Autumn’s tears have started to spill over. “I wasn’t ready.” She drags the heel of her hand across her cheek like a small child. “And I didn’t know what to think.”
She wasn’t ready?
I scared her.
This is too much to take in. I sit down at the foot of the bed. I’m facing my window, her window, and I can’t bear that, so I look down at my hands.
She wasn’t ready? And I scared her.
I’d clenched her arm. I’d tried to be romantic, but I’d missed her cues.
I deserved the way she treated me the following year. I’m lucky she gives me the time of day now, that she thinks of me fondly enough to put parts of me in her novel. Autumn brings out the worst in me. All along, I knew that, yet I’d still blamed her.
I hadn’t overshot the mark with Autumn that night. I shouldn’t have taken the shot at all.
If I had waited, given her space. If I’d trusted the Autumn I knew instead of the tall tales of locker room jerks…
I feel the mattress shift as she scoots across the bed.
“I’m sorry. I hate myself for hurting you.”
She tries to get a good look at my face in the dark, but I can’t bear to see her yet. I woke her up to confront her cruelty only to discover that I am the one who owed her the bigger apology.
“I’m sorry too,” I say. We’re both so many years late.
“For what?”
She must still be part asleep.
“I’m sorry for kissing you.”
“Don’t say that.” She sounds sadder than I’ve ever heard her sound before. “Don’t say you’re sorry for that.”
Do I owe her an apology for something else?
It turns out I don’t really know who Autumn is, and I don’t know who I am either. A dark laugh escapes me. No matter how I try, I always seem to end up hurting her.
“I never know what to do to make you happy, do I?”
She answers so quickly that it surprises me.
“You make me happier than any other person ever has.”
The conviction in her voice is unmistakable.
“Do I?” Like Jack said to me: her story doesn’t make sense.
“Every day,” she says.
We sit.
Autumn wasn’t ready for me to kiss her.
Autumn doesn’t want me to apologize for kissing her.
I make her happy.
These three new facts roll around in my head, bumping against each other until suddenly they line up together in a way that makes sense.
Except it can’t be true.
Do I know how to make Autumn happy?
Before, I kissed her without asking.
“What if I kissed you right now?”
She takes a quick breath, and I am already dead.
Autumn says, “That would make me happy.”
I’m almost not sure what to do next.
You aren’t facing her, my brain gently nudges me.
I turn on the bed, tucking a leg under me, waiting for her to stop me, to clarify what she said, because there’s no way she meant it.
Autumn raises her face to mine, and her expression steals my breath.
I reach out a hand, ready to pull back at any moment. Gently, I rest my hand on her hair, just above her neck. She relaxes against my touch, and something breaks inside me.
Greedily, I pull her toward me. As I lean in, I hit her nose with mine. I’m about to apologize when she turns her face, and her lips are so close.
All apologies, every apology, is forgotten, and my lips are on hers.
I am only my lips. No other part of me exists.
Autumn.
I’m kissing Autumn.
The urge comes to push her back against the bed and feel her beneath me, and I begin to think actual thoughts again.
Don’t fuck this up, Finn.
I rest my hand against her hip so that my thumb can stroke that little spot that divots inward below her ribs, the glorious shape of her. Autumn sighs the sigh from a thousand of my fantasies.
I’m kissing her, and she’s leaning into me.
This is real.
This is happening.
Autumn.
Her hand is on my shoulder, and I think she might push me away, but instead she pulls me closer, even though we’re as close as we can be sitting like this.
She wants this. She wants me.
Autumn puts her hand on my knee, and I stifle a groan.
“Ow,” she says.
Her head shifts and I realize my grasp has tightened in her hair.
I pull back.
“Sorry,” I say and begin to take my hands off her.
“No. Don’t stop,” Autumn says. Her hand is still on my shoulder. She pulls again, says, “Lie down with me.”