It’s starting to settle into my brain as fact. Autumn loves me in return.
“Tomorrow,” Autumn whispers.
“What about it?” Tomorrow is going to be wonderful, and the day after and the day after, because I am hers. Tonight is the only concern, and that’s mine alone.
“What if you waited until tomorrow?”
I tighten my grip on her and bury my face in the back of her neck.
“No, it’s the right thing to do.” I kiss her shoulder. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I’m still amazed that she wants me to touch her.
Autumn rolls over, and we settle in, facing each other.
“Tell me a story,” she demands.
“What kind of story?” I try to hide the amusement in my voice because she’s being very solemn.
“About us,” she says. “Something true. Something that happened when we didn’t know we loved each other.”
“Hmm.” I think I understand what she’s asking, and I wonder if she has stories of her own. “Do you remember that tiara my mom got you one year for Christmas? She said, ‘Finny picked it out.’ I bought it. I saw it at a store and knew you would love it. I gave it to Mom and asked her to say it was from both of us.”
Autumn’s mouth is hanging open.
“Oh, Finny,” she says. “You could have told—”
“No,” I say. “I couldn’t have. We hadn’t gotten each other Christmas gifts for years. It would have been weird.”
“Oh, Finny,” she says again, but this time, she’s agreeing with me.
“Now you tell me a story,” I say.
“Well,” she begins, “remember the Valentine’s Day right after that? You were sick, and I brought you that note from…” She stalls at that part, but I don’t need her to continue.
“I remember.” The agony I’d felt that day stayed fresh for the rest of that winter. I had obsessed over that embarrassing conversation for weeks.
“You were so hot,” Autumn moans, looking away from me, and I blink in surprise. She scrunches up her face and closes her eyes against the memory. “You were shirtless and sweaty and flushed and—” She breaks off into a frustrated growl. When she looks back up at me, she says, “But you saw me checking you out, right? You had to have. It was so obvious.” She’s smiling like she expects me to agree.
“I thought you had brought me a Valentine. I was confused and happy and then a different sort of confused when it was from Sylvie.” I find myself faltering again. “I thought you could see my mistake, and I felt so sick and gross in front of you, and you were so beautiful like alwa—”
“You thought that I—How could I have—Finny, no,” she says.
We’re staring at each other in amazement.
“I wish I could go back in time,” she says.
“Why don’t you just go back to telling me I’m hot?”
Autumn laughs. She tells me about both loving and hating going with The Mothers to my soccer games. She says my muscled legs in my running shorts drove her to distraction, and it blows my mind that she’d lusted after certain parts of me from a distance the same way I had after her.
As if picking the thoughts from my own head, she tells me she was always secretly aware of any movement my body made when I was near—at the bus stop, on the couch as we watched television, at the holiday dinner table—just as I memorized every detail about her.
I stroke Autumn’s hair and her arm as she talks, and I watch her face as her eyes close in pleasure, then open to look at me as she speaks.
“I want another story,” she says.
I try to remember my most intense memory of longing for her. I move my strokes down her back and she sighs. I’m getting this right. I’m learning the rest.
“Last Halloween,” I finally say. “I was watching you the whole night. I couldn’t stop myself. You were—” I sort through all the vocab words I’d used her to help me remember. “You were splendiferous that night, Autumn. Like, if I’d had one of those new phones that take pictures? It would have crossed my mind to try and take one. Not that I would have!” She’s smiling at me as I confess how horrible I am; I guess I should be glad she thought Wuthering Heights was romantic.
“I wasn’t even wearing a sexy costume.” Autumn giggles.
“You were radiant,” I tell her.
I was particularly moonstruck that night. Her pale skin and the dark shine of her hair have always had the power to hypnotize me. That Halloween, she was particularly bewitching, her laugh dazzling and her every movement like an alien ballet.