While I’m waiting, my phone buzzes inside my jeans pocket. I pull it out and notice a message waiting for me in Snapflash. A lot of kids use Snapflash so their parents won’t invade their privacy and read all their text messages, but I only use it to communicate with one other person: Nathaniel. It was his idea, because the text messages disappear after sixty seconds. It’s the safest way to communicate.
I read the message that he sent to me:
Just finishing up. Will be there in two minutes.
I stare at the message until it disappears from the screen. I love the messages he sends me. Every time I get one, I read it and reread it for the entire sixty seconds.
After the message vanishes, I take out the poem I wrote for Nathaniel and read it one more time. Lotus said it was sappy, but I don’t think it is. It really does feel like my love for Nathaniel is this endless black hole. Lotus just doesn’t understand because she has never been in love. Really, I feel sorry for her.
The door to the darkroom cracks open, and I get that jolt of excitement like I always do practically anytime I see Nathaniel. But especially in here because I know he’s going to touch me. And I love the way his face lights up when he sees me.
“Addie,” he breathes. “My sweet Adeline.”
“Hi.” I always feel weirdly shy when he comes in here. It takes me a few minutes to warm up. “How are you?”
“Really good now that I’m here.” He crosses the small space and wastes no time in kissing me. Good thing he doesn’t get shy. “And there’s something I want to show you.”
“What is it?”
In the dim light, his cheeks color. “I wrote a poem—for you.”
This absolutely takes my breath away. He wrote a poem for me? How could that be? I’m not the kind of person who men write poems for. And yet he means it. Nathaniel Bennett wrote me a poem.
I’m going to faint from happiness.
“Do you want to hear it?” he asks, now shy himself.
I nod. “Very much.”
He pulls a scrap of notebook paper from his pocket. I recognize his handwriting now, and I can see the scribbles on the page. Words he wrote just for me. I listen in rapt attention as he recites the verses:
Life nearly passed me by
Then she
Young and alive
With smooth hands
And pink cheeks
Showed me myself
Took away my breath
With cherry-red lips
Gave me life once again
When he finishes the last line, I can barely breathe myself. It’s such a beautiful poem. Nobody has ever written anything like that for me before. Hudson was my friend, but he was no poet. Even if something had happened between the two of us, he never would have written anything like that for me.
“I love it,” I whisper. “So much.”
“I mean it,” he says softly. “You gave me my life back. You have no idea how dreary my world was before you came along.”
He laces his fingers into mine, and we just stand like that for a moment, staring at each other. I can’t even bear to show him what I wrote for him after hearing his beautiful verses. It seems so stupid and immature by comparison. I’ll have to keep working on it. Until I write something worthy of him.
“I think about you all the time.” He reaches out to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. “Do you think about me?”
“Every moment of the day,” I answer truthfully.
He kisses me again, and he starts tugging my shirt off. He did this last time, so I expected it. But what I don’t expect is the way he attempts to unbutton my jeans. I take a step back and smile apologetically, but he doesn’t catch my eye—he is wholly focused on getting my jeans open. I take another step back, this time bumping into the table behind me, and now there’s nowhere to go. Nathaniel successfully gets the button open and then lowers the zipper as I suck in a breath.
He raises his eyes to look up at me. “You are the most beautiful girl I’ve ever met, Addie.”
I hold in that breath as he tugs down my jeans and then my panties. But I don’t tell him not to do it, because…well, how can I? Yes, he told me he didn’t care about sex, but I knew on some level it couldn’t be true. I’m not totally stupid.
I lose my virginity to Nathaniel in the darkroom that afternoon, and the whole time, I recite his poem in my head, written just for me.
Life nearly passed me by
Then she
Young and alive
With smooth hands
And pink cheeks
Showed me myself
Took away my breath
With cherry-red lips