how to put my feelings into words without offending Dre. I was good at debating because I spoke from my brain, but not so good with people sometimes because speaking from my heart didn’t come as easily. But I really didn’t want to keep anything from him. “The truth is, I was scared.”
“Of what?”
I led Dre to the bed and sat beside him, leaving a little bit of room between us because I didn’t want to get distracted. “You,” I said. “Us. We talk on Promethean all the time, but we hardly get to see each other, so I feel like there’s this urgency to squeeze as much into the time we have as possible. Only, I need to take this slow, and I was scared you might not understand that—”
Dre took my hand and held it, giving me those soft puppy dog eyes that melted my heart. “And you thought having your friends here would make sure I kept it in my pants.”
“Something less vulgar, but yes.”
“I care about you, Dean. Like, more than I thought possible. And, sure, when I see you, I want to rip your clothes off and do things to you that would give your mother a heart attack if she found out we’d done them. But I don’t wanna ruin us, whatever we’re becoming. So we’ll take things as slow as you want. I’ll court you like you’re a Victorian lady and I’m the charming son of a local lord desperate to win your favor.”
I laughed. “We don’t need to take it quite that slow.”
Dre pressed his hand to his chest. “Please, madam, cover your naked wrist before I lose all control of my senses.”
“You are so weird.”
“Good weird?”
“Definitely good weird,” I said. “And, in case you were wondering, they won’t be here for a couple more hours, and I would very much like to kiss you, so—”
Dre checked his watch and shrugged. “I mean, I suppose I could spare a few—”
I pulled Dre to me and kissed him. It was everything I wanted. He was everything I wanted.
Dre
I WAS IN Dean’s bed with my head resting on his chest, listening to him breathe. His tie was gone and the top three buttons of his shirt were undone, and my T-shirt was somewhere on the other side of the room, flung there in the mad dash of roving hands and exploring lips. For someone who’d just said he wanted to take things slow, Dean had held nothing back. Not like we had sex or anything. All the action happened from the waist up. I mean, stuff was going on from the waist down, but it was stuff we couldn’t control and did our best to ignore. Neither of us was ready to cross that border yet.
For the moment, I was content.
“What do you think will happen after the election?” Dean asked.
“Depends who wins.”
“What do you think will happen to us?” Dean was running his fingers across my back, sending surges of electricity through me. “How will we keep seeing each other?”
I was busy enjoying the present and Dean was trying to drag us into the future. “We’ll find a way.”
Dean sat up on his elbow and looked down at me. “But how? If my mom wins, I’ll be in DC and you’ll be in Nevada—”
“Until I graduate.”
“If your dad wins, you will be in DC and I’ll be in Florida—”
“Until you graduate.”
“And if McMann wins—
I clamped my hand over Dean’s mouth. “Then he’ll probably start a war with Russia or China or North Korea, and we’ll all die in flames and it won’t matter.”
Dean peeled my hand off his mouth. “I’m attempting to be serious.”
“I know,” I said. “And I wish you’d stop.”
“You don’t want to plan our future?”
Our future. He’d said “our future” like he was certain we had one. I wanted us to have one, but our lives were so damned uncertain, and I thought it was better to live in the now and let the future happen when it happened.
“I do,” I said. “But, like, there’s so much that’s out of our control. Someone’s gonna win the election. It might be your mom, it might be my dad, it might be McMann, though let’s hope it isn’t. Either way, it’ll be way harder to see each other afterward. But then we get to go to college.”
“Do you know where you’re going yet?”
“I know where I’ve applied.”
“If you go to RISD and I go to Harvard, we could see each other easily,”