn’t even happened.”
“Long distance never works.” It’s true, and this is the normal, rational way to phrase it, as opposed to something pathetic like: You’d leave me eventually. But you can’t leave if you’re not mine.
“Why?” he demands. “Because people can’t resist the urge to rub their genitals all over other people during Freshers Week? Rest assured. I am not going to do that.”
“I never thought you would.” He wouldn’t need to. He’d just need to…sit next to someone at the back of a lecture every day for six weeks, and realize he wants to take them out, and feel trapped by the fact that he couldn’t because he had me sitting somewhere miles away thinking he was mine. That’s all he’d need to do. Just, stop wanting to be mine.
Which would be perfectly reasonable. Normal. Part of growing up. And I never ever want it to happen, so I try again, scrambling for an explanation he’ll accept. “We are very young, Brad, and people change, and the next few years of our lives will be transformative. I mean, I doubt I’ll be transforming any time soon, but…but you will, and holding on too tight to parts of a previous stage in your life is just not a sensible idea.”
He makes a sound of disgust and kicks the frozen grass beneath us. “Why,” he demands, “is everyone telling me how not sensible it is to have feelings? What are we, fucking Vulcans?”
“I’m not telling you not to have feelings. I’d never tell you what to do in your own head.”
He looks up—maybe because of what I said, or maybe because of how I accidentally said it, like trying to control him would be a capital crime. Which it would, for so many reasons, but if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s showing my own feelings, and he teases them out of me without even trying.
Yet another reason not to kiss him again, as if I needed more.
“Celine.” He makes my name sound like a sigh. Like a very gentle waterfall. “You said earlier that I could do anything.”
“Books,” I remind him desperately. “I was talking about books. Writing. Jobs. Dreams.”
“Is work the only thing people are supposed to dream about? I thought fantasies were meant to be fun.”
There’s a second of teetering uncertainty where the world wobbles or shimmers or shifts and I’m not quite sure if I’m protecting myself or committing serious sabotage. Then everything slams back into place and logic prevails: everything ends. I don’t want to have him if he’s going to be gone. So I won’t take him at all.
There. Logic. Who can argue with that?
“I’m sorry,” I tell him.
His jaw shifts. This is his stubborn face. “I still like you. I’m not gonna stop.”